Taming Our Intuition

Life presents us with many occasions to forecast. Often, we watched economist on television forecasting inflation and economic growth, publishers and producers predicting audiences, engineers estimating the amount of materials needed for a building. Even in our daily lives, we predict the arrival time for the buses and MRT trains, forecast our spouse’s reaction to a proposed move.

Such predictive judgments, such as those made by the engineers, rely largely on schematics, precise calculations and explicit analyses of outcomes observed on similar occasions. Others involve intuition. Such intuition draws primarily on skills and expertise acquired by many years of repeated experience. Today, one of my colleagues during the management meeting performed such rapid and automatic judgment and choices of what constituted the strength and weakness profile of our Normal Technical students. Such intuitive judgment was made with high confidence even when they are not based on any evidence.  Of course, such judgment especially in the profession capacity, are influenced by a combination of analysis and intuition. And yet…  I wonder if using intuition alone is sufficient.

How can we look at the descriptions of the strengths and weaknesses, allegedly written on the basis of years of experience with these “groups” of students? Personally I will evaluate the evidence by comparing the description to the norm for descriptions of normal technical students by professionals. I only wonder the existence of such a norm. Hence, it is important to start with actual profiling of the normal technical students so as to get a baseline of the norm strengths and weakness. Then, using our intuitive prediction compared to the norms that matches our professional impression of the evidence. In this way, the prediction which is still based on our intuition which is far more moderate and accurate than the first.