A látszat csal

Intuition is the art by which we leap to an answer without actually examining it. Often time we employ intuition simply to get started in the right direction, and then the rest of our analytic process is just book-keeping. Unfortunately, humanity is generally moronic, particularly in the realm of understanding the physical world around us. Heavier things would, intuitively, fall faster than small ones. We know that it takes more work to hold up an orange than a grape, ergo, it must fall faster as well, and we can safely be assured of our understanding and leave the fruit in the bowl. Intuition!

Luckily for mankind, a bizarre and thoroughly inhuman subspecies, known as the pure scientist, or the "nerd" in modern vernacular, has evolved completely devoid of any common sense or intuition, and occasionally overcomes such hurtles with his pernicious curiosity. Luckily, these men and women are rarely heeded and mankind may persist in that luxurious state of being correct. Amazingly, Galileo, the nerd first responsible for proving the humanity of his day "wrong" and then passing on his belief to subsequent generations concerning the rate of falling objects of various sizes, turns out to be wrong. Later we find that the orange does indeed plummet toward the Earth infinitesimally faster than the grape, due to its larger mass. Practical factors, i.e. the fact that the Earth is so large that the relative sizes of the orange and grape are inconsequential, obscured this fact. We don't often hear of any of the old Aristotelian philosophers writing "I-told-you-so" sort of articles, even though they were right, because they weren't, not really. They were wrong because their thinking did not let us learn more and did not let us use our knowledge. Intuition deceives most effectively sometimes by pointing us in the right direction.

So it is with people. Sometimes. Intuitively. We have in our mind the image of what a good person may be, or, more generally, we construct an archetype for an agglomerate of a number of desirable traits we are currently pursuing, and then strive to emulate said halcyon ideal. Yet, in the practical world, solutions are not so intuitive.

I think often of one of my favorite imperfect families, one that breaks all the rules. People that don't know them would hardly think of them as an ideal Christian family because they break all of those intuitive rules. Houses should be clean, dads shouldn't cuss, children shouldn't be allowed to run around naked and nice people shouldn't be cynical. They are perfect, they are whole. They are bound by a love that cannot be shaken by man or Hell, and they share that imperfect perfect love with those around them. From the threshold it becomes apparent to the sensitive observer, that this is a home where the smiles are real and the arguments are not. Happiness, it seems, must be a practical science, one that is horrifically non-intuitive.

In finding my own way, I try to combine intuition and experimentation, to apply my ideals to the examples around me, adding, rejecting and modifying as I need to. This paragraph sure needs a conclusion, I've decided.