Interesting article, but do you have any empirical evidence that people's thinking styles can be divided so neatly into intuitive vs. logical?

On its face, you seem to be taking this thinking style distinction for granted.

Reflecting on this some more, is an intuitive thinker synonymous with one who primarily uses System 1 style thinking and a logical thinker synonymous with one who primarily uses System 2 style thinking? If so, it'd clarify things quite a bit (for me at least) if you made that clear in your post.

More on gut feelings:

When I was 13 years old, I was a heavily logic-dominant thinker, and I was terrible at reacting under pressure–I found this out when I started taking the required classes to become a lifeguard. I think this is mainly because, even though I could reason through what I was supposed to do, I was misinterpreting the nervousness of social pressure and people watching me perform as uncertainty about what to do. I also tended to be so occupied by thinking things through that I would have "tunnel vision"–my method wasn't fast enough to flexibly adapt when I thought a situation was one thing and it turned out to be something different.

In first year nursing school, I had gut feelings, and they were screaming at me all the time. I ignored them–justifiably, because they were pretty useless. I didn't yet have what they call "clinical judgement", which AFAICT consists of your intuition knowing what details to work from. Four years ago I didn't really know what it looked like when someone was having trouble breathing–now I could list probably 10 little details to look for. But the mental process isn't a checklist down those ten items with yes or no for each and making an aggregate score–it's "this person looks okay" or "crap, this person doesn't look okay." And this happens even if I'm not asking myself the question–I look at a patient and my brain pings me that something is wrong. I think the main limitation that my 13-year-old self had to work under was that I ignored my gut feelings, so I frequently didn't notice new information that didn't make sense–if it didn't fit into the mental model I'd made of what was going on, it got filtered out. Intuition is good at noticing confusion. Logical thinking tries to suppress confusion by fitting details into a model even if they don't fit very well, and it doesn't answer questions that aren't asked, either.

Moral of the story: it takes time and effort to train gut feelings. They don't come from nowhere.

Your experience and values seem to differ from mine in a number of ways; that does seem to be what's behind the OP's advice being of different utility to us.

I take by this that you don't have the experience of it feeling like your brain's being hijacked into having an emotion that you don't want?

I guess something that's atypical about me for a LWer is that I'm very agreeable and somewhat of a conformist. I don't like to bother other people. Acting on frustration or anger would often make me a bother to other people. Even when I'm in the right, I can fix the situation more effectively from a standpoint of not being angry. My angry self might say things that my later non-angry self would regret, and I've gotten pretty good at not doing that.

I'm heavily intuition-dominant, in that I tend to minimize the use of "System 2" thinking whenever possible and make decisions based primarily on emotion. Some more patterns I've noticed:

• Strategy. System 2/Logic-dominant thinking is much better for planning things out, especially when you're working with a novel situation. If you use System 1 when playing a game such as Settlers of Catan for the first time you'll have a very low chance of winning. If you use System 2 you'll generally perform better (at least in the first play.)

• Decision speed. Intuitive thinkers tend to make decisions quickly, and to (unconsciously) assign a high cost to "opening" a made decision. Logical thinkers tend to make decisions more slowly (but often more correctly) and be much more willing to debate, consider alternatives, etc.

• Responsiveness to external feedback. Intuitive thinkers learn primarily by trying things and seeing what works, since most of their skills are on the 5 second level. This means fast learning with certain types of skills, but also a tendency to fail at things that don't provide frequent feedback.

• (Un)-awareness of their skills. Intuitive thinkers tend to have a harder time explicitly describing their thought process, or how they developed a skill. Someone who knows came up with a plan to learn Probability and executed it effectively can probably give you directions on how to study, but someone who knows how to charm a room will have a difficult time articulating exactly what they do.

• Severe struggle with unusual tasks/skills. Heavily intuitive people who do most of their communication online are often literally afraid of phones, to the point where they'll procrastinate on making calls for hours. Same with networking, going to office hours, etc. Some practice making phone calls tends to mitigate this problem pretty quickly, but it means intuitive thinkers often have a very steep learning curve when it comes to new skills. Conversely logic-dominated thinkers seem to have an easier time working outside their comfort zone.

None of these are insurmountable. For example, I've focused on improving my communication skills over the past few years and it's shown tremendous results, to the point where people explicitly ask me to give talks or explain certain topics. But they do seem to be fairly strong tendencies.

This post makes a lot of claims that are factual in nature. Many of them seem to make sense, but that doesn't mean they are true. In fact, some of them may be false; I recall seeing research showing that intuitive thinkers performed better at math / logic problems if they were word problems involving social settings, eg amount of soda to buy for a party or people sitting next to each other. Regardless of this specific claim, the general point is that an article full of factual claims should have citations. If citations are too much trouble, the writer should provide some evidence of expertise to give us a reason to believe factual claims without citations.

Frameworks and claims that make intuitive sense but are not linked to research are risky from an epistemic hygiene perspective. So I felt I had to downvote this post despite it being well written and reasonable sounding.

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

Can I ask that the title be changed to "Biases of Intuitive and Logical Thinkers"? I almost didn't read this due to the very generic title.

The confused commenter clearly comprehended the argument to some degree, but a few possible details were overlooked.

I think your example is bad. It's the first commenter who is confused, not the second one.

The correct formulation is "If, for any small positive number (epsilon), I can show that the difference between A and B is less than epsilon, then I have shown A and B are equal."

The first commenter screwed things up by saying "If, for any small positive number you give me (epsilon), I can show that the difference between A and B is less than epsilon, then I have shown A and B are equal." The second commenter's objection is valid.

I'm not sure the first example is really an error on the part of the commenter, unless there was an implicit shared technical usage at play. The word 'any' in the quote you give below is not very clear. I knew what it meant, but only because I understood what the argument was getting at.

"If, for any small positive number you give me (epsilon), I can show that the difference between A and B is less than epsilon, then I have shown A and B are equal."

In this case, 'any' means 'if whatever number is given, the following analysis applies, the conclusion is reached'

Compare:

"If, for any small positive number you can give me (epsilon), I can show that the difference between A and B is greater than epsilon, then I have shown A and B are not equal".

Here, the natural reading is 'if a single case is found where the following analysis applies, the conclusion is reached'

As I said, this may be a failing of technical language on my part, but I don't think normal English is clear here.

I am not convinced that it's easy, or even really possible, to change from one thinking style to the other.

I've noticed a lot that can be explained just by practice effects. Someone practices tai chi for 5 years, they think of movements in terms of tai chi. Someone practices basketball for 5 years, they think of moving a ball in terms of basketball. Someone practices intuition, and wordplay, and they think of problems in terms of those.

Basically, I think it's like expertise (random google hit that seems to cite the research I was thinking of). Experts build a framework for understanding things. If someone has been immersed in fashion their whole life, they have a whole mental vocabulary for clothes that I am only starting to realize exists. I, as someone who has been immersed in problem-solving my whole life, have a vocabulary for doing it that I take for granted. But if someone who is bad at problem-solving practices logic, or I practice fashion, we can learn the structures experts use, just like people can learn a musical instrument without having been born knowing how to play.

From this perspective, the flaws listed for "intuitive" reasoners stem from a lack of practice / expertise at logical tasks, while the flaws listed for "logical" reasoners stem from a lack of practice / expertise at other kinds of tasks (like, apparently, the "picking up on Russian social norms" task). The reason the division in the OP makes sense is because becoming an expert takes a lot of time, so not everyone will be an expert at logical tasks if it's not absolutely required, and people who become experts at logical tasks will be less likely to be experts at other things, due to time constraints.

But this is not to say that the division is always a good heuristic - it's possible for people to be good at two tasks that would normally be put in different camps. And conversely, it's possible for people to be good at neither of two tasks. That is to say, stupid people exist. The only reason (or so I claim) that we're grouping professional writers together with stupid people in the "intuition" group is because they're both non-experts at certain logical tasks - not because stupid people and professional writers form a natural kind.

I like the main essay, but have one quibble:

You can find resources with some light googling

If it's trivial to find these resources, could you not include them in the OP?

Reasons why you should:

1.) You spending the ten minutes it takes to do this will prevent dozens of readers from spending a collective several hours doing the same.

2.) The resources will receive wider use because the trivial inconvenience is gone.

3.) It's more difficult for people who are not you to know exactly what you're talking about or what you're Googling for. Googling "framework for understanding people" is not very useful.