Intuition

The ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts.

Quotes

I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
– Ingmar Bergman reported in “Ingmar Bergman Confides in Students” (New York Times, May 7, 1981)

The first, sometimes referred to as Forrester’s Law:
“In complicated situations efforts to improve things often tend to make them worse, sometimes much worse, on occasion calamitous, because the obvious thing to do is often dead wrong.”
The second is more blunt:
“Any intuitive alteration of a complex system will cause it to become worse off.”
– Jay W. Forrester in Urban Dynamics (1969) regarding obvious or intuitive solutions

Articles

Big Data and the role of intuition

By Thomas H. Davenport, posted December 24 2013
https://hbr.org/2013/12/big-data-and-the-role-of-intuition

Intuition is the most important data science skill, says this chief data scientist

By Rohit Yadav, published April 6 2020
https://analyticsindiamag.com/intuition-is-the-most-important-data-science-skill-says-this-chief-data-scientist

A case for intuition in Data Science

By Brandon Cosley, posted Aug 17 2021
https://towardsdatascience.com/a-case-for-intuition-in-data-science-e1241e968a1e
How intuition can help make us better data scientists