Autism

Intuition or just highly tuned pattern recognition?

Listening to your intuition works in certain situations.

Always listen to your intuition when it comes to the behavior of others (and animals). Ie: If you think they’re lying or trying to pull something over you - for are. If something doesn’t seem right with someone, there is something wrong. Make an excuse and leave.

Intuition also works if you’re an expert at something (like an actual expert, not something you learned from TikTok.)

Intuition doesn’t work on logic and if you’re not an expert. Dunning kruger effect is real.

Intuition also doesn’t work on your emotions. Just because you feel something (or think something), doesn’t mean that it’s true.

For the naysayers, intuition has actually been proven to exist, the more scientific term is implicit learning and tacit knowledge. In summary we actually are much more aware of our environment and lived experience when we realize. Through this unconscious awareness we can actually pick up on patterns and use this passive knowledge in our lives as intuition.

Sources:

https://cognitivepsychology.com/Implicit_Learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Learning about the staring experiment is rather interesting too!

As a caveat, you need to allow good information in, get offline, talk to people in real life, move your body. If you're implicitly learning garbage, your intuition will be garbage.

I am cursed with people asking my advice, my advice being correct, them failing to heed my advice to their detriment. Time after time. People value my judgment, because it is pretty good, then proceed to do the opposite of it.

That probably sounds self absorbed, but it's not like I'm an oracle or anything. It's just usually fairly obvious stuff, but people are often irrational and do wacky things.

I pay attention to a lot of off the wall information sources but unfortunately people tend to ignore me. (For example I heard about this mystery illness in China in December 2019 - but you know I was just being an alarmist.) I regularly mention topics and will be blown off by my friends but frustratingly a year or two later Jon Oliver will do a special on that very subject and the same people will suddenly care about it and excitedly explain it to me. Because now they know all about it and are interested. And don't mistake me. I'm glad Jon Oliver is making some of these topics mainstream but it's endlessly infuriating that it takes an HBO funded comedian to allow the people around me to open their minds enough to talk about the topics I care about. Even if they never acknowledge these things have been my special interests for-fucking-ever.

Does this count for adhd as well? I feel like I've definitely felt like this before. Predict what's going to happen, tell them not to do it. They do it anyway, shit falls apart. Rinse and repeat.

Go to a rural town in Utah. Listen to a medium/long conversation between two local people at a gas station or diner etc. Drive to another rural town. Start a conversation the exact same way you just saw and play the role of whoever started the conversation.

There is a non-zero chance the entire new conversation will replicate the original one verbatim even down to the pauses, cadence, and inflections of the original conversation, despite it occurring with an entirely different person several dozen miles away.

Intuition is easy when people around you think exactly the same way about everything

Fled America when Biden was still president. Urged all my friends to do the same. If told-ya-so's were money I'd have fixed income in perpetuity.

My intuition is fantastic, I trust my gut on everything because it's never let me down. I think it's amazing how countless generations before me were able to hone this instinct to become what it is today. Those that ignored these feelings ended up paying for it with their lives, while those who listened managed to pass on their genes, eventually passing the trait to those of us here today.

Which is why when I get a bad feeling about something, I sometimes imagine a crowd of my foremothers/forefathers standing there going, "GO! GET OUT! NOW!" as if they can see the danger that I can't.

As to neurodivergence, I've spent a lot of time learning to know myself. I wouldn't be surprised if being different from most folks causes a lot of us to self-reflect. For me, that self-reflection includes evaluating what I feel and why I might be feeling it. Having different mental filters for stimuli, I know for a fact that I consciously recognize things that most people don't - usually little visual details, or background sounds. Surely, there's far more that my subconscious brain is picking up on that I am not consciously aware of. So when I overwhelmingly get the sensation that something is wrong, I react - usually either by investigating what is causing it (if I'm stuck somewhere, like at work), or by leaving the situation (if I'm in a public place that I can freely leave.)

(Slight tangent) Sometimes I think of us as "the canaries in the coalmine" so to speak. With our different sensory experiences, we might be the first people to notice distressing stimuli, but that doesn't mean we're the only ones affected. For example, how background traffic noise increases stress levels - everyone can feel the effect, sometimes without knowing why. But usually it's us neurodivergent folk that are the first to say, "My god, it's way too loud here!" And we're right. If it's too loud for us, it's probably too loud for others too - they just don't consciously realize it yet.

My selection bias is unparalleled

Validation biais?

Can best be described as cassandraic

Ha told you so. The lesson you should learn is everyone else is wrong and I'm right

A life time of obsessive pattern recognition done to try to fit in will do that.

It's pretty good, but I still only believe things with evidence because if you're wrong once, it will butterfly effect all over your life.

Mine's great, but it takes so long that by the time it proves correct, everyone has the AHA face and says "boy i wish someone had told me this 15 yrs ago before it was too late".

Pretty damn good. Sometimes scary.

Self fulfilling prophecy doesn’t count

Really hoping I’m wrong about Gen X retirement en masse single handily collapsing the stock exchange causing the worst financial crisis to date.

I haven’t peeped any numbers lately but the aging work force and passive investments into etf portfolios with nowhere near the cash reserves to cover the draw down once the generation of 6-10 children become dependent on the 1-3 children generation lol

Basically a race between the ai bubble and the silver tsunami at this point pain all around

Pretty good. I always expect it to be wrong, but still allow myself to be a bit cautious. But pretty much always in the right, sometimes might take longer to see the results.