ntuition is really good at making fairly accurate predictions without complete information, enabling us to navigate the world without having a deep understanding of it. As a result, intuition trains us to experience the feeling we understand something without examining every detail. In most situations, paying close attention to detail is unnecessary and sometimes dangerous. When learning a technical concept, every detail matters and the premature feeling of understanding stops us from examining them.

I've built a trap for myself to help mitigate this tendency:

As soon as I think I understand something, I try it.

I.e., if I'm reading a book about circuit diagrams, the moment my intuition clicks in my head and says "aha! This is how a NAND gate works!", I immediately tell that part of my brain "okay, if you're so damn smart, build one." If I'm studying linear algebra, the moment the intuition clicks in my head and says "aha! That's how an affine transformation works!", I immediately tell that part of my brain "great! let's skip to the problems section and try to answer the first 20."

Occasionally, it turns out that my intuition appears correct, in which case I flag that understanding as "provisionally true, but check these underlying assumptions FIRST at the first sign of trouble". More often than not, though, I start noticing discrepancies between what my intuitive "understanding" was telling me, and what I'm actually seeing experientially.

About then my intuition starts saying "well, maybe we're still right, and it's just -", at which point I tell it, "you had your chance, buddy, let's go back and reexamine the details. If it turns out you WERE right and something else is going on, we'll figure that out by the time we're done."

But for me (and, I suspect naively, for a lot of other intuitive people), jumping in and trying something the moment your intuition tells you that you've got it is a highly effective learning strategy, so long as you have someone who can tell you before you're about to do something legitimately dangerous.

Steps would go something like this:

1. Recognize the 'eureka!' moment
2. Formulate an experiment
3. Visualize EXACTLY what you think will happen when you perform that experiment
4. Safety check, preferrably with a domain expert
5. Perform the experiment
6. Hold yourself accountable
7. Go back to the text and compare your intuition, your results, and the text
8. Repeat 2-8 until you're internally "sure" your intuition is correct
9. Compare notes with a domain expert