Training Intuition

Last night someone told me about Hubert Dreyfus, and specifically his books What Computers Can’t Do and What Computers Still Can’t Do. There’s lots of reading ahead.

I found this video of an interview that touches on the limitations of AI, the nature of expertise, and mastery of subjects.

At about the 22:30 mark he introduces a model of development of expertise, apparently developed with his brother and co-author Stuart. The fifth stage in his progression is the creation of expertise, which he describes as intuition. I’ve long thought that the primary purpose of our reasoning is to train the intuition, so this was exciting to see.

Knowledge can be taught and transferred. It can be judged correct or incorrect and refined by reasoning. And it is slow.

Intuition is fast, whether right or wrong. It cannot be transferred. And it is not subject to reasoning, but can be trained through feedback.

The world is too rich to operate at the pace of reason. Therefore training one’s intuition is key to acting in it. I’m happy to learn of this elaboration of my crudely trained intuition.