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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I'll put this near "scientific extremism", a lot of science discoveries have as a trigger chance and intuition, even if we don't have a precise idea of how they works scientifically, probably trial and error is a good way to express it, but the trial sources can be non scientific while the validation is scientific.

Food for thought and brain crawling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism

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I think you are taking the article out of context. At best intuition leads to a hypothesis. By itself it is definitely not a source of scientific knowledge. The author even explicitly states this:

>Under a scientific framework, input from intuition, tradition, experience, common sense, experts, and logic might be incorporated during the construction of a preliminary hypothesis

I would say that it's difficult to assert this in a scientific way. Or better: magic thinking, religion and other sources can be input as well and produce scientific outcomes.

The difference is between:

    My intuition is telling me this is true.

and

    My intuition is telling me this is true.  Let me test it.

What I wrote is that we can say the same thing with every source of information, even purely unscientific things like magic thinking, rituals, etc. That's the paradoxical thing about science. And also, there are a lot of things that you can't test and can't probe but they are true.

This is a good book along the same lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

I'm always amazing by how many people like this are able to buy into their own bullshit. Not only is intuition important for coming up with scientific hypotheses, but it's essential for sound decision making. That is, when making good decisions you don't exactly what the science says, but rather you make the best guess you can based on the information available. And you use deductive logic to make sure that your ideas are logically consistent with what you already know to be true.

"buy into their own bullshit"? You're putting words into the author's mouth.

What has the author said about intuition? That it is unsuitable for answering scientific questions. The author hasn't said it's bad for decision-making, nor that it has no place in generating questions. Just that it is poor for providing rigorous answers

What the author actually said was:

"We simply cannot place enough confidence in intuition to accept it as a source of information."

In other words, the author is saying that not only is intuition not on par with scientific knowledge, but it isn't good for anything.

The author also says "Under a scientific framework, input from intuition, tradition, experience, common sense, experts, and logic might be incorporated during the construction of a preliminary hypothesis"

You're taking one sentence out of context of the entire article. He's talking about being a source of scientific information - it's pretty clear if you read the article as a whole.

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