Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo P. Lucci. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, our topic today is intuition. Yes. We're going to talk about what intuition really is, like what people mean when

they talk about intuition, where our intuitions come from, whether intuition and reason are

opposed, like whether there are alternative methods of drawing conclusions about the world or

whether they're compatible in some way. And when intuition might be useful,

if it can be useful, and when it can be particularly misleading. So the word intuition comes from

the Latin, as a lot of words do, intuere. And intuere means knowledge from within. So,

which is, I think actually a pretty good description of how most people

think about intuition, right? That there's something inside us that tells us what to do. Right. So I think

that's a great umbrella definition, but it still leaves open the question of that knowledge from within.

Where did that knowledge come from, right? I mean, so it, the word is sometimes used

to mean knowledge that you've sort of built up over time through practice and experience,

which, you know, has all been sort of stored in some way in your brain, but which you don't

have like conscious deliberative access to. So you might have an intuition about

a situation as being dangerous, even though you, you, you aren't consciously thinking about,

well, here are the reasons it's dangerous. There's just, you've learned patterns and rules.

And, um, or, you know, maybe a chess player, uh, an expert chess player might have an intuition

that a certain move will be good. And that's just something

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