ChatGPT Can Make You Dumb OR Smart - You Choose | Power of Intuition - Future IQ
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Wait, is this logic right? •
Jun 13, 2025
Slog Reference: Finger tips feeling
Description
Real intuition can’t be taught—but it can be trained. In this episode of Future IQ, we explore the idea of “Fingertips Feeling”—that sharp, almost invisible intuition that top performers rely on in fast-moving, high-stakes situations. And yes, it applies to how you use ChatGPT too.
Through real-world case studies—including the fascinating Dutch Car Buyers experiment and examples from war strategy, business, and software—we show how deep, intuitive decision-making works better than logic alone in complex situations. But here's the catch: this kind of intuition only develops through regular, hands-on experience.
If you're only using ChatGPT occasionally, you're missing the point. This episode breaks down why daily use helps you feel what it's good at, where it fails, and when to trust it. From AI hallucinations to productivity gains, we cover it all.
Because in the age of AI, smart thinking isn’t enough—you need smart instincts.
More Videos:
Mastering Both Your Brains | System 1 vs System 2: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Feelings vs Facts? Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions: https://youtu.be/CBIm7TqXQ4w
Jeff Bezos Decision Making Framework - How to Make Fast Decisions?: https://youtu.be/aQg7dAJWqyk
Will ChatGPT Take Away Jobs?: https://youtu.be/3fOTvF8ReXA
Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant
Chapters:
00:00 Fingerspitzengefühl
03:45 Intuition OVER Logic?
07:30 When to trust your gut and when NOT?
10:50 How to train your intuition?
13:40 ChatGPT is making us DUMB
18:40 This is how you can let ChatGPT make you SMART
External Sources:
Fingertips feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl
Dutch Car Shoppers Experiment: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7291642_On_Making_the_Right_Choice_The_Deliberation-Without-Attention_Effect
Taylor Pearson Article on Fingertips feeling: https://taylorpearson.me/fingerspitzengefuhl/
https://slightlyeastofnew.com/2016/07/30/the-power-of-fingerspitzengefuhl/
Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Through real-world case studies—including the fascinating Dutch Car Buyers experiment and examples from war strategy, business, and software—we show how deep, intuitive decision-making works better than logic alone in complex situations. But here's the catch: this kind of intuition only develops through regular, hands-on experience.
If you're only using ChatGPT occasionally, you're missing the point. This episode breaks down why daily use helps you feel what it's good at, where it fails, and when to trust it. From AI hallucinations to productivity gains, we cover it all.
Because in the age of AI, smart thinking isn’t enough—you need smart instincts.
More Videos:
Mastering Both Your Brains | System 1 vs System 2: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Feelings vs Facts? Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions: https://youtu.be/CBIm7TqXQ4w
Jeff Bezos Decision Making Framework - How to Make Fast Decisions?: https://youtu.be/aQg7dAJWqyk
Will ChatGPT Take Away Jobs?: https://youtu.be/3fOTvF8ReXA
Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant
Chapters:
00:00 Fingerspitzengefühl
03:45 Intuition OVER Logic?
07:30 When to trust your gut and when NOT?
10:50 How to train your intuition?
13:40 ChatGPT is making us DUMB
18:40 This is how you can let ChatGPT make you SMART
External Sources:
Fingertips feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl
Dutch Car Shoppers Experiment: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7291642_On_Making_the_Right_Choice_The_Deliberation-Without-Attention_Effect
Taylor Pearson Article on Fingertips feeling: https://taylorpearson.me/fingerspitzengefuhl/
https://slightlyeastofnew.com/2016/07/30/the-power-of-fingerspitzengefuhl/
Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Related Slog Matches
Finger tips feeling
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Manual
Transcript
Chad GPT is changing your life whether you're ready for it or not and most of you are not ready for it. If you don't understand how to use it effectively in your job, you will not be as productive as the people using it well. And if you don't understand when to not use it, you will make mistakes and get into trouble. So you have to develop a fingertips feeling for CH GPT. Fingertips feeling, what is that? Some things cannot be taught. You have to learn them through practice and you have to develop an instinct for them. Let me explain with some examples please. Yeah. Suppose you play cricket. Okay. And you are a fielder. When a ball comes at you and
you want to feel it, it bounces just in front of you. Instinctively by looking at the spin of the ball, you know that after bouncing it might turn this way or that way or not turn at all. Right? If I ask you to explain it right now, you will have difficulty articulating it. But in practice you know when and where and how much you just know. Yeah. Yeah. That's fingertips feeling you have for fielding. Right. Right. Similarly driving. I was teaching my son driving and at one point Arsha suddenly came in like this. And I told my son you should have known that. And he said how could I have known that? And I couldn't explain
to him. I knew that this guy can come here anytime but I couldn't explain why I knew because after long years of driving I have developed a fingertips feeling and all of you who are used to Indian roads know what I'm talking about right to be fair it's not just a ricksha it can be any vehicle it can be a two-heer three-wheer four-wheer six-heer 18heer we have absolutely no lane sense which is why I usually practice defensive driving so I grew up in a place that had lots of goa trees. We used to sit in guava trees and read books and then just grab guavas to eat.
Many different kinds. So over time I got a very good sense for which guava I am going to like. Right. I can just look at a guava for just two three seconds and I know this one I will like the other two I will not. You know I'm going to test this one out, right? Oh yes, we are all about testing here. Right. Blind test. We are going to do a blind test because I want to see how this happens. how what Naven's power of guava identification is. Subscribe and you'll get a notification when we do it. One great example from one of our early episodes system one system two is of the fire chief right they were fighting a fire
and suddenly this experienced chief suddenly said get out of here and few minutes later the roof collapsed right he knew something was wrong but he couldn't explain why he felt that right that was fingertips feeling of firefight with enough practice you develop an intuition which is usually correct even if you cannot explain Explain how you reached that conclusion. That is the fingertips feeling. But wait, where does this name fingertips feeling come from? This was popularized by John Boyd, the fighter pilot who came up with the concept of udaloop. Ah, observe, orient, decide, act. Exactly. He was a fighter pilot in the 1950s,60s and 70s. And he revolutionized not just air combat but all of military strategy. And these days
even businesses use this idea for being agile and being able to handle fast changing conditions quickly. Right? One important aspect of his theory is this idea of fingertips feeling. Right? That people who are in a fastchanging situation but who have enough experience with it, they develop an instinct for you know what in this situation I should do this. I don't know why but this is the right thing to do. But this could just be confirmation bias, right? Okay, I see where you're going. You're saying that the pilots who took fingertips, feelings, decisions and came back to talk about it. We think they're great and took excellent decisions, but the ones who used similar methods and died
are not here to talk about it. That's why we think fingertips feelings always works. Yeah, very good thought. You have been paying attention in our episodes. But there is research backing this concept of instinctual decisions. Okay. Okay. There is a famous experiment called the Dutch car shoppers experiment. All right. In this researchers divided the subjects into two groups. Each group was given information about four cars and were told to pick out which car is the best. Okay. Each group was given 12 pieces of information. The first group was told look at all the pieces of information carefully study the data use logic and then reach a good decision. The second group was told don't think about it too
much. Just quickly take a look and then use your instinct to make a decision. All right. Later on when they checked 30% of the careful group got the right answer. Okay. But 60% of the intuitive group got it correct. That's a big number. So what you're saying is we should trust our intuition which is essentially system one and not logic which is system two. Despite having information depends okay in some situations your intuition works very well in other situations your logic works better. Okay we will look at the different situations but first let us understand why you are confused. Yeah please. Yeah, normally we are taught that logic and data is what will get you
correct decisions, right? A lot of this channel is about using science and reasons correctly, right? Yes. But the problem is that system one is much older evolutionarily. Okay. It has had billions of years of honing instincts which work very well in complex situations. Whereas system two is much younger. Great aes and forward, right? True. As a result, system 2 still has some bugs and some limitations. For example, if you've been paying attention, you know that our working memory can handle only about five to seven pieces of information at a time.
Yeah, you give it more than that, it gets overwhelmed, start dropping packets and starts making wrong decisions. Right. Packet loss is a very interesting way to put it. But then this also explains why the Dutch car shoppers who relied on intuition did well. Yeah. But also that experiment had a second part which explains when system two does well. Okay. Okay. In the second part of the experiment, the two groups were again given four cars, but this time they were given only four pieces of information about each car. That's a lot less than 12. Correct. Now the intuition group got only 40% correct. But the careful group got 50% correct.
Interesting. So as soon as the number of pieces of information fell below our 5 to7 limit, the system two performance improved whereas system one which didn't have that many pieces of data to work with didn't see enough patterns and their performance got worse. Aha. So what you're saying is we should use intuition only when you are required to make complex decisions with lots of information. Yes. But there is a whole bunch of things that you have to be careful about. So let me give you the warnings. Okay. Okay. First, you can use it for complex decisions but only in areas where you have expertise. That practice that I talked about the fingertips feeling, right? Makes sense.
The fire chief. If you use your instinct in complex areas where you don't have expertise, you're just going to take random and stupid decisions. Yeah, I can see how that can happen. Another thing to keep in mind is that if a complex area has been around for a long time, humans have had a lot of time to study it and come up with a bunch of thumb rules and uristics and so on. In that case, those work quite well. Okay, so you don't have to depend on your instinct so much. Okay, makes sense.
Whereas for fastch changing fields, we haven't had time to come up with rules of thumbs and that is why you have to do the actual practice and develop a fingertips feeling. The first example of a fastchanging field that popped into my head just now was the stock market. No, that is the third warning. Okay. Fingertips feeling only works in areas where there are underlying natural patterns that your instinct can pick up on. Right? If there is no pattern if it is all random, then what is your instinct going to do? Right? So for example, in casino gambling, do not use fingertips feeling. Okay? You will lose your money. There are lots of gamblers who believe that they have an instinct
and oh now I should bet and they all are broke. Okay. And the same applies in the stock market for 99.9% of the people including you. Yeah. Because I am not Warren Buffett or Charlie Mer. So I agree with this. I I don't have fingerless feelings of stock market and I according to this explanation I never will. But there are areas which are not random but in which I don't have expertise. Exactly. So you will not have fingertips feelings. In that case what you want to do is you want to use the fingertips feeling of someone else who actually has a fingertips feeling in that area. So for those areas you want to outsource your decision. You want to
delegate. Okay. So what you're saying is in such situations let the seniormost person in an organization for example take the decisions. Not necessarily. Okay. What you want to do is that the person with the most experience who has the most fingertips feelings should take the decision. But it is not necessarily the person with the most experience. How? What you are saying is true of stable fields. For example, civil engineering. Not much has changed in 50 years. So in a civil engineering team, the person with the most experience is also likely to be the person with the most fingertips feelings. Similarly, the fire chief. Exactly. Okay. But consider programming, web development, right?
There the frameworks in use change every few years. So a person with 15 years of experience in a web development team very likely that for the last 5 years they have been a manager they have stopped programming and they no longer have the fingertips feeling whereas someone who joined just 3 years ago is much more likely to have fingertips feeling for the programming that happens for web development. Interesting. That makes sense. That actually makes a lot of sense. And now I'm thinking if I were to develop fingertips feeling in my profession, what exactly should I do?
There's a lovely concept for this called make smaller circles from searching for Bobby Fischer by Josh Waitskin. Okay, there he talks about how it's a bad idea for new chess players to try to develop a fingertips feeling for chess by directly jumping into complex middleame positions. Okay. Instead, he says they should start with a simple situation, just one king and one pawn on the board. Play many, many games of that until you have a solid fingertips feel for that. Okay? Then go to the next level, maybe four or five pawns at a time. Develop a fingertips feeling for that. Then you add a knight. Then you add a bishop and so on. Right? The idea being you start
with a small circle, develop it well, then you expand the circle a little bit, then you expand a circle a little bit, right? Yeah. This is actually like uh starting with small weights and then increasing weights as you go along and as you gain expertise with those weights or starting with the end game and then progressing into middle game and then start off game. It's not not necessarily start with the end and go backward. It is think of it more as you know going up the ladder of complexity, right? Look at this example called the stairstep approach. This one is talking about how you develop a fingertips feeling for sales. Very interesting. Another way to think about
it is in terms of the taren principle. Tarzen like ah tarzen. Yes. Imagine your taren in the jungle swinging from wine to wine. The important thing is that grab onto wines which are within reach from this wine. Do not try for a wine that is too far. you will fall on your butt. Right? So that is the Tarzan principle. That makes sense because I was wondering where he was going with the Tarzan example. Yeah. Another concept related to this is of the circle of competence which we will talk about in a future episode. Yeah. Identify where you are competent. That's your circle of competence. And then take steps, small steps outside that. Don't jump far outside your circle of
competence. Yeah. Don't go all tarzen and go outside your circle of confidence. But yeah, we'll talk about that. And one more important thing is that you have to do a lot of practice. Instincts only develop through repetitions. And related to that, our next episode is called quantity is quality. So subscribe to know what I mean by quantity is quality. Quantity is quality. Yeah. Follow and uh you'll get to know when we drop that episode. But I am thinking about what you said at the beginning of the episode about Chad GPT, right? What does this have to do with Chad GPT, right? So Chad GPT will change your life. True. And it is one of the
fastest moving, most unstable fields, right? Yes. There is no course you can take to learn about Chad GPT. Your seniors don't know anything more about Chad GPT than you do. So the only way to know what Chad GPT can do is by developing a fingertips feeling for that, right? Most people think oh chpt is only for improving my emails or writing an essay for me. There is so much more it can do. For example, did you know that if I take a piece of paper on that draw with a pencil what an app looks like and show it to chat GPT, it can write the code for that app. Yeah, I've heard of this. If I give it a
spreadsheet with company sales data, it can not only do analysis of historical sales patterns but also develop a strategy for improving sales. Yeah. Given a list of interests of a 5-year-old child. Okay. It can automatically generate an audio fairy tale incorporating those interests and the name of the child in your language. Yeah. And I know of this especially because I have seen it. I have tried it out and it is scary good. Like the kind of things Chad GPT can do is incredible. The list is endless, right? You just have to keep trying all kinds of things with it to see what it capabilities are.
But more importantly, you also should know what it can't do, what it makes mistakes in. Right? Like every day I run into people who get surprised by the fact that Chad GPT just completely makes up facts. It makes up scientific papers that don't exist. It makes up news articles that don't exist, incidents that don't exist. It makes horrible logic mistakes which you cannot imagine that something this smart can make mistakes that are so dumb. Yeah. Much more important though is the fact that Chad GPT makes people dumb. Dumb. Chat GPT makes people smart. That is only true if they are using chat GPT well and they have developed a good fingertips feeling for it. Right? Okay. The other
people let me give you examples of what they do. In my work for example for job candidates we have set up a place where people can write programs. Okay. Now before chat GPT about 15% of the people would get that question correct. 1 15 yeah 5% would write the program correctly on first try and another 10% would fight and try different things and then get it correct on the third or fourth try all right then came charge GPT right now our very simple program chpt could do very well so everybody started getting good marks correct what we did was make the program just a little bit harder so that chpt gets it wrong okay and we told the candidates
that okay now this new challenge. Feel free to use charge GPT for this. What happened was that the 5% who was getting it right the first time, they continued to get it right. Okay. But the 10% who would get it right after some fighting, they stopped trying. They would take charge GPT's output and then submit it even though it is wrong. So overall performance actually went down after the use of CH GPT became common. Right? Yeah, and you don't have to take my word for it based on my experience, right?
There is actual research around this. So for example, recently medical students were split into two groups. One group was told to use CH GPT and make decisions based on that. The other group was told to make decisions just based on their knowledge what they have learned. Right? And the group using Chad GPT made more errors than the group not using Chat GPT. Right? Okay, but hold on one second. Uh, in both cases, both of these are people without expertise or experience. They haven't developed that expertise or experience yet. This is true even of people with a lot of expertise. Okay, one experiment was done with people in Boston Consulting Group, right? This is one of the top consulting
companies in the world charge a lot of money to their customers. And these consultants were professionals with a lot of experience. These professionals were split into two groups. One group was given challenges related to their work and told okay do it without chat GPT. The other group was told you can use chat GPT. Fair. The group not using CH GPT got 84% accuracy as judged by the customers. Okay. Whereas the group using CH GPT got only 72%. Oh. So what happened in this case was that the group using CH GPT got complacent. They stopped using their own brain. They stopped using their fingertips feeling.
Exactly. Ah so that explains why you have to develop fingertips feeling specifically in terms of Chad GPT because Chad GPT is going to take all our jobs eventually possibly ours as well. No, there is still hope if you learn to use CH GPT well. Okay, which is why you should develop fingertips feeling for Chad GPT. Use it a lot because quantity is quality. Agreed. Use it daily because you can lose fingertips feeling very quickly. Yes. And use it to expand your circle. Right. Take little steps just outside your circle of competence with the help of Chad GPT and keep expanding becoming more ambitious about what you want to learn. M and finally delegate to the lowest level
possible which means that your juniors should also be encouraged to use chat GPT in what they are doing and don't tell them this is how you should use it let them figure it out on their own because their fingertips feeling for what they do daily is better than what you think they should be doing. Hm. That's a very very clear uh actionable plan for you if you've been paying attention and if you haven't developed fingertips feeling for this channel yet, I suggest you use your fingertip to click the mouse and follow us. Sri Kant loving future IQ.