We sometimes tend to think that ideas and feelings arising from our intuition are essentially superior to those achieved by reason and logic.
As such, intuition—the good old “gut feeling”—has come to be idealized as the Noble Savage of the mind, fearlessly cutting through the precision of reason.
In truth, intuition is just another heuristic of our brain honed—over millions of years—to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. But it is not always good at it.
Let’s test your intuition with a question that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to pose to his students.
You have a ribbon, which you want to tie around the center of the Earth (assuming that the Earth is a perfect sphere for once). Unfortunately, you’ve tied the ribbon a bit too loose; it’s a meter too long.
Now, if you could distribute the resulting slack—the extra meter—evenly around the planet so that the ribbon hovered ......