Michael Mauboussin On Intuition, Experts, Technology, And Making Better Decisions by Shane Parrish, Farnam Street
The first episode of The Knowledge Project features Michael Mauboussin, the head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. He’s also written numerous books, including More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, and most recently The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing. More importantly, Michael Mauboussin spends more time thinking about thinking than most people.
In this episode we explore parenting, daily routines, reading, and how to make better decisions.
In this excerpt from the podcast, Michael Mauboussin comments on the role of intuition in the decision making process:
The way I like to think about this, and by the way there’s a great book by David Myers on this, called “Intuition.” It’s a book I really would recommend. It’s one of the better treatments of this, and more thoughtful treatments of this.
The way I think about this is, intuition is very domain-specific. Specifically, I would use the language of Danny Kahneman – System one, System two. System one is our experiential system. It’s fast, it’s automatic, but it’s not very malleable. It’s difficult to train.
Our System two, of course, our analytical system, is slower, more purposeful, more deliberate but more trainable. Intuition applies when you participate in a particular activity to a sufficient amount that you effectively train your System one.
So that things become, go from your slow system to your fast system. Where would this work, for instance? It would work in things like, obviously, with things like chess. Chess masters, we know, they chunk. They can see the board very quickly, know who’s at advantage, who’s not at advantage.
See full article here by Farnam Street.
