> Many choose to uphold their intuition, even when directly
confronted with simple arithmetic that contradicts it
My experience agrees with that, both being stubborn myself and also being on the receiving end of that
I wonder if there is a benefit to sticking with our intuition even if we are wrong in the moment
For example, my intuition might lead me to start a business. I might fail and you could say my intuition was wrong, because it led me down the wrong path. But maybe I start a second business, incorporating my lessons from the first one, and now it’s successful. Was my intuition now right?
I feel like a lot of the time people's mathematically incorrect intuitions are exactly right if you were asking a slightly different question. What's abnormal is the person who's evaluating their intuition by asking tricky questions that aren't very compatible with how human thinking works. Notably nobody would ask questions in real life the way these trick questions are asked. I like the notion that the problem is in the asker!
Like the question in the article whether a person is more likely to be a banker or (banker and feminist). Probability says the former is a mathematical uncertainty. The human intuition gets it wrong but it's solving a different question, because the category of 'banker' is a type of person than (banker and feminist). The mathematically wrong answer that intuition gives is expressing which category makes more sense for the person, and it's right about that-- it is just not an answer that should be interpreted as a probability.
The human brain doesn't work on probabilities, but it will try to answer questions of them anyway, misapplying it's otherwise effective circuitry instead.
Incidentally for the bat and ball problem the way it feels to not mess it up is to install a sort of 'trap' that says 'this is a trick question, kick out to mathematical thinking instead'. Which works but it's not the same as making it intuitive.
The thing with intuition vs arithmetic is that intuition sums up both conscious and unconscious knowledge. Often there’s more, deeper that happens unconsciously. So, in reality, a strong intuition may be fooled by otherwise simplistic arithmetic that fails to represent the essence of the intuition.
That is not to say that if your intuition results in incorrect arithmetic/logic it would make any sense to stick to it :))
But unlike simpler situations starting a business isn't something with a known answer how it will go, so there you need to listen to your intuition, but in other cases like physics you should listen to the math and theory.
My experience agrees with that, both being stubborn myself and also being on the receiving end of that
I wonder if there is a benefit to sticking with our intuition even if we are wrong in the moment
For example, my intuition might lead me to start a business. I might fail and you could say my intuition was wrong, because it led me down the wrong path. But maybe I start a second business, incorporating my lessons from the first one, and now it’s successful. Was my intuition now right?
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