The Sticky Wicket of 90% Rightness

I once offered this accounting of intuition:

People often confuse it with hunches - i.e. random guesses we make about the state of something. But while hunches make you think, or worry, real intuition makes you act. The brain does not intermediate. You don't feel a suspicion of something, you feel the actual thing.

If I slow down my car while passing a restaurant and remark that it looks good, it probably is good. A good hunch! But if my car suddenly screeches to the curb and stops and I find myself getting out, without actual thinking, then the restaurant will be great. It's always great. It's never not great.

A long curve of diminishing results trails those rare peaks of certainty. When less confident intuition arises, one cannot distinguish good chunks from flotsam. All you can do is to take a playful stab, knowing you might come out looking silly.

That's what happened yesterday. I offered someone a mildly audacious intuition. I packed it with disclaimers, because while I trust my certainties, I am, per above, vaguer on my vagaries. And this time I was wrong. And my friend micro-smirked. I'm not sure she even noticed. An internal shift of perspective registered externally—which I spotted, and couldn't blame her for. "Ok, this person shoots wild." (I suppose this, too, was intuition on my part, but it registered as such certainty that I knew to accept it as truth—plus, I've seen that look before).

I reserve a standard statement for situations where people catch me misfiring and lose faith: "I'm not always right, but it'd be a mistake to bet against me." It's not a boast, just a level observation. But it's always better to bake fresh than to keep reusing a line. Canned lines lose their power. And this time, the following came out:

"I'm right 90% of the time. Which is a horrible stat, for two reasons:

First, it's high enough that people come to expect perfection, so when I misfire, I seem like the wrongest wrong-o who ever wronged. I drop all the way down.

And second, it’s high enough that I might build up pompous confidence which would be nauseatingly challenged every time I fail—and 10% is a lot of failure!

I've ensured, on my end, that #2 is not an issue—I've built no self-image around being right—but #1 is beyond my control."


See also:
The Subtlety of Truth
Intuition