Intuition based work is bad science

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 13, 2012 at 8:10am

Chris Bathgate • I guess perhaps we need to either alter the definition of intuition slightly or maybe just use a different word . I would consider some of the subconscious thinking examples you gave as having an intuitive quality, I guess I am trying to separate what I feel is a more informed type of intuitive thinking from what you describe as a more raw, trial and error type of intuition that would resemble blind guessing. But I think cognition happens along a wide spectrum so it is not always so easy to separate rational thinking from unreasoned guessing.

An intelligent, highly educated persons intuition may be much more accurate then someone who has limited intelligence and education, based on your definition, they should be the same. I do not consider trial and error to be a type of intuitive thinking either. I think it is much more nuanced then that. before I understood mechanics as well as I do, I still intuitively understood how things would behave in certain situations based on past experience. I was not guessing how things would behave, I had some concept of how things moved based on experience, To me intuition, is more of the way our brains run quick simulations based on the limited information it has, filling in gaps of knowledge with educated guesses rather than blind ones. It has a lot to do with whether or not we are able to obtain "Domain knowledge" about the field or area we are using our intuition with as to how effectively we are.
That being said and as you point out It is nearly impossible to have experiential knowledge about many fields of science because we are not able to experience these worlds with our five senses and therefore build up a functional domain knowledge, take micro biology as an example. This requires tools such as microscopes and many other types of equipment Just to see what is happening (only one sense), we have no working physical experience of that world, so our intuition about it would be from a position of ignorance and would be poor. But basic mechanics is something people have great intuition about even without knowing the math and science behind it, because it exists at a Macro level. It is why we have athletes. most of them do not have in depth knowledge of how gravity and other forces behave on each other yet their performance is not based off of hard science about trajectories or fluid dynamics.

And while I certainly agree with you 100% that as standard practice, intuition should be left largely out of science, I also think it is completely unavoidable that intuition plays a part in every persons life and therefore inevitably creeps into the lab, after all, we are only human and oh so occasionally this pays off. I think what separates good science and bad science isn't whether or not someone decides to go with there gut, its whether or not they do the testing, the hard work, the actual science to follow up on and prove the thing that their intuition led them to. It is not enough to just "feel" a certain way, but if follow up on a feeling with logic, and reason,in order to definitively prove or disprove that feeling. It is about scientific rigor that separates the good science and the bad.
And I guess that is part of what I am interested in with my work. I am interested in how my intuition works. SInce I operate in an arena where there can be no harm, I am privileged to go with my gut. But for me personally, as in science, It is not enough to go with my gut, I need to feel like there is some logical reason I am attracted to the forms that I am making, I like to study my intuition as I work. When I feel that a shape should be a certain way, I try to look at that feeling objectively and figure out why it is that I feel that way. So when I can see a connection between a form and some other tangible construct, be it mechanics or anything else tangible, I feel it helps me understand the root of my aesthetic and intuition better.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 13, 2012 at 8:11am

I certainly dont disagree with you in any way. But I think we may have slightly different definitions of what intuition is. For me, intuition is kind of how we catch a baseball thrown to us without thinking. We do it based on subconscious mechanisms that are based off of lots of past experience firmly grounded in reality, even though we do not have access to the information tat informs the action, it is not purely a guess either. That is my only main point.
Perhaps I am venturing into fairy tale land again. But I have read numerous accounts from scientists who have had major break throughs who explain that they do not really know how they made the quantum leap of thinking to make the break through that they did, and that it just came to them and they do not understand how or why (the math and science to prove it came later). This is sort of my definition of intuition, it is based on experience and information that we may not have conscious access to, and is far from a linear way of thinking. this is highly unscientific, but a quick google search turns up these examples. Perhaps none of these are true, or are just exaggerations that have no real relationship to what 99.99% of scientist do on a daily bases. But that is why this conversation is interesting.

-Though his professors told him it was impossible to develop a polyphase motor, Nikola Tesla invented it. Remembering a description of the sun’s motion in Goethe’s Faust triggered this. This crossing of disciplines laid the foundation of most of our modern technology.

-The invention of polymer molecular rings was inspired from a dream of a serpent biting it's own tail.

-Einstein intuited the basic concepts of relativity before he developed the mathematics to express the ideas, later proven by observation.

-Penicillin was discovered as a result of a contamination accident in a petri dish containing bacteria. The discovery of this lead to the first true miracle drug.

-The existence of the toy levitron flies in the face of conventional magnetic theory that says it is impossible. Yet they work, exist and are sold routinely to anyone who is interested. The inventor had to intuit the concept and go beyond the limits of magnetic theory. The evidence now exists and stirs up controversy.

-Experiments to produce a plastic glass (Plexiglas) failed, until someone left an experiment overnight as refuse to be cleaned up later, which ended up producing the desired result when it set during everyone’s absence.

My reply: I know about the stories you told. But are "accidents in science" related to intuition?

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 25, 2012 at 8:21am

Intuition: The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition. Arising from impulse; spontaneous and unthinking.

Reason: The capacity for logical, rational, and analytic thought; intelligence.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 14, 2013 at 6:50am

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2013/02/12/i...
Intuitions, scientific methodology, and the challenge of not getting fooled.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 25, 2013 at 7:54am

Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. http://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/14805...

The first pump is "Making Mistakes". It takes courage and maturity to admit your mistakes in public.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 5, 2013 at 8:02am

1182

 solutions were more often correct than those achieved deliberately. For instance, in one experiment, in which 38 participants had to think of a single word that could form a compound phrase with three previously presented words (such as “apple” for the trio “crab,” “pine” and “sauce”), aha! solutions were correct 94 percent of the time compared with 78 percent accuracy for analytical solutions.

This outcome may result from the way the brain generates insights. Because such processing occurs largely outside a person's awareness, it is all or nothing—a fully formed answer either comes to mind or it doesn't. This hypothesis is supported by EEG and functional MRI scans, which revealed in previous studies that just before insight takes place, the occipital cortex, which is responsible for visual processing, momentarily shuts down, or “blinks,” so that ideas can “bubble into consciousness,” Kounios says. As a result, insights are less likely to be incorrect. Analytical thinking, in contrast, happens consciously and is therefore more subject to rushing and lapses in reasoning.

That is not to say that insight is always the best strategy. The Salvi and Kounios experiments involved puzzles with clear right and wrong answers. So the results may not apply to real-world situations, where problems are typically highly complex and may require days—if not months or years—to solve.

In fact, difficult questions often necessitate several different strategies to arrive at a solution

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-you-trust-a-eureka-mo...

Permalink Reply by Anand G.V. on October 20, 2013 at 9:31am

Good reply!

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2013 at 8:29am

Intuition

Scientific

General approach
let's try this and see how it works let's make an assumption, implement a precise plan to study how it works, try it out, collect data, share with others, repeat the experiment (with other students who are similar to the first group) to see if the results are the same.

Observation
casual and uncontrolled very systematic and carefully controlled very systematic and carefully controlled

Reporting

OK to be biased and subjective
must be unbiased and objective

Concepts
OK to be ambiguous (general and even imprecise) all aspects of activities must be clearly defined all aspects of activities must be clearly defined

Instruments
the tools used can be informal (even inaccurate and imprecise the tools used could be informal but must be accurate and precise

Measurement
no real concerns about validity or reliability It's important that measures used are both valid and reliable

Hypotheses
do not need to be tested or proven very important to have a well-articulated theory or assumption that you are trying to prove or disprove

Attitude
no need to be critical or skeptical of results because outcomes are just assumptions important to ask questions about the results (healthy skepticism)
National Research Council (2002). Scientific Research in Education. National Academy Press. Washington DC., pg. 104.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 18, 2014 at 5:45am

A recent meta-analysis by Kuncel, Klieger, Connelly and Ones found that, across multiple criteria in work and academic settings, when people combined hard data with their judgments, and those of others, their predictions were always less valid, and less predictive of real outcomes, than those generated by hard data alone.
What this research suggests is that relying on the most objective data available and using algorithms to interpret it to make selection decisions beats our intuition. By far.
By relying on intuition, in fact, we can make biased decisions. To take one example, we tend to infer someone’s ability directly from his performance without adequately adjusting for the situation in which he has operated, a systematic error known as the correspondence bias. For instance, when evaluating which employees to promote, a manager might focus exclusively on their success and fail to adjust for the difficulty of their past assignments. Similarly, we might judge our leaders without factoring in market conditions, political challenges, and so on.
“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge,” Confucius once said. Algorithms using objective data lead to much greater accuracy in predicting widely valued outcomes such as job and academic performance. A true expert is someone who knows what they do not know—namely, that our intuition can fail us.

http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Kunce...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-data-beats-intuition-...

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 21, 2014 at 2:55pm

Our brains can make decisions while we're sleeping
Your brain doesn’t shut down when you go to sleep, in fact, a recent study has shown that it remains quietly active, and can process information to help you make decisions, just like when you're awake.
http://sciencealert.com.au/news/20141909-26203.html

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2015 at 8:53am

Are lucid dreaming and metacognition of the same origin?
Lucid dreaming is the ability of someone to be aware that they are dreaming and even exert voluntary control over their experience in dreams. Metacognition is defined as “cognition about cognition”. In general terms, it is being extremely introspective. In metacognitive monitoring, someone is in tune to their mental state and potentially able to modify this state through thought and training. During sleep, metacognitive awareness is essentially unavailable, except in the case of lucid dreaming. The subset of people who report lucid dreaming are able to communicate through volitional eye movements while their bodies remained locked in the atonia of REM sleep, suggesting that they can access cognitive processing that is off limit the larger population during sleep.

Metacognition is linked to the brain regions within the prefrontal cortex, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the frontal polar cortex. For example, activation in these regions is associated with self-reflection, working memory organization, action planning, multitasking and theory of mind. During REM sleep, activity is reduced in these regions but not in lucid dreamers. Therefore, a relationship between this brain region, metacognition and lucid dreaming seems intuitive, but until now it was not directly tested. Recently, researchers evaluated groups of subjects within a spectrum of lucid dreaming ability which they reported on a questionnaire. The researchers had these subjects perform a thought monitoring task while awake in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and evaluated reaction time. During the task, researchers measured gray matter volume (essentially collections of neuron cell bodies) in the prefrontal cortex and blood flow to the region (a measure of neuronal activity).

The results, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, found that gray matter volume was higher in the prefrontal cortex of people who reported being lucid dreamers. They also found that blood flow was increased in this region when subjects were actively thought monitoring compared to simply resting with visual stimuli, and that the difference in blood flow between resting and thought monitoring was even greater in the lucid dreamers than control participants. Therefore, the authors conclude, this provides evidence that lucid dreaming and metacognition are anatomically connected through neuronal processes that are seated in the frontal pole.
Metacognitive Mechanisms Underlying Lucid Dreaming
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/3/1082