Is scientific intuition real? One definition: a scientist has good intuition if they design experiments which yield important results without necessarily being guided by an underlying theory. They "just know" what to do. I think a lot of what we call intuition is basically luck.
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Scientists typically have a hypothesis they want to test, and may use intuition to help design experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
The results may inspire some intuitive “flash” but the work is the scientific method…
This also captures "intuitive understanding" even though we might not be able to articulate that understanding easily
Perhaps we can create mechanisms where same person can try both strategies in their career at different phases
Think of it this way: Imagine your brain is an LLM that is really well trained. Intuition is what happens when we prompt the well trained LLM (mind) on the subject
Not all intuition is correct but there are those that have it because their LLM is better trained on the subject