Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of human intuition by February 10th, we will pick the winner by poll, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
I've been thinking a lot about the subject of intuition lately, due to some life events. What do we know without knowing we know it, what can we communicate without knowing we communicate it. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, on a whim while thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The basic rules are thus:
-- Write an effortpost on the topic of Intuition. Standalone or in the CW or side threads; only rule is effort. Intuition can be as broadly or as narrowly defined as you like. Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 12th, as long as we have at least three entries, I will publish a poll, and we will select a winner. If anyone has a suggestion for a better method of picking a winner, I'm open to it. I'm thinking a poll would be better than just raw upvotes, but I'm open to other possibilities.
-- Once a winner is selected, I will work with the winner to select a charity, and I will donate $200 to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund just because somebody wins a poll. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? You don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
I'm curious to see what a bit of direction and effort could bring out, or maybe we need chaos. We'll see if we get three.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The year is 2003, the Redsox haven't won the World Series since 1918. Now they're in Game 7 of the America League Championship against the New York Yankee. Grady Little is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Pedro Martinez pitch? This year Martinez has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting, he's won 3 Cy Young awards in the previous 6 years. Without recapping his entire career, let just posit that he is really good. If you wanted to bet on 1 particular guy, with everything on the line, he is a guy you would want to bet on.
Through 7 innings, that works great, at the end of 7 innings Martinez has thrown 100 pitches and the Redsox led 4-2. Is 100 pitches enough? Should Little call it a night for Martinez and turn it over to the bullpen? Or should he keep rolling the dice with the 1 particular guy you want to bet on?
The Redsox score another run in the top of the 8th to make it 5-2. Little decides to bet on Martinez. That works out less great. 23 pitches later the game is tied and Martinez's night is over. In the 11th inning Aaron Boone homers to win the game 6-5 for the Yankees. The curse lives on. Who knows, maybe next year will be the year. It won't be this year.
The year is 2016, the Cubs haven't won the World Series since 1908. Now they're in Game 7 of the World Series. Joe Madden is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Kyle Hendricks pitch? This year Kendricks has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting. Let not recap his entire career either, but let posit that while he is not nearly as decorated a pitcher as Pedro Martinez was, he has been quite good this year, with everything on the line, he isn't a bad guy to bet on.
Through 4 innings that works great, when it's Hendricks time to pitch in the 5th inning the Cubs led 5-1, Hendricks gets the first 2 outs of the 5th, then he walks a batter. What to do?
For Maddon, that is enough, he pulls Hendricks at this point. That turns out to work, ehh, not exceptionally great. Before the inning is over the score is 5-3, at the end of the 9th inning the score is 6-6. The Cubs wind up scoring 2 runs in the 10th inning and win 8-7. Their curse is over.
Alright, anyway, intuition.
What exactly are we talking about?
Where these decision made on intuition? What does it even mean to make a decision on intuition?
To be straightforward, I'm almost certain that Maddon's decision wasn't made on intuition, its less clear to me whether Little decision was.
Moneyball was published in 2003. I'll probably butcher this synopsis, but roughly, it documents how the A's won a lot of games in the early 2000's by replacing the intuitive judgements of baseball scouts and managers with statistical analysis that didn't rely on human intuition.
For a few years after it was published, which method was better was a sports radio debate topic. Before long, it ceased being one, the teams that embraced the statistical method simply won too frequently. It is no long a question of whether you should rely on human intuition or statistical analysis, its how do you win the statistical analysis arms race.
Back to the pitching decision, by the time Maddon was making his decision, this was a studied question, Maddon was almost certainly aware of analysis that indicated that by the time pitcher see a batter for their 3rd time in a game, the pitcher's effectiveness drops considerably. Glossing over particular details of each situation, broadly speaking, the science was with Maddon.
Its hard to know exactly what the Redsox internal analytics department had produced by 2003. It seems likely to me that Little didn't have the benefit of this analysis in 2003. He may of had to rely on his intuition to make his decision in 2003.
Is this what we mean by intuition? This seems like a pretty crappy definition. Is every decision we make that hasn't been mathematically calculated an intuitive decision? I don't think that's what we mean.
Does it mean a decision we haven't thought out previously?
If Little sat in his hotel room the night before the game with his pitching coach, and spent several hours discussing exactly how long to keep Martinez in the game, and had agree that as long as they were winning he would go 8 innings, they were sticking with Martinez, would it have been an intuitive decision?
It seems like it would have been the opposite, it would have been a decision that they analyzed, and analyzed wrong. Nothing to do with intuition.
One of the suggested prompts to this question involved "how can we improve intuition."
Having read a few Malcolm Gladwell books in my life, my first instinct is "put in your 10,000 hours".
When to pull a pitcher isn't exactly a "haven't thought out previously" situation.
Complete games are quite rare, making this decision is actually something very close to an every game occurrence. Little should have had plenty of the practice needed for his intuition to be on-point.
(This is oversimplifying. While pulling pitchers in an every game occurrence, pulling pitchers in game 7s of playoff series is not. That comes with a set of end game considerations that the regular season decisions do not. For example, in the regular season you need to keep your pitchers well rested enough to pitch the rest of the season in a way that you don't at the end of the playoffs.) (But I think we're getting too far into the weeds here.)
Let's just posit that Little relied on his intuition, and his intuitions screwed the decision up. What should he have done to improve his intuition?
It seems really tempting to dismiss this as a totally idiotic framing of this question.
Baseball over the past 20 years is really clear about the answer to this. He should give up.
He should turn this question over to statistical analysis, and then listen to the analysis when it gives him an answer.
He should quit trying to get his intuition to tell him things that can be looked up.
Its sort of cold and windy outside right now, I just walked outside, here's guessing its 42 degrees.
Looking at my phone, my phone thinks it 40.
Not bad.
How good can I get at this game?
Can I develop my weather guessing intuition?
Every hour, I'll walk outside, make a guess, then check my phone.
I bet I could get pretty good and intuiting the weather.
What's the point though? I can just look at my phone, why develop weather intuition that's no better than taking 2 seconds to look at my phone?
I mean, I'm fairly certain my phone gets it from the National Weather Service or something. Are you afraid of BIG Weather Service?
It seems almost anti-science.
I recently listened to Robert Caro's books about LBJ.
One big theme of the books is the degree to which LBJ had a great intuitive sense for the one on one convincing part of politics.
There are several descriptions of LBJ abilities as "a reader of men". I'll quote one at some length -
From Master of the Senate, pg 136 -
"While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men - a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what the man really wanted- not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted- and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men-"Watch their hands, watch their eyes," he told them. "Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes"-and to read between the line: more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man's weakness. "The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's not telling you," he said. "The most important thing he has to say is what he's trying not to say." For that reason he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. "That's why he wouldn't let a conversation end," Busby explains. "If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn't let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him." And Lyndon Johnson read with a genius that couldn't be taught, with a gift so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a "sense"; "He seemed to sense each man's individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin." He read with a novelist's sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man's heart and know his innermost worries and desires."
So my audiobook setup is a bit odd, I like to listen in my car, we have two cars, one new with an USB port where I can listen to Audible books through my phone, hence the LBJ books, an old older car without any of this new fangled technology like USB ports, so I have to go to the library and check out physical CDs.
Around the same time I was listening to the LBJ books. The physical CD book I was listening to was Barack Obama's memoir, A Promised Land.
This is almost certainly a fool's errand. But I would like to keep political nature of Obama's legacy out of this analysis.
Anyway, with that terrible set up. Listening to these two book side by side, it struck me that Obama didn't sound anything like LBJ.
I was struck by how in the Obama book, all the key players seemed like fixed political pi
Isn't it weird that in most submissions (3/4 in my count) the role of experience always comes up? In 2/4 Thinking, Fast and Slow is mentioned.
My insight was that intuition is analytical thinking encoded. The more hours one puts into a task, the better one becomes and intuiting. However, hours alone isn't enough, those hours have to be of a certain quality. Veritasium's video: The 4 things it takes to be an expert explores what that quality is.
The list is: valid environment, many repetitions, timely feedback, deliberate practice.
Putting 10,000 hours alone is not enough. Following your baseball examples, 10,000 hours without analytics is not going to be the same as 10,000 with analytics.
I think people are too quick to dismiss intuition based on bad examples.
No, absolutely not. You can train intuition (think, reflexes, like playing tennis) without any analytical thinking at all. Animals do it, no problem.
The main point of analytical thinking is to provide a check on intuition for when it goes wrong. Like, you encounter an optical illusion, a fish in the water appears farther than it is, so to spear it properly you need to aim closer, "wat in heck, my eyes deceive me" is where the improvement starts.
Reflexes are not intuition to me.
That's what you assume, but you couldn't have done your current level of analytical thinking without having done some analytical thinking in the past. A baby cannot do your level of analytical thinking, even a genius baby.
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pieces.
McConnell was an obstructionist who got in Obama's way just to win political point. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi get somewhat more sympathetic treatment. But they’re sort of presented as fixed personalities as well. Pelosi is giving him grief from the left. Reid can’t get the Senate to be helpful with any reliability.
Obama as an intuitive reader of men doesn’t seem to come through at all. At least not to me when I listened to it.
Is it Michael Lewis fault?
So Moneyball was a best seller when it came out.
I remember seeing it on all sort of lists of books that smart people were supposed to read (I think I remember it being on a Harvard Business School reading list).
I think we might have learned the lessons from Moneyball too well.
There are certainly domains where the lessons are correct. Do you need to decide when to pull pitcher? Study it, count it up, do the science.
Lots of politics happens with a significant degree of statistical sophistication. Obama’s national campaigns should certainly be included in this.
Perhaps we’ve become so reliant on giving up out intuition that we’ve lost the ability where intuition does come in handy.
(Its worth keeping in mind, that for all LBJs gifts, he has a pretty checkered legacy of his own)
Ok, that's what I got, hopefully that was high enough effort to count as a high effort post and that gets us to 3 submissions.
(I love the concept of this competition, I hope we get more of this sort of thing, I wish I was a talented enough writer to contribute something better)
Thanks
I'm putting up a poll to determine the winner, but if I were the one selecting it this would have had it in a laugher. Michael Lewis and Robert Caro are two of my favorite authors, Baseball was my favorite sport as a child, and the question of why was Barack Obama a wildly ineffective president (relative to expectations) is basically the second formative political question of my life (the first being Iraq War II).
Intuition is an interesting place to pin the difference between LBJ and Obama in terms of effectiveness. Say what you like about Lyndon and his legacy, he passed a ton of very important legislation, stuff that changed the face of the country on a permanent basis. Obama, for the most part, did not. Obamacare was an abortion of a piece of legislation, trying to fit a queen size sheet on a king size bed and call it coverage. Foreign policy barely changed from the Bush years. Etc.
I always thought that the difference could be placed in terms of a fundamental laziness on the part of Barack Obama, a "big speech" disease that caused him to constantly chase the big event, the big announcement, the big omnibus bill, the new direction new paradigm moment; while ignoring the little things, the relationships, that actually grind tough bills through Congress.
Listening to The Years of Lyndon Johnson literally right now, I'm struck by how (in Caro's inimitable verbosity) down and dirty it gets on what gathering political power actually meant. LBJ spent decades forming relationships, learning who to talk to and talking to them, shaking hands, doing favors. He accumulated positions in moribund organizations and then made those organizations powerful from his college frat to the DCCC. Most of those don't pay off, a few do pay off big, and he worked his way up. At every step it was a grind, it was putting in the work, going door to door, making phone calls, sending letters, sucking up and kissing ass where necessary, whipping subordinates into line. By the time LBJ became president, he had learned the value of hard political labor to get anything done.
Obama, by contrast, parachuted into national politics with his 2004 keynote speech, and was running for POTUS in earnest by late 2006 early 2007. He didn't have time to learn where the proverbial bathrooms were in the Senate before becoming president. He might have been an extraordinarily intelligent man, but he never learned the value of grinding away. Obama became president on the power of a few great speeches, and some great statistical environments for his run in the Post-Bush oncoming-Recession timeframe. He never spent time grinding away at any political project, and when he was president he never did that too much either. He constantly tried to give one big speech, and the media cooperated, that was going to change the whole direction. He never spent time whipping votes and trading favors, maybe he couldn't do it anyway.
And maybe that ties back to your Malcolm Gladwell 10k hours bit. LBJ put in the work in the trenches, from practically childhood with his father. Obama learned that wasn't necessary. LBJ needed that time to learn how to do what he was able to do, to get the Civil Rights Act passed. Obama's lack of that skill stalled the public option in healthcare.
Another lesson could be that intuition is useful at the top, but difficult to hire out. You can have an intuitive manager in the dugout, and the numbers crunchers back at HQ can feed him data; you can't have a numbers cruncher in the dugout and an intuitive guy back at HQ feeding him hunches. LBJ could hire numbers guys, Obama couldn't hire empaths.
PS: This product works beautifully for setting up bluetooth in all my old cars. Honestly I like it better than using the built in bluetooth on a lot of cars, which can be rather clunky. Just plugs into a cigarette lighter, and broadcasts FM signal to the radio. I really only couldn't find a station when I was driving through DC, once, and I didn't look all that hard.
lol, curious as to how far you are through the LBJ books.
Have you gotten to the point of Kennedy winning the 1960 Democratic nomination? I'm going trust that I don't need to give spoiler warnings for a historical event that happened 60 years ago.
An interesting take away, is that even by 1960, LBJ might have been someone who's gifts were past their time. At least in terms rising to the Presidency.
LBJ thought he could stay out of the primaries, and that all his backroom senate connections would get him the nomination at the convention. He thought Kennedy was a political lightweight who hadn't done anything of any real note during his time in the Senate.
But Kennedy was already the beneficiary of TV and 'big speeches', by then he was a staple of the Sunday morning political shows, for all LBJs Senate accomplishments, Kennedy was better known to the voters.
The comparison between Kennedy and Obama is an interesting one. I suspect you're right. By the time he arrived in Washington, he was already a possible Presidential nominee, 2 years later, he was literally running for the nomination. He never had time to build political alliances as anything other than a possible President.
One area I was trying to go in my post (not sure I got there, I was running out of steam by the end), is that might just be an odd product of our time. We don't reward that sort of political intuition, so we don't get leaders who have it.
To start with, its almost a dirty word to have been a DC politician for any stretch of time. Before Biden, between Bill Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump, we had 28 years of presidents with a total of 4 years of inside the beltway political experience before becoming President. Hillary had some line about "the most qualified candidate ever", but for the most part, deep Washington connections is almost never a selling point for Presidental candidate.
If anything, its almost the opposite.
You can market change, can you market the opposite?
Beyond that, I'm not sure we believe in that sort of intuition at all.
I singled out Lewis, but there's a large bookshelf of books about how our intuition sucks and we shouldn't trust it. I would put the Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Cass Sustein's Nudge (who Obama worked with at U of Chicago and hired into the White House), most of the Less Wrong universe of stuff including SSC, all fit into that category.
I think that shelf has a lot of good insights, and its useful to sort of be careful about the limits of intuition, and where it can lead us astray.
I also think its somewhat antithetical to LBJs sort of intuition. The sort of leaders we aspire to be, and choose, after reading that stuff. Can't do the things that LBJ did.
Or at least that's 1 theory of the universe.
Thanks for the car adapter tip, not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a solution to my setup, but that's seems like something I should own. Purchased.
They used to be really shitty, I had one growing up that could pick 4 frequencies and never worked well. I think the newer ones are just much more powerful and so do a much better job.
I'm currently in the first book, he's about to lose his first senate campaign to Pappy.
I think your observation of how Johnson was a product of his time is a good one. We don't reward politicians for that kind of work anymore. We're constantly on the lookout for the next big thing, and ignore the steady workmanlike stuff. Even Biden, though he's the ultimate insider/swamp creature, wasn't elected on a record of effectiveness merely one of continued existence.
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