The advantage of gut feelings and intuition lie with their ability to synthesize years of experience and thousands of variables into one answer within less than a second.
When is this necessary?
During a conversation, someone watching your face is going to be observing how you react (even in the smallest possible ways) as they speak. You don’t have an hour, five minutes, or even two seconds to decide how to present yourself; they’re going to judge you based on that instantaneous reaction (or a lack of one, including a delayed reaction or straight face.)
Anyone who is a natural “people person”—the kinds of people who can get almost anything they want from anyone around them, who make great salesmen or politicians—is going to need to be able to continuously react “properly”, and that means intuitive judgments.
Same thing with any kind of games/sports, or literally any other situation where a quick reaction is required and not immediately responding will doom you no matter what.
The domain of “behaving in such a way as to gain and maintain an advantageous position in social interactions” is very different from other domains, like “diagnose and repair difficulties with computer equipment”, “diagnose and treat afflictions in human beings”, “understand mathematical concepts”, and almost anything else. It seems to me that the domain of social interactions with other humans is in fact a unique domain, not properly comparable (in the context of the current discussion) to anything else.
Certainly gut feelings are key in social interactions; in fact, the most charismatic, likable, and socially successful people do what they do largely unconsciously, and are almost entirely unable not only to explain their technique to others, but even to recognize there is a technique, that other people are not as skilled at using.
My question is, how accurate are gut feelings in other domains — especially those domains where there is are objectively right answers and wrong answers, and where it is possible and even easy, in principle, to compare the answer you get from your gut feeling to the actual right answer? In the treatment of computers and people, in math, in science, in engineering? (Answering this question requires data!)
What’s more: I really don’t think that this
The advantage of gut feelings and intuition lie with their ability to synthesize years of experience and thousands of variables into one answer within less than a second.
is an accurate characterization of where gut feelings in successful social interactors come from. It’s been my experience that such instinctual social success is largely innate. Oh sure, it may be honed, but saying that the gut feeling is a synthesis of years of experience is just almost certainly not what’s going on there. More likely it’s a naturally great ability to model others, to respond (unconsciously) to nonverbal cues, etc.
Players are often required to make decisions with no time whatsoever to plan. For example, you might find yourself surrounded by enemies with no warning.
You need to know whether to run on foot, to teleport away, or to fight.
The difference between reacting in a third of a second and a fourth of a second could mean life or death.
Success in this situation, assuming it’s possible, is dependent on your experience in similar situations and your instinctual reaction. Since you do not have the time to think, your decision is almost guaranteed to be imperfect, but any improvement in it is highly beneficial.
Obviously, the same would often apply in war or in certain crisis situations.
You mention lots of fields (computers, math, science, engineering) where your argument is almost tautological: in a case where you have time to reconsider each decision, a slow but reliable and precise method is better than a snap judgment. Yes, I would agree with you, and I would also agree that logical thinking is better than intuitive thinking in many, many situations.
Are you suggesting that the ability to model others or respond to nonverbal cues is innate, rather than learned? I would definitely disagree, though proving it would be difficult. I suspect that it’s a matter of internalizing the results of numerous actions and reactions in different situations. In my experience, it’s often developed by people who travel lots or are otherwise exposed to tons of different people in a situation where being friendly and getting on their good side is very helpful. Some of them, pretty bad at socializing before they were in such a situation (and really gave it the necessary effort to learn).
I disagree, however, when you say that being socially successful is innate.
The difference between reacting in a third of a second and a fourth of a second could mean life or death.
Success in this situation, assuming it’s possible, is dependent on your experience in similar situations and your instinctual reaction. Since you do not have the time to think, your decision is almost guaranteed to be imperfect, but any improvement in it is highly beneficial.
I do not play sports, but I did spend several years doing high-end raiding (mostly as a main tank) in World of Warcraft, which I think fits your criteria. Raid play is fast-paced and demanding, with necessary reaction times measured in fractions of a second.
I would not characterize good play in a WoW raid as based on intuition. Here is, basically, the process for beating a new, challenging raid boss:
Go in, try the boss. The entire raid dies horribly, of course.
Meticulously, exhaustively analyze the combat log. Note down all observations made of boss behavior. Correlate data.
Brainstorm solutions, based on raid leader’s and key raid members’ comprehensive, minutely detailed knowledge of game mechanics.
Make detailed plan. The plan implicitly includes generally correct play from all raid members; note that for almost all classes in WoW, optimal play means following detailed algorithms for ability usage, often worked out at length by top “theorycrafters”, who are often people with advanced degrees in physics and mathematics (no, I am not exaggerating) — plus, of course, extensive experience, to the point where playing correctly is at the level of muscle memory.
Attempt to execute plan. Correct execution demands precise, down-to-the-second performance from all raid members.
If successful: yay! If failure: proceed to step 2. Repeat until victory.
If this is an intuition-based approach, then I don’t know what “intuition” means.
You mention lots of fields (computers, math, science, engineering) where your argument is almost tautological: in a case where you have time to reconsider each decision, a slow but reliable and precise method is better than a snap judgment. Yes, I would agree with you, and I would also agree that logical thinking is better than intuitive thinking in many, many situations.
Of course logical thinking is better when you have time to use it. I’m not asking whether it’s better. I’m asking whether “gut judgments” are accurate, and how accurate they are.
Basically, I see many people claiming that in “crunch time” scenarios, you have no choice but to apply the gut judgment. Ok. But my question is: if you later go back and apply logical reasoning to the (by now, perhaps, irrelevant) problem, does it turn out that your gut judgment was right? How right? How often? Etc.
I would not characterize good play in a WoW raid as based on intuition.
On a PvE server, on in PvE in general—yes, raid bosses are basically a puzzle that you figure out and then execute to the best of your ability. But take a PvP server, say you’re assembling for the raid and are attacked. This is the fight where you have half a second to realize what someone is trying to do to you and come up with a counter.
I hesitate to say that you have to act on your intuition in a PvP fight, probably a better word is memorized (mostly subconsciously) patterns based on experience—that’s what drives your actions.
On a PvP server, if you’re assembling for a (serious) raid and are attacked, you sigh, say “goddamnit… jerks”, and then res as fast as possible in a way that will get you to the raid ASAP. (And that’s back when you couldn’t just teleport directly to the instance from wherever.)
“Memorized patterns based on experience” is a good characterization (often they’re even memorized consciously). Although, there is a nontrivial element of intuition in competitive (arena) PvP, where your opponent’s psychology is an important factor.
On a PvP server, if you’re assembling for a (serious) raid and are attacked, you sigh, say “goddamnit… jerks”, and then res as fast as possible in a way that will get you to the raid ASAP.
That rather depends on your guild. “Screw the raid, we’ve got faces to melt!” is not an uncommon response :-)
I’m asking whether “gut judgments” are accurate, and how accurate they are.
I have very little experience with WoW, so it’s interesting to hear how deliberate and reasoned a high-level raid is. I have a little experience with sports, combat, and combat sports.
It’s pretty surprising that our brains handle abstractions as well as they do. It’s not at all surprising that they can process and integrate sensory information as fast as they can, because that trait is crucial to survival for most animals.
When Kevin Durant fakes a pass and then shoots from 30 feet away, he’s doing something he’s done thousands of times before. It’s a pattern. But he’s adjusting that pattern for many things that weren’t present in practice, and no two shots are exactly alike. His brain is calculating a trajectory much faster than any of us could with pencil and paper, and his cerebellum is “answering” hundreds of individual questions about muscle opposition that our roboticists might not be able to coordinate at all. He misses some shots, of course. But insofar as a made shot counts for accuracy or right judgment, he probably has better accuracy in much less than a second than anybody could achieve with reflection.
Some rudimentary efforts to do so have, on occasion, been made. While wholesale bots (i.e., no real-time human control at all) are totally incapable of performing at the level required to beat high-end raid bosses, certain simple, repetitive parts of the process can be automated with add-ons and macros.
There are two issues here: desirability and difficulty.
Desirability: if you automated those parts, then there wouldn’t be a game. No one wants to just theorycraft for a while and then sit there and watch while things happen automatically. Theorycraft is the metagame. The parts where you actually execute the plan are the gameplay. And the gameplay is fast-paced, exciting, adrenaline-rush-generating, skills-demanding, and cool-looking. The excitement of the gameplay is what WoW raiders live for.
Or at least, most WoW players take this stance. Knowing this, Blizzard has consistently banned any game add-ons that go too far in automating things. There’s a fine line, and sometimes it shifts, and sometimes it’s blurry, but the intent is clear: thou shalt play the game yourself, not write code that will play the game for you. (As with all commandments, precise interpretation is a longer discussion.)
Difficulty: The reason you can’t actually fully automate the steps in question (unless, perhaps, you are the game/boss designer, and have access to all the internal game variables) is largely because:
Positioning (i.e., location and movement of characters in the game world) matters a lot. (The reasons why are several, and probably boring, but take my word for this.)
Timing matters a lot. Which is to say, not only must character ability usage be timed correctly with respect to the behavior of game elements (monsters, environmental events, etc.), but players must also time their actions with respect to, and in response to, what other players are doing.
There are many variables that go into correct play. Combinatorial explosion would make automating this a daunting task. For a human, learning a boss strategy, or a play technique, is faster than devising and implementing an algorithm to execute it. To a human, you can just say “kite that mob over there, then release it when I yell on voice chat”, and (if he’s a skilled player) he won’t need to be told twice. Writing code to do this… is likely possible, but not easy.
Are you suggesting that the ability to model others or respond to nonverbal cues is innate, rather than learned?
Yes, I am not only suggesting but saying it explicitly (but see caveat below). Huge, obvious case in point: the autism spectrum. People on the spectrum (such as myself) have little to no ability to perceive nonverbal cues or (non-explicitly; again see caveat) model others.
Even for neurotypical (that is, non-autistic) people, there is a range of ability in this area.
I would definitely disagree, though proving it would be difficult. I suspect that it’s a matter of internalizing the results of numerous actions and reactions in different situations. In my experience, it’s often developed by people who travel lots or are otherwise exposed to tons of different people in a situation where being friendly and getting on their good side is very helpful. Some of them, pretty bad at socializing before they were in such a situation (and really gave it the necessary effort to learn).
Caveat to the above: I think these skills are innate in most people; that there is a range of ability, with the autism spectrum at one of that range and naturally charismatic, socially apt people on the other; but that the skills can be learned, with effort, as explicit skills.
For instance, autistic people can train themselves to recognize nonverbal cues and social signals; but this is not a matter of simply unconsciously perceiving the cues/signals/situations and just “knowing” their meaning, as it is for most people; rather it is a case of consciously paying attention and looking for things; and the meanings of these cues and signals must be looked up, researched, and memorized. In other words, a logic-based approach to compensate for lack of an intuitive ability.
It is probably also the case that neurotypicals who are not on the extreme positive end of the social ability spectrum, but do not lack the innate intuitive ability, can train their ability in the manner you mention. I would not know, of course, but it seems plausible enough, and consistent with what I’ve heard.
The advantage of gut feelings and intuition lie with their ability to synthesize years of experience and thousands of variables into one answer within less than a second.
When is this necessary?
During a conversation, someone watching your face is going to be observing how you react (even in the smallest possible ways) as they speak. You don’t have an hour, five minutes, or even two seconds to decide how to present yourself; they’re going to judge you based on that instantaneous reaction (or a lack of one, including a delayed reaction or straight face.)
Anyone who is a natural “people person”—the kinds of people who can get almost anything they want from anyone around them, who make great salesmen or politicians—is going to need to be able to continuously react “properly”, and that means intuitive judgments.
Same thing with any kind of games/sports, or literally any other situation where a quick reaction is required and not immediately responding will doom you no matter what.
The domain of “behaving in such a way as to gain and maintain an advantageous position in social interactions” is very different from other domains, like “diagnose and repair difficulties with computer equipment”, “diagnose and treat afflictions in human beings”, “understand mathematical concepts”, and almost anything else. It seems to me that the domain of social interactions with other humans is in fact a unique domain, not properly comparable (in the context of the current discussion) to anything else.
Certainly gut feelings are key in social interactions; in fact, the most charismatic, likable, and socially successful people do what they do largely unconsciously, and are almost entirely unable not only to explain their technique to others, but even to recognize there is a technique, that other people are not as skilled at using.
My question is, how accurate are gut feelings in other domains — especially those domains where there is are objectively right answers and wrong answers, and where it is possible and even easy, in principle, to compare the answer you get from your gut feeling to the actual right answer? In the treatment of computers and people, in math, in science, in engineering? (Answering this question requires data!)
What’s more: I really don’t think that this
is an accurate characterization of where gut feelings in successful social interactors come from. It’s been my experience that such instinctual social success is largely innate. Oh sure, it may be honed, but saying that the gut feeling is a synthesis of years of experience is just almost certainly not what’s going on there. More likely it’s a naturally great ability to model others, to respond (unconsciously) to nonverbal cues, etc.
How about sports and fast paced games?
Players are often required to make decisions with no time whatsoever to plan. For example, you might find yourself surrounded by enemies with no warning.
You need to know whether to run on foot, to teleport away, or to fight.
The difference between reacting in a third of a second and a fourth of a second could mean life or death.
Success in this situation, assuming it’s possible, is dependent on your experience in similar situations and your instinctual reaction. Since you do not have the time to think, your decision is almost guaranteed to be imperfect, but any improvement in it is highly beneficial.
Obviously, the same would often apply in war or in certain crisis situations.
You mention lots of fields (computers, math, science, engineering) where your argument is almost tautological: in a case where you have time to reconsider each decision, a slow but reliable and precise method is better than a snap judgment. Yes, I would agree with you, and I would also agree that logical thinking is better than intuitive thinking in many, many situations.
Are you suggesting that the ability to model others or respond to nonverbal cues is innate, rather than learned? I would definitely disagree, though proving it would be difficult. I suspect that it’s a matter of internalizing the results of numerous actions and reactions in different situations. In my experience, it’s often developed by people who travel lots or are otherwise exposed to tons of different people in a situation where being friendly and getting on their good side is very helpful. Some of them, pretty bad at socializing before they were in such a situation (and really gave it the necessary effort to learn).
I disagree, however, when you say that being socially successful is innate.
I do not play sports, but I did spend several years doing high-end raiding (mostly as a main tank) in World of Warcraft, which I think fits your criteria. Raid play is fast-paced and demanding, with necessary reaction times measured in fractions of a second.
I would not characterize good play in a WoW raid as based on intuition. Here is, basically, the process for beating a new, challenging raid boss:
Go in, try the boss. The entire raid dies horribly, of course.
Meticulously, exhaustively analyze the combat log. Note down all observations made of boss behavior. Correlate data.
Brainstorm solutions, based on raid leader’s and key raid members’ comprehensive, minutely detailed knowledge of game mechanics.
Make detailed plan. The plan implicitly includes generally correct play from all raid members; note that for almost all classes in WoW, optimal play means following detailed algorithms for ability usage, often worked out at length by top “theorycrafters”, who are often people with advanced degrees in physics and mathematics (no, I am not exaggerating) — plus, of course, extensive experience, to the point where playing correctly is at the level of muscle memory.
Attempt to execute plan. Correct execution demands precise, down-to-the-second performance from all raid members.
If successful: yay! If failure: proceed to step 2. Repeat until victory.
If this is an intuition-based approach, then I don’t know what “intuition” means.
Of course logical thinking is better when you have time to use it. I’m not asking whether it’s better. I’m asking whether “gut judgments” are accurate, and how accurate they are.
Basically, I see many people claiming that in “crunch time” scenarios, you have no choice but to apply the gut judgment. Ok. But my question is: if you later go back and apply logical reasoning to the (by now, perhaps, irrelevant) problem, does it turn out that your gut judgment was right? How right? How often? Etc.
On a PvE server, on in PvE in general—yes, raid bosses are basically a puzzle that you figure out and then execute to the best of your ability. But take a PvP server, say you’re assembling for the raid and are attacked. This is the fight where you have half a second to realize what someone is trying to do to you and come up with a counter.
I hesitate to say that you have to act on your intuition in a PvP fight, probably a better word is memorized (mostly subconsciously) patterns based on experience—that’s what drives your actions.
On a PvP server, if you’re assembling for a (serious) raid and are attacked, you sigh, say “goddamnit… jerks”, and then res as fast as possible in a way that will get you to the raid ASAP. (And that’s back when you couldn’t just teleport directly to the instance from wherever.)
“Memorized patterns based on experience” is a good characterization (often they’re even memorized consciously). Although, there is a nontrivial element of intuition in competitive (arena) PvP, where your opponent’s psychology is an important factor.
That rather depends on your guild. “Screw the raid, we’ve got faces to melt!” is not an uncommon response :-)
Dirty casuals :p
I have very little experience with WoW, so it’s interesting to hear how deliberate and reasoned a high-level raid is. I have a little experience with sports, combat, and combat sports.
It’s pretty surprising that our brains handle abstractions as well as they do. It’s not at all surprising that they can process and integrate sensory information as fast as they can, because that trait is crucial to survival for most animals.
When Kevin Durant fakes a pass and then shoots from 30 feet away, he’s doing something he’s done thousands of times before. It’s a pattern. But he’s adjusting that pattern for many things that weren’t present in practice, and no two shots are exactly alike. His brain is calculating a trajectory much faster than any of us could with pencil and paper, and his cerebellum is “answering” hundreds of individual questions about muscle opposition that our roboticists might not be able to coordinate at all. He misses some shots, of course. But insofar as a made shot counts for accuracy or right judgment, he probably has better accuracy in much less than a second than anybody could achieve with reflection.
Yes. This is exactly right, and true in WoW as well.
So, I realize this is off-topic, but I’m really curious: wouldn’t it be easier to automate steps 1, 5 and 6?
Some rudimentary efforts to do so have, on occasion, been made. While wholesale bots (i.e., no real-time human control at all) are totally incapable of performing at the level required to beat high-end raid bosses, certain simple, repetitive parts of the process can be automated with add-ons and macros.
There are two issues here: desirability and difficulty.
Desirability: if you automated those parts, then there wouldn’t be a game. No one wants to just theorycraft for a while and then sit there and watch while things happen automatically. Theorycraft is the metagame. The parts where you actually execute the plan are the gameplay. And the gameplay is fast-paced, exciting, adrenaline-rush-generating, skills-demanding, and cool-looking. The excitement of the gameplay is what WoW raiders live for.
Or at least, most WoW players take this stance. Knowing this, Blizzard has consistently banned any game add-ons that go too far in automating things. There’s a fine line, and sometimes it shifts, and sometimes it’s blurry, but the intent is clear: thou shalt play the game yourself, not write code that will play the game for you. (As with all commandments, precise interpretation is a longer discussion.)
Difficulty: The reason you can’t actually fully automate the steps in question (unless, perhaps, you are the game/boss designer, and have access to all the internal game variables) is largely because:
Positioning (i.e., location and movement of characters in the game world) matters a lot. (The reasons why are several, and probably boring, but take my word for this.)
Timing matters a lot. Which is to say, not only must character ability usage be timed correctly with respect to the behavior of game elements (monsters, environmental events, etc.), but players must also time their actions with respect to, and in response to, what other players are doing.
There are many variables that go into correct play. Combinatorial explosion would make automating this a daunting task. For a human, learning a boss strategy, or a play technique, is faster than devising and implementing an algorithm to execute it. To a human, you can just say “kite that mob over there, then release it when I yell on voice chat”, and (if he’s a skilled player) he won’t need to be told twice. Writing code to do this… is likely possible, but not easy.
Not exactly. Yeah, I know this isn’t WoW.
Yeah, my comments were WoW-specific. Roguelikes are very different.
Yes, I am not only suggesting but saying it explicitly (but see caveat below). Huge, obvious case in point: the autism spectrum. People on the spectrum (such as myself) have little to no ability to perceive nonverbal cues or (non-explicitly; again see caveat) model others.
Even for neurotypical (that is, non-autistic) people, there is a range of ability in this area.
Caveat to the above: I think these skills are innate in most people; that there is a range of ability, with the autism spectrum at one of that range and naturally charismatic, socially apt people on the other; but that the skills can be learned, with effort, as explicit skills.
For instance, autistic people can train themselves to recognize nonverbal cues and social signals; but this is not a matter of simply unconsciously perceiving the cues/signals/situations and just “knowing” their meaning, as it is for most people; rather it is a case of consciously paying attention and looking for things; and the meanings of these cues and signals must be looked up, researched, and memorized. In other words, a logic-based approach to compensate for lack of an intuitive ability.
It is probably also the case that neurotypicals who are not on the extreme positive end of the social ability spectrum, but do not lack the innate intuitive ability, can train their ability in the manner you mention. I would not know, of course, but it seems plausible enough, and consistent with what I’ve heard.