Jennie Scott linked to this 2003 article on the danger of thinking too much in this week's CCK11 postings. The thesis is that "In every area of academic and more practical study, we can find simple examples that on introspection grow into unspeakable 'creatures.' The technical details take over, and practitioners are fooled into thinking they are doing serious work." Instead of bogging down in detail, the author urges, we should trust our intuitions. "Clearly, we have a wealth of experience, gathered over millennia, coded into our gut responses. Surely, we all hope to call on this." I doubt that the knowledge of millennia is captured in intuition, but certainly the knowledge of a lifetime is. We try through abstractions and statistics and detailed reasoning to emulate the inferences much more subtly conducted by a neural network. No wonder we fail.
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