It’s a good epiphany to have - you can offload pretty much anything to your subconscious mind, and call it intuition. Everything can be like playing the piano or riding a bicycle, and utterly automatic. It saves a vast amount of conscious cognitive effort, which can be spent on novelty instead, feeding the underlying machine new patterns, new quanta of information.

It’s like diagnosing sick systems - I don’t think about it, at all - I just look, listen, observe, take in the landscape and the music of the machine, and then point at the problem. Software, mechanical systems, networks, any domain where I have enough knowledge to know what I’m looking at, the pattern recognition system can handle the rest. It makes people think that I have expertise in many domains, but really, I’m just a one-trick system-grokking pony.

The structure and function of the animal brain is remarkable. Only a few weeks ago, I was noting the habits of a hornet, which tended to pass by the same point at the same time each day, and marvelled that such a tiny handful of neurons could manage not only flight and navigation of 3d space, but a routine, habits, behaviour. What the many orders of magnitude more grey matter we have might be capable of beggars belief. There’s the old bullshit adage that you only use 1% of your brain, but there’s perhaps truth to the idea that most people horribly underutilise the power of their minds, because they have been trained to think, not to intuit.