Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Also many people speak of the importance of "intuition" in their endeavours. It is often deemed to be incredibly valuable and the main thing that makes people really good at things. What is intuition if not subconsciously held ideas?

Do you want an structural engineer to intuitively design a bridge? An aerospace engineer to intuitively design planes? Modern society is built on science/tech and science/tech is built on careful, conscious cognition. To overvalue intuition is to undervalue science imo.

I think you’re seriously underestimating how many scientific & mathematical advances are the result of both conscious deliberation & spontaneous, consciously inexplicable insights, layered one on another with frustration & excitement to fruition

I’m not. The insights almost always depend on the frustrating, repeated *conscious* effort preceding imo. The subconscious doesn’t create, it coalesces.

...which is what David was saying, no?

Not afaict. “Creative resolution is needed and the condition for that to be possible is to do only what is fun—hard or not.” Much of hard work that leads up to the insight is clearly not “fun”.

Not in my experience, no! The most salient example of this for me is in learning to code — frustration & fun somehow sprinting hand-in-hand, forgoing meals & sleep, spending great stretches in total flow

This is generally not true if you’re not making progress ... The fun/flow results from the repeated small but meaningful moments of accomplishment/learning. You’re not describing something “hard” imo.