In my formative years, I would try to apply logic to any and all matters.
- How do I decide what to do?
- Why should I do this?
- What does this impact? etc etc.
Any kind of intuition of predisposition seemed dangerous as I had no way of knowing why I leaning that way (biases, misinformation etc)
This analytical process was lengthy and exhausting but I like to think it helped shape a way of thinking and form a (mostly) reliable intuition.
I can still remember the exhilarating feeling of hearing a question, leaning one way about it, then analyzing it and discovering I still liked my original inclination.
I could now trust my gut and stop the (over)analysis, right?
Well, sort of. You see any kind of gut feeling gives answers for everything, but these answers are reliable only about the kind of questions for which it has been trained.
Example
(Do NOT calculate, try to use your gut)
I am asked to tie a rope around the Earth’s equator.
I buy the needed ~40.000km of rope and spend some time deploying it.
But as I’m finishing I find out that we now need this rope to not be tight around the Earth, but instead levitate 1 meter above it.
I rush to the rope store to buy some more rope for this.
Ballpark estimation, how much more rope do I need? 1km? 50km? 10.000km?
Note the number down!
Now let’s calculate.
Assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere of radius r in meters, its circumference would be 2πr meters.
Now the rope needs to be 1m above, so the new radius is 2π(r+1) meters.
Which means I need to buy 2π(r+1) - 2πr =2π = 6.3m meters of rope
Unless one’s day job is tying rope around the globe, one’s intuition would lean towards buying a few thousand kilometers of rope for the extension.
You know, to be safe :-P
And one would be off by a few thousand kilometers.
So?
Trust your gut, only as far as you have trained it, I guess? :-D