“Intuition” is a mystical-sounding word. Someone asks “How did you know to rush your son to the hospital when he looked completely well and said he felt fine?” “Oh, intuition”. Instead, think of intuition as how you tell a dog from a cat. If you try to explain it logically - “dogs are bigger than cats”, “dogs have floppy ears and cats have pointy ones” - I can easily show you a dog/cat pairing that violates the rule, and you will still easily tell the dog from the cat. Intuition can be trained. Good doctors have great intuition, and are constantly saying things like “this feels infectious to me”. If you ask them to explain, they’ll give you fifteen different reasons it seems infectious, but also admit there are ten different reasons it might be iatrogenic and forty reasons it might be autoimmune, but the infectious reasons seem more compelling to them. A newbie intern might be able to generate the same list of 15 vs. 10 vs. 40 reasons and be totally paralyzed by indecision about which ones are most important

via Scott Alexander link