
How often is your gut instinct right? - nonrecursive

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kul
With boso, ibtalk and now auctomatic, the instinctive decisions have always
been the best. I'm wary of the term 'common sense' because I don't really
think it's all that common. Also, what's really weird, is that at time x, you
can believe 100% and with everything in your heart that decision y is the best
course of action. At x + 3 days, you can then believe, also 100% without any
doubt, that decision y was wrong and that you should now do z. It's not that
that is indecision, it's just that things can move so quickly and variables
change so much that you can change your mind 100% about something without too
much difficulty. (and I've been using 100% too much). I believe an important
quality of a CEO is to be able to do that, and continually convince himself
that the latest course of action is the most prudent, but more importantly,
convince his team that it is the right path to take too, (and that bit of
advice came to me from someone who works at Yelp).

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melhorn
Question is: Do you really need something like gut instinct?

I think there's one thing that it is appropriate for: Quickly needed decisions
with a "social background", if you are experienced at judging human behavior
(I don't know the exact English word for "Menschenkenntnis").

Else: Don't do it. Do not decide based on pure gut instinct. Try to get
something more dependable: Ask friends, ask experts, talk to people who know
more than you or provide a different point of view and then judge their
comments against each other. There's almost always a way to get the
information you need if you have the time, and it's very seldom you don't have
time.

Then it brakes down to experience and self-confidence, I guess. Luckily, my
gut instinct is right, usually :-)

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jkush
Do you mean "gut instinct"? I go by that a lot and have been learning how to
trust it more. More often than not, my initial reaction is right.

If you're interested, here's a link to a book about this topic:

<http://snipurl.com/1fxk7>

~~~
gibsonf1
Another way to frame the idea would be to rely more on your subconscious - all
those automatic responses to situations based on a lifetime of experience.
This is standard practice for designers who spend a great deal of time
absorbing the aspects of a problem at hand, then put it aside. A
minute/hour/day/week later comes the Aha!, a subconsciously formed integration
solving the problem. (No magic involved).

One experiment I tried was for a very large multiple choice test. (For the
Architect exam, 3 days of 10 hour tests). I found that when taking the
practice test, 95% of the time that I went back and changed an answer,
thinking I had answered it wrong the first time, I actually changed it from
right to wrong. So for the actual test, I went through the test once only with
one answer, left hours before every one else, and aced it. The moral: The
Subconscious is a good thing - you can rely on it.

~~~
jkush
Nice anecdote.

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nonrecursive
One of the reasons I asked this question is because recently I participated in
a webinar by marketingexperiments.com . The folks at MEC said they tested
three different price points for a product - $10, $12, $15 (something like
that) and asked the audience, many of whom were marketing professionals, which
price they thought performed the best. The majority of them were wrong.

The moral, in that case, was that a marketer's instinct is a fine thing, but
doing online testing gives you real knowledge of the situation. By doing
testing not only can you learn if your instinct is right, but you can glean
information about your users/visitors as well.

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nonrecursive
Does your gut instinct lead you to make good decisions more often than bad
ones? Does it work better for you in some areas than in others? For example,
are your decisions about marketing more often right than your decisions about
strategy? Or does it work better for you with small decisions compared to
large ones?

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mdakin
Back when I was in school I noticed a pattern emerge while taking tests over
freshman year: If I changed a test answer a statistically HUGE amount of the
time I changed it from the correct answer to an incorrect one. After noticing
this pattern I stopped second guessing myself!

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nostrademons
I actually noticed the opposite pattern: about 95% of the time, the double-
check caught careless mistakes and I ended up with a higher score for it.
Perhaps it was because of my typical test-taking strategy: I'd race through
the questions and answer every one immediately, then I'd go back and double-
check all the steps to make sure I hadn't done anything silly.

I did notice that my score tended to decrease if I triple- or quadruple-
checked my answers, though.

~~~
mdakin
I guess the real key is to "know thyself" well enough to know one's optimal
strategy!

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ivan
Very often, it's like masochist, the problem is, I'm not submissive :)

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juwo
intuition can mask prejudice

