Just wondering, while making big and small decisions on a day to day basis, do you prefer thinking or intuition?
Personally I like to think about the cause & effect of everything before deciding on what to do, but I've seen way too much people around me repeatedly making decisions based solely on their gut feelings. Most of these occasions did not end well for them.
I think what this question is attempting to distinguish is the difference and application of very short-term thinking and longer-termed thinking in decision making. You can call this subconscious thinking and conscious thinking.
Intuition, as far as cognitive psychology is concerned(at least I think..I read it in a psychology book somewhere) is subconscious processing. Basically, when we consciously think, we average a rate of 40 bits of information per second. Subconscious processing allows for 40 million bits of information per second. Basically subconscious processing is a million times faster than conscious processing and thus, appears to be instant. You can find the quantification of thinking speed in
information theory.
A book called "Thinking fast and slow" explains this in terms of system 1 and system 2 type thinking(at least i guess/never read the book).
In daily decision making, we use both forms of thinking: subconscious and conscious.
When people use short-term thinking, they are often using what is called heuristics. Heuristics are "mental shortcuts" used to produce quick decisions and judgements. Trial and error, an educated guess, profiling, etc., are examples of these heuristics. They often appear to be effective and sometimes are to the degree necessary to make decisions, but often have a large capacity to be incorrect.
Short-term decision making often generalizes new information so as to take away the complexity of the problem and provides a generalized answer to the generalized problem. New problems often appear to be the same as an older problems, in the overarching sense, but in actuality they are different when viewed in narrow sense. It is when you view the nuanced differences between "old problems you have already solved" and these "new" problems that you have yet to solve that you find variability with tremendous consequences. That is why case studies are widely ineffective for solving new problems. In theory, you are supposed to look at a case study and see how a problem was solved in the past as a way to better understand how you could solve a similar problem in the future. However, that only works to the degree that the old problem and new problem are similar. When they differ, and they often do in large ways, the previous case study and old information is often useless.
In general most people havent been exposed to tools like
decision theory as a way to make decisions.
They are also unaware of the cognitive biases they have. Here is a list of
cognitive biases that if viewed will greatly help you understand how you think and how your thinking is being exploited. You can also view a list of
logical fallacies that when corrected, will help one reason.
This is getting too long...lastly...logic is just an
axiom of information or a
construct from which information is intelligible.
