Statistics, Intuition and Expertise: Are they related?

I encounter, many a fools, in my daily routine who claim to pass on a quick judgement or opinion or an intellectual thought(according to them only), who do not bother to see through the impasse of their own thinking capacity.

Sound familiar? Well, most of us find them on daily purpose. They just use their System-1 more often than System-2 without realizing that they are not using their brain’s capacity.

System-1 is famously known as fast thinking and System-2 is known as slow thinking. The terminology is taken from the famous book by Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking fast and slow”. Most of the ideas discussed in the article are influenced by the book, “Thinking fast and slow”.

They co-relate accordingly and completely eradicates the necessity to know if their opinion or judgement holds to the larger factions of the population. They forget, their brains are faulty to the point their memory goes.

According to the author “Daniel Kahneman”, even best of the statisticians fails to identify the structure of the study in their data and run haywire with the emission of an intrigued truth that falls apart as more data flows in.

Data makes knowledge flow and none of us even bother to go deep into the intricacies of data.

And, why should you even bother? The greatest hypocrites are within us. We tend to think as far as our memory GO and associate it with the first thing that comes to our mind. No, that’s not the way to think and study society or even the small group of friends or even the Facebook friends you have. You are just failing yourself with limited or no data at all.

Even, though our brain intuition is powerful enough to understand most of chaos we go through. But, it is faulty. It breaks more often than we think. We clearly like to make the popular choice and eradicate the necessary.

Generalization is easy; whereas relying on the System-2 (Slow thinking) for answers, can mean wasting precious time that can be used to earn more.

And, Why I am writing out this?

Because of the plague that roam around the internet on opinions and truths and evil of the society and so many wonderful thoughts that are limited to the person writing it. And, yes, this post is limited to! (Until you can expand it further).

That’s why I stay away from people who come to an amazing appealing opinion in matters of minutes and hours about the politics, sports, media and more.

Societal study is not easy; it is both multi-level and multi-dimensional. There are limitations in the study of society and its structure, but with more and more data coming in the age of Big Data; there are chances that we can slowly solve the problem of how our complex surroundings work.

To completely understand one’s own life and others, there should be a constant need to understand and recognize one’s limitation and make changes to the system or the thought of system, which in the future can bring more value tot he study of society and its structure.

The Power of Intuition

Intuition plays an important role in our daily life; it kicks in when we wake up and goes back to sleep during the night time. Intuition can be really powerful and enables us to live with certainty in this uncertain world.

Intuition works when we least expect them to, and there is no proper reason behind the intuitive thought; it just happens. The best example, that happened to me is the during the class of Automata; the problem was of moderate difficulty and it might take around 5 min to solve for anyone, with slow thinking in action. After reading the question, a strange calling came and I drew many lines on the copy and it was almost correct. I took around 10-15 secs to solve the problem.

When I showed the result to teacher, he was also stunned at the speed and accuracy; I also had no explanation of how I solved the problem so fast. The natural process of reading the question, making sense of it and then proceeding to solve the question, requires time and effort, but I didn’t bother with the natural process of solving problems. It just happened and I still don’t have answers on how I achieved the outcome.

The next day, I tried to analyze and from what I could figure out, I have solved similar type of problem in the past; the memory helped me to gain access to information hidden deep inside my brain and strangely come out with a solution that was almost perfect.

So, does memory plays a vital role in Powerful Intuition?

Yes, it does. According to psychologists, Intuition is no miracle. There are certain conditions when matched lead to a practical outcome which are accurate to a great extent. The real algorithm is still unknown and is intricated into the depths of our brain.

How does Intuition relates to Expertise?

Expertise is altogether different ball-game. Most of us, see and perceive expertise as the token of constant practice and this is true for every grain of sand present on Earth.

Expertise is tightly bounded with the Intuition; as intuition creates the path of finding the shortest path possible for the problem at hand. They have seen this same problem hundred times, either a slightly modified one or a complete variation of different genotype that matches with the previous problem genotype. The connections are endless, and somehow the expert knows what to do in a situation. Another important aspect of Expertise is the confidence with which the task is executed.

Many experts in their field don’t bother to think twice about their actions; as they are sure that they are going to solve the problem.

But, the expertise can sometimes lead to nowhere. I could find many examples that relate to this experience. Doctors, for example, are the best way to analyze the relation between expertise and failure. They expertise in a certain section of their field, some are general physician, others are cardiologist, neurologist and more.

There are lots of subfields and the division will only increase in time. Human knowledge has seen a vast improvement in the knowledge and with time, we are only going to thrust the rocket of curiosity towards vast areas of unknown horizons.

Well, the point is simple, we gain experience and move towards the unseen wall of expert knowledge. The definition of expertise according to Wikipedia, it is the skillset that governs one’s behavior over the problem in a certain field and generally the work or the outcome is of high quality. That’s true but not always. Errors are still part of their profession, but the error rate decreases considerably, which in turn provides faster turnaround.

My Writing example can govern to the amount of growth I am witnessing, and the growth is still happening until I reach the expertise group. Writing for me has never been so easy; the first article that I wrote for a client took me 4-5 hours of thinking and the words were hard to come by. Grammar was all over the place(I still make mistakes in grammar), the sentence structure was not great, and there can be a lot of things that went wrong. That period was the inception period of learning; maximum errors happen there.

With 3-4 months of hard practice and dedication, I can now write 2000 – 3000 words per day; an increase of 200% . And, I know this is just the beginning. The Human brain is capable of creating such complex neural networks that constant practice can really make us habitual to the work we are doing. In other words, we spend less energy working and our System-1(fast thinking) does all the hard work. We are lazy and expertise make us achieve our true sense.

Does Expertise Always Help?

The answer is no; Expertise is great game-changer in the current world, but I see it as a road blocker to innovation. An amazing example would be the startup ecosystem. Startups are the current generation game changing machines; they harvest ideas and bring them to life. The failure rates are high and no one knows the “exact” way of making them successful. It’s mostly trial and error.

So how Expertise relates to startups? But, why? The reason is simple; expertise kills innovation. Expertise is learning to do one single thing, hundreds of time, the way it is meant to be and NOT ride away the original path; creativity is not entertained in expertise.


In this blog post, I tried to figure out the relation between the Statistics, Intuition and Expertise. There is more to this topic, and the blog post might not do justice to the depth of each of the above terms.

These three terms, Statistics, Intuition and Expertise governs over life more than we can understand. A constant effort is what makes us realize that we are surrounded by both numbers and objects. It’s our choice, what we choose to see and feel.

Have anything to add to the opinion? Comment below and get started!


  1. Chris February 2, 2015
    • Nitish Singh February 2, 2015

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