Spencer and Jeff explore intuition as subconscious pattern recognition—like driving or gaming skills—versus instinct, limited to survival basics. Buffett’s "stock instinct" is debunked as luck exploiting modern skills, not evolution. Intuition’s flaws in critical decisions highlight the need for conscious oversight, while common sense, a social shortcut, often masks ignorance or tribal bias. Physics misconceptions reveal how intuition and shared assumptions shape flawed understanding, underscoring why deeper knowledge matters beyond everyday convenience. [Automatically generated summary]
But we are back, Spencer and Jeff, tonight, and we are going to go through intuition and common sense.
Just a note before we start, we do have an email address for anyone to let us know all the things they don't like.
Please, more things, more things we don't like.
Otherwise, I'll get more and more extreme as we go.
I promise.
That email address is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Please send me anything you like, even if it's not related.
But tonight, we're going to talk about intuition and common sense.
Are you excited for this one, Jeff?
I'm excited to see how much weight you put in intuition.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's get right into it then.
I have a feeling that your BSometer would be rather high on this issue.
Well, let's find out.
Intuition, I define it as the ability of the brain to recognize processes and patterns without consciously studying them.
The conscious part of your brain, your consciousness, is only one part, and it's happening outside of that.
It's like it's happening behind you, like a little guy on your shoulder that's telling you things.
Only you don't even really hear him.
It's just things are showing up.
But based on what?
Instincts?
No, it's brain matter that's working out things, trying to find patterns and things that you can use and give you hints.
And it's happening outside your conscious knowledge.
It's a weird thing to understand because it's happening.
It's not in your conscious view by definition.
If you're consciously thinking about it, it's not really intuition.
It's you're consciously dedicating the conscious part of your mind to it and you're working out a solution.
So what's the difference then between intuition and instinct?
Because instinct happens outside of your conscious perception as well.
Most people confuse these two things, instinct and intuition.
Instinct is a collection of preformed decisions that are granted to us through our genetics.
Now, I understand that not every geneticist fully believes that instincts are in our genetic coding, but they can't be anywhere else.
I guarantee it.
In the end, they're going to find where they are on the genetic framework and they're going to say, this is true.
They're definitely here because there's too many things that animals are doing that they aren't learning from anywhere.
They're just doing them.
Famous geneticists talk about this, but they veer away from actually saying that this is a genetic thing.
Famous books have been written on this concept, but we don't want to get in that tonight.
Basically, instincts are in our genes and they're a collection of preset decisions that are helping us to increase our survivability.
But they're really, they're only like three areas of instincts.
And this is a thing that everyone agrees on.
It's not controversial among people who study instinct.
There's three of them.
One is an instinct to get more food.
One is an instinct to protect yourself.
And the other is an instinct to procreate.
More food, more protection, more babies.
And if whatever is happening is not one of those things, it's not instinct.
So I put together a useful thing.
If you're putting on an aggressive front to intimidate another person, perhaps even to discourage them from causing problem for you, the decision to do that is probably found and its root is probably somewhere in your instinct.
But if you have a knack for picking stocks on the stock market, that is not an instinct.
That's your intuition that's leading to that.
If you're not consciously thinking about it, if your brain somewhere noticed the pattern of something and just said, I'm going to do this, and then you make a whole bunch of money at it and you just do it relentlessly.
That's intuition that's leading to that.
It's not instinct.
You don't have an instinct for picking stocks.
I guarantee it.
It's not there.
Because instinct, by the fact that it's genetic, would have to have had things like selection pressures, which are removing versions of our species that are not appropriate to the current environment.
And if the environment changes, that means there's a different set of selection pressures.
And that's the reason why each species has to be slightly varied, because if the environment changes in some way, and by environment, I don't just mean the weather.
I mean. the predators in the region or viruses or anything that might kill you changes, then in order for your species to survive, there has to be enough variation in your species that some of your species can weather the storm of the new selection pressure.
And that's also applying to instinct.
Our instincts are there because they lead us to a better set of decisions that protect us from the many selection pressures that are looking to eliminate us.
And there was no selection pressure involved with stock markets when we were developing as a species.
So therefore, we often say, oh, that guy's got a real instinct for that.
There's really not that much of an instinct for it, really.
It's actually not true.
For it, many of the times we're using it.
So, well, then, well, then, just to argue the point philosophically, where's the line?
Because like, you know, we've also evolved well past being a hunter-gatherer species.
But if somebody who was unemployed, destitute, kicked off welfare, desperate, had a family to feed, robbed a grocer, one might say instinct led them to pursue that path because they were getting food for their family.
The drive for more food is intense for a reason.
If we didn't have it as an instinct, we wouldn't have made it.
So if the same guy robs a bank to get money to go and buy his starving family groceries, is that still instinct?
Like, does it stop being instinct the minute the target is actually food?
Or can we not concede the point that gathering, hunting, and hoarding behaviors.
Oh, gathering resources is absolutely part of it.
Squirrels that gather far more resources than they actually really need because they realize that some other creature might take some of them, that's all wrapped up in it.
We see that behavior in animals all the time.
And when we look at people who amass massive amounts of wealth, I personally believe part of that is some level of instinct.
The idea that you, as a squirrel, would want to have a larger and larger stash of nuts to weather the winter with.
The old Gordon Gecko speech from Wall Street, from Wall Street, greed is good.
Well, that was a different, that's a different thing.
The idea, like when you think about the idea that Jeff Bezos has enough money now, he could stop doing everything that he's doing.
And him and every progeny of his down to the 10th generation could live a comfortable life without needing to bother the world for anything.
He could call it quits at this point and be good, but he's not because he still has a continued drive to get more.
Whether we want to look negatively on him for it or not, he does have a drive to get more.
He really does.
And all the rich people do.
That drive is probably nested somewhere in our instinct, but it's not intuition.
Intuition is a different thing.
Even if it's a thing that allowed you to survive, it's not necessarily instinct.
As I say, the example with the stock picks, people talk about Warren Buffett, that he has a real instinct for the stock market.
That's a thing that's said of him, but he doesn't have an instinct for the stock market.
I guarantee it.
He might have intuition about these things, but there was no instinct for picking stocks that has evolved over many generations of creature that led to him.
That's not a thing that happens.
Yeah, actually, I remember reading an interview with him where they cited this, referenced his instinct for picking stocks.
And he said, hey, I just was fortunate enough to be born in a time when a thing I'm talented at is capable of allowing me to amass a lot of resources.
If I'd have been born in the Stone Age, I wouldn't have lived past 12.
Yeah, right.
There's a different set of selection pressures on in then.
Yes.
But that's that's the line.
If you, if the kernel, the seed for the drive is not one of those three things, more food, more protection, more babies, then it's just not really instinct.
It might be instinct that drives a person to want to play the stock market, but it's not, instinct is not a thing that makes you good at it.
So that's where that line is.
Intuition is an ability that is, it really is finding patterns and processes.
What when you're really thinking about your own movements in your own life, you might even find yourself doing things.
And then you stop and you think about having done those things and you think, why did I do that that particular way?
This happens a lot with the simplest of things.
Here's an example.
The route that you drive to get to the grocery back.
If you live in the same place for a while and you follow the same route day by day, you're going to not instinctually, but pick up a sort of rote memory of which ways are faster when you want to take this four-way stop versus waiting for that streetlight.
We never approach this road when we're turning left at this time of day.
A lot of those are conscious thoughts, but a lot of those driving decision tree moments don't really happen with a great deal of conscious thought in my experience.
Right.
That's maybe less of an example than like a little one, which is something like to take from your driving example, when you're cornering, you might corner a certain way.
You don't really know why, but you do.
I mean, you do corner a certain way.
Undoubtedly, you have some characteristic about the way you corner that's probably very slightly different than the way someone else does it.
And the way that your brain has come up with this, the way to do it, I mean, you're going to feel the weight of the car.
It's just the sum of its experiences.
Yeah, you're going to feel the pull of the car as you're experiencing the centrifugal force as you're cornering.
And that's all part of intuition.
That's part of the intuition motor that's leading you to all the movements that lead to that.
I've noticed intuition a lot in gaming.
When I was playing World of Warcraft, I played a World of Warcraft for many years.
I'd play for three hours on a stretch and I'd be grinding some experience or reputation with something.
And I would move my character in a certain way.
And I was so in tune with the keyboard.
I wasn't thinking anymore consciously about hitting the keys.
I was just moving the character.
My only thoughts were on moving the character and all the movements of my fingers on the keys and all of that was not happening consciously.
And then I would notice that I was doing certain things a certain way.
And then I, as I'm mindlessly doing everything, my brain at some point is thinking about why I'm doing those things that certain way.
And then I realized sometimes that I'm doing it that way because of something else that I get some very slight advantage for.
I get an extra tenth of a second here, a tenth of a second there.
And then I think to myself, I didn't know I was getting that until this moment.
So my doing it wasn't a choice to get that.
I was making that choice somewhere else.
And that was an example of a thing that's happening by intuition.
All the minutiae of the movements were happening by intuition.
And that's probably happening with most people.
I think things like sports where you're going to play a sport, you're going to play basketball or baseball or something, and you're going to perform some athletic feat many, many times and you'll find some way to do it.
And you're not usually thinking about all the many little things you're doing unless pros sometimes have to drill down on the way they do a certain thing so they can change it.
but they have to start consciously thinking about it before they can change it because their brain used intuition to find that method to do it the first time without their conscious thought, because that's just how intuition works.
When you take a shower and you towel off, you're not really thinking about the movements that you're making to do it.
Not really, because your brain just came up with a way to do it.
And that's an example too.
It's in the background.
There's a good reason why instinct and intuition were confused with each other by many people because they're both happening behind the curtain.
It's like there's another creature inside us that's helping us with our decisions.
We think of our conscious mind as our decision maker, but that's not how it really works.
The conscious mind is experiencing the decisions.
It's a very strange thing in neuroscience.
I've not done it myself, but I've come to understand that when people get deep into meditation and they start paying close attention to everything, that's when they really realize that your decisions are not happening in the conscious part of your brain.
They're happening somewhere else and they're getting experienced by the conscious part of the brain.
So intuition would be like a set of decisions that aren't being experienced by the conscious part of the brain.
They're usually so small that part of the brain says, oh, don't bother that guy with all this little stuff.
So that's intuition.
I think we should move on to the next part, which I think is much more interesting, much more one of my hobby horses.
Common sense.
So common sense, as I define it, is a collection of thoughts, concepts, or ideas that are assumed to be held by everyone in a conversation.
And if you're looking at the macro of that, everyone in your peer group or your community or your society.
But usually first starting with a series of conversations, one at a time, and then moving to a larger set.
And oftentimes, common sense is, again, subject to your circumstance.
So while you're at work, you and your coworkers might have a different set of things you consider to be just common sense than you and your family will, because the people in your family don't experience the same things that you and your coworkers experience.
But you have an expectation of the kind of things they're likely to know based on this.
And we call that likelihood common sense.
Yeah, the most acceptable, glaring example I could see would be the accepted level of profanity allowed in a conversation.
Yeah, yeah, people call that common sense a lot.
Sure, they do.
And we need common sense.
I'm going to differ with myself or seem to quite a bit here.
I need to recognize right away that we need common sense as humans.
We need it.
We can't afford to try to live our lives without it.
There's a great Monty Python sketch that I could not find as a standalone thing.
It's not from one of the movies.
It's from the TV show where Michael Palin is robbing a store and several of the other members of the Monty Python troop are in the store and he says, don't move.
And then he immediately breaks down, well, you know, I recognize that there are certain involuntary movements that you must do.
And then he starts listing off the involuntary movements in the typical Monty Python way to make it absolutely absurd and ludicrous, this whole situation.
But that's what our life would be like if we tried to live without common sense.
When a man has a gun and he says, don't move, it's common sense that he means your voluntary movements, not your involuntary ones.
And no one needs to be told that.
And of course, Monty Python is pointing a finger at this thing and pointing it out so that they can all laugh at it.
And your life would be like the user license agreement that you don't bother to read on every website.
If we tried to live without common sense, you could no longer assume that anyone knew anything.
And each time you talked to them about anything, you would have to again go through all the things that they would have to know in order for them to understand the thing that you're saying before you ever got to the thing you were saying.
It would be exhausting.
It would take forever.
We would never get anywhere.
So we need common sense, but this thing leads to a lot of problems.
Many of the miscommunications that I note in my life are breakdowns in this thing that we call common sense.
So much so now that people say that there isn't common sense.
There is.
Of course there is.
That's hyperbole to say that there isn't.
But you need it, but you can't rely on it.
And for me, I think that it should never be used when attempting to form a logical argument.
That should be obvious, but it's not.
So many people say, well, that's true just because, I mean, it's common sense that that's true.
If someone is trying to form a cogent argument or trying to convince you of something and then they say it's just common sense, they're saying that because they don't know the actual reason or they don't want to have to bother to give you the actual reason, which is probably at the end of the day, they don't know the actual reason.
They can't form words that show that that thing is really true.
They just say, oh, they just slough it off.
That's common sense.
And by the way, they're also kind of insulting you because they're saying that you didn't get that from common sense.
You don't have the same common sense as them.
And that needs to be not used in our conversations about these sort of more important issues.
We need to get away from trying to say it's just common sense.
I've been doing a lot of talking tonight.
Why don't you say something?
What do you feel about common sense?
I think that touching back to an earlier episode would be appropriate at this point, because where common sense frequently goes wrong is when it strays into tribalism, like when the common sense that we're talking about is the common sense of a tribe or a camp or a group that we are attempting to extract conformity to.
I think that certainly members of a tribe will have a different context for the things they would call common sense than the people outside that tribe.
But I also think that people are using these arguments of common sense as a means of drawing the tribal lines, if you will, right?
Yeah, exactly.
They're among their peers.
It's like what I said about values.
A politician using the word values without actually defining what those values are.
If someone's using common sense, but they're not going to list the things that they consider to be common sense, it's because they're just hoping you fill in the blanks with what's in your head and everyone can agree without having to go through the motions.
And that's a slur of the language.
It really needs to not be used in these conversations where we're trying to get to the root of what the difference really is between two points of view.
There's a thing about intuition I'd like to mention at this point.
Somehow I missed it as we were going through.
I think I was distracted by instinct, but because intuition is not happening in your conscious part of your mind, it's not something you can entirely rely on as a means of figuring out the world.
It's not responsible to anyone.
It can lead you to the wrong conclusion and you won't even know who to blame.
You actually won't have anyone to blame but yourself, but you won't even know how you came to the wrong conclusion because you weren't thinking about the thing that you were wrong about.
And that's the problem with intuition.
It's a very powerful tool.
It can lead to a lot of conclusions very, very quickly.
But the very important conclusions, you need to not use it for those.
Our nature and demeanor, if you will.
Yeah, our social, we make social decisions to influence how people will see us.
And the things that inform all those decisions are trust and our need for conformity and all of the things that we've been talking about in this podcast so far.
But they're not necessarily our real decisions.
We will make decisions that are not in favor of what we really agree with necessarily because we want other people to like us more.
People liking us is one of the most important things to each of us.
And we will curb our inner tendencies, especially if we think our inner tendencies are to something that's bad and seen really poorly by everyone else.
We will curb our inner tendencies to avoid those things.
If everyone were disgusted by oranges and just really grossed out by anyone who ate them, you would be hard pressed to get yourself to eat them, unless your purpose was to gross everyone else out.
But if it were seen as a degrading thing on par with pedophilia, you would be really hard pressed to convince yourself to do this thing.
And it would be an easy thing to give without.
You might love oranges, but you could easily live without them in order to gain the respect and trust of everyone else.
It's one of the most powerful social forces in our world.
But your intuition has no knowledge of that.
It doesn't factor that in to the best of our ability to understand.
It doesn't factor any of that stuff in.
Your intuition might lead you to all kinds of terrible things.
We say terrible in the social sense, things that will get other people to look down upon you for.
And you need to consciously, as the real captain of the ship, grab hold of the rudder and move it to steer the ship in the proper direction.
You have to be in control.
But common sense has the same sort of, that's why I put them together as part of the podcast.
It has this same property in that we need it.
It's there and we're never getting rid of it, but we need to not rely on it.
It's useful, but it's not useful in every situation.
In some situations, it needs to not be used.
What are your thoughts on that?
So both intuition and common sense have valuable roles in navigating our way through life and society.
Intuition is basically a collection of rote personal experiences.
And instinct is genetic coded experiences that performs a similar but not same task.
And common sense.
So did you say, well, intuition is an ability equal to IQ, really.
It's attempting to define patterns in the world and influence our decisions based on those.
Yeah, but it's something that's informed by your personal experience, whereas common sense is informed by the collective experience of the society or village that you belong to.
Yeah.
Both of them are processed unconsciously, but I guess take their source material or triggers from internal versus external forces.
Yes.
Common sense is a weird one.
I don't really think it's, you know, like I consider intuition is a fundamental part of every human being, and we would have it regardless of any other factor.
If we reset the world and we took a bunch of babies and raised them by robots away from all the humans, those babies would still have intuition, but I'm not convinced that they would have common sense.
I think common sense is something we learn from our social interaction.
We've been doing it and it's worked so well.
And in doing it, we're teaching other people to go along with it because it's working so well.
But it's not a fundamental part of our coding, I don't think.
I think it's something we learn from other people rather than a thing that we would have regardless.
Instinct is another one.
We would have it regardless.
If we were raised by robots, we would still have all our instincts.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's an interesting point for me is that common sense isn't really, I don't think it's, if you want to call it that, code that sits in our meat computer versus intuition, which is definitely code that sits on our meat computer.
Yeah.
And many of the other things we talk about.
I don't think common sense is.
We need it, but we need to know that we can't use it for the biggest conversations that we use, the most important ones.
We can't, that's a failure to actually describe the thing when you're just saying, oh, that's that way just because it's common sense.
Yeah.
I have another note here that I was thinking about this morning, which is that almost everything that a layperson knows about physics comes by way of either intuition or common sense.
So gravity and how it works.
Everyone has a regular everyday knowledge of this and they'll have an intuitive view of it by having thrown things in the air and having them come back down and dropping things on their toe.
Jumped on a trampoline.
That's right.
And everything that fell in their life.
And everyone knows that you have to plug in the coffee maker before you make it work.
And that's just common sense.
But most people don't know how it really works.
They don't really, you know, they don't remember their lesson in grade nine science where they learned about Ohm's law.
And most people, by and large, don't remember that or know anything about it or care to.
Yeah.
They know that when they plug it in, and that's common sense.
That's a everyone knows you have to plug it in and then it works.
And it makes me a little bit sad that almost no one knows anything about physics.
Not really, not consciously.
I don't know.
I was thinking about that and I was like, well, shrug.
What are you going to do about it?
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They also feel they don't need to know.
So everyone knows a little bit about friction, but not really about how it really works.
Just their hands will get warm when they rub them together.