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Swimmer963 comments on Biases of Intuitive and Logical Thinkers - Less Wrong
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Probably. I don't think "intuition" is one process–for example, for neurotypical people apparently reading faces is innate and unlearned, and there isn't and never was conscious processing that later became unconscious habit. I'm pretty sure that other intuitions start out as conscious reasoning and simply become overlearned to the point that the reasoning happens really, really fast and doesn't feel like "thinking about" anymore–either that, or the "intuitions" were originally a separate process that was useless, and studying X fed them with information to the point that they became useful. Either way, not innate.
I do think it's a useful word to have, even if it's not rigorous. At the very least it's shorter than "processes inaccessible to consciousness that produce thoughts."
It's useful as what Edward de Bono (who is too rarely mentioned on LessWrong) calls a "porridge word": a name given to a vague concept just in order to have a name to call something by when we know little about what it is. Like porridge, it has no flavour of its own, and can take on any shape without resistance. Or to drop the metaphor, the word says nothing about the thing it vaguely points to, and can come to mean whatever subsequent evidence tells us about it. But a porridge word is never an explanation: any definition of a porridge word should include somewhere the words "we don't know".
ETA: 29 hits for "de Bono" in the LW search box, so not as unmentioned as I had thought.
Is it the same thing which Marvin Minsky calls a "suitcase word"?
See http://edge.org/conversation/consciousness-is-a-big-suitcase : "Most words we use to describe our minds (like "consciousness", "learning", or "memory") are suitcase-like jumbles of different ideas. ... those suitcase-words (like intuition or consciousness) that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can't yet explain."
Something like, although de Bono sees them more positively as tools for thought, that let you talk about something when you don't know what it is, and avoid premature commitment to explanations. Minsky is talking about what happens when they are mistaken for explanations.