Excellent post! However, I suggest that intuition is not the best guide to seeking the truth for one of the products of intuition is heuristics and biases that include the sourcing heuristic. Today, in virtually every case, the builder of a model uses heuristics and biases in selection of the predictive inferences that will be made by this model.

Most model builders are unaware of the availability of an alternative to heuristics and biases. This alternative is optimization of the missing information in a predictive inference for a deductive conclusion to be reached from it per event, the so-called “entropy.”

Selection of the inferences by optimization is made possible by the fact that its entropy is the unique measure of an inference in the “probabilistic logic.” This is the logic that is formed from the classical logic by replacement of the rule that every proposition has a truth value by the rule that every proposition has a probability of being true.

Beginning in 1963, a search was conducted for methods by which heuristics and biases could be replaced by optimization. Playing the lead role was a theoretical physicist, engineer and lawyer by the name of Ronald E. Christensen. By 1980, Christensen had successfully completed this work and documented it in the multi-volume “Entropy minimax sourcebook.” In completing this work, Christensen had solved the ancient, previously solved “problem of induction.” The problem was of how in a logically defensible manner to select the inferences that were made by a model from the larger set of possibilities. Thirty eight years later, the vast majority of model builders continue to select the inferences that will be made by their models by using heuristics and biases.