It usually seems to be a bad idea to try to solve problems intuitively or use our intuition as evidence to judge issues that our evolutionary ancestors never encountered and therefore were never optimized to judge by natural selection.
In mathematics, intuition is generally not used as evidence to support a conclusion, but instead as a tool with which to search for a rigorous way to solve a problem. First of all, this makes intuition a lot less dangerous. If a voter's intuition tells him that some particular economic policy will be beneficial, then he is likely to rely on his intuition being right, and can harm public policy if he is wrong. If a mathematician's intuition tells him that a certain way of attacking a problem is likely to be fruitful, he will fail to solve the problem if he is wrong. But if the mathematician intuitively feels that premise P is true, and he can use it to prove theorem T, he will not state T as fact. Instead, he will state that P implies T, and mention that he finds this especially interesting because he believes P to be true. Secondly, this makes mathematical intuition trainable. Although our brains are not optimized for math, they are extremely adaptable. When a mathematician tries a fruitless path towards solving a problem as a result of bad intuition, he will notice that he has failed to solve it, update his intuitions accordingly, and try a different way. Similarly, he will notice when his intuition helps him solve a problem, and he'll figure out what his intuition did right.
Would this be a valid rephrasing of your statement? "When you have done a certain number of problems and understood complex connected conceptions, your intuition becomes molded so that it becomes useful to trust them, but verify them as well."
While reading the answer to the question 'What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?' I became curious about the value of intuition in mathematics and why it might be useful.
It usually seems to be a bad idea to try to solve problems intuitively or use our intuition as evidence to judge issues that our evolutionary ancestors never encountered and therefore were never optimized to judge by natural selection.
And so it seems to be especially strange to suggest that intuition might be a good tool to make mathematical conjectures. Yet people like fields medalist Terence Tao seem to believe that intuition should not be disregarded when doing mathematics,
The author mentioned at the beginning also makes the case that intuition is an important tool,
But what do those people mean when they talk about 'intuition', what exactly is its advantage? The author hints at an answer,
At this point I was reminded of something Scott Aaronson wrote in his essay 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity',
Again back to the answer on 'what it is like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics'. The author writes,
Humans are good at 'zooming out' to detect global patterns. Humans can jump conceptual gaps by treating them as "black boxes".
Intuition is a conceptual bird's-eye view that allows humans to draw inferences from high-level abstractions without having to systematically trace out each step. Intuition is a wormhole. Intuition allows us get from here to there given limited computational resources.
If true, it also explains many of our shortcomings and biases. Intuitions greatest feature is also our biggest flaw.
Our computational limitations make it necessary to take shortcuts and view the world as a simplified model. That heuristic is naturally prone to error and introduces biases. We draw connections without establishing them systematically. We recognize patterns in random noise.
Many of our biases can be seen as a side-effect of making judgments under computational restrictions. A trade off between optimization power and resource use.
It it possible to correct for the shortcomings of intuition other than by refining rationality and becoming aware of our biases? That's up to how optimization power scales with resources and if there are more efficient algorithms that work under limited resources.