Essay Series: Reclaiming Judgment
Essay 1 | Reclaiming Judgment
How do you know when you’ve made a good decision? Most of us weigh a mix of evidence and intuition, testing what the numbers say against what experience and context tells us. In engineering, that synthesis is often called judgment, though every field has its own version. The word can make people uneasy. We venerate being open-minded and non-judgmental, and for good reason. Yet in our work, we judge all the time: we weigh evidence, choose between imperfect options, and decide what to trust and what action to take. Judgment, in this sense, isn’t condemnation, but rather articulated decisions and actions that create opportunities for calibration. That capacity is worth reclaiming because our relationship to judgment is changing. Collecting evidence and comparing options are becoming automated tasks; the subtler work of discernment may follow, or it may not. Either way, for now, the human part of deciding what feels fitting, responsible, or wise still depends on us.
Every civilization builds external systems of stability (e.g., roads, power grids, data pipelines, courts of law, hospitals) and internal systems that guide attention, reasoning, and memory. As uneven and contested as they are, these outer systems have become deeply embedded in daily life and increasingly able to sustain their own operations. Whether through trust or habit, we depend on them more than we once did. Tools that once assisted human analysis now take the lead while we sleep, sorting, summarizing, and sifting through what matters. These systems never tire, but they also don’t yet care in the way people do. Caring, for now, remains a human responsibility. Leaning into that capacity means treating judgment not as a shortcoming to be suppressed but as an art that matures through deliberate practice. Our next frontier may be inward: strengthening the internal infrastructure that interprets, questions, and situates measurement within meaning. Judgment matters even more as automation removes the friction between measurement and action that once invited human reconsideration. Discernment, then, is the attentive work that keeps judgment responsive rather than rote. It draws on two companions—intuition, the ability to sense patterns and implications before we can name them, and taste, the felt sense of what fits. Intuition helps us perceive; taste helps us choose; discernment brings them together in service of good judgment we can use to build trust.
We’ve long wrestled with how to pair reason with intuition. What feels different now is the load and the speed: the same mental muscles now face heavier weight and faster tempo. In response, I’d like to use the analogy of resistance training, and here I highlight three dimensions.
Intuition: Building Your Pattern Libraries
Every discipline has its version of ‘gut feelings’, of knowing before you can explain why. An epidemiologist glances at a time series and senses the outliers aren’t measurement error. A community health worker hears hesitation in someone’s voice and knows the “yes” means something more complicated. An engineer reviews a model output that passes all the checks but still feels wrong. Intuition develops through repeated, attentive looking and through exposure to variety and contrast. As scholar-practitioners, we spend time in many field sites, attending to how different communities describe the same hazard, noticing what ‘normal’ looks like across seasons or demographics until deviations become perceptible. Whether those deviations matter, or simply reflect noise we’ve learned to over-interpret, is itself something we must learn. Experience can train us on noise as readily as on signal, mistaking consistency for validity.
Avoiding that trap requires curation, which, in turn, requires developing capacities many of us never trained. Cognitive science, contemplative studies, and embodied cognition research increasingly suggest that noticing our own patterns of attention requires practices we’ve largely dismissed as unserious or inefficient, like keeping a field journal that tracks what surprised you, not just what you measured; taking five minutes after a difficult meeting to write down what you noticed but didn’t say; learning to distinguish intuition (the pattern your body registered) from anxiety (the story your mind constructed about it). In academic environments that prize analytical speed over reflective depth, these practices can feel like indulgence. But they’re the reps that build perceptual infrastructure. A researcher who regularly asks, “what am I assuming right now?” when reviewing familiar data builds the capacity to catch their own form of pattern imposition before it calcifies into false or damaging expertise.
Taste: Responding Under Pressure
Noticing is one thing; knowing what to do with what you notice is another. This, I think, might be where taste enters. I’m even less certain about taste than I am about intuition, partly because the word carries so many connotations. What I’m trying to explore here is the capacity to respond to what we notice and to choose among competing problem definitions and solutions in ways that are proportionate, contextual, humane, even beautiful. Put another way, good taste could be about choosing the right action for the moment, the people, and the stakes involved.
Taste develops through public use, especially under pressure and in collaboration with others. Some of the best taste training feels like sparring that sharpens thinking through productive friction, like when a community partner pushes back on your sampling strategy, and you realize they’re seeing something you and your team missed; or when a student asks why you made a choice you can’t fully justify, and you’re forced to articulate what had been implicit. The discomfort that might arise in us in these situations is the feeling of taste being refined through contrast and consequence.
Taste also builds through watching others work. You see how a senior colleague navigates a charged public meeting, or how a mentor balances scientific rigor with political reality, and you begin to develop a sense for how you would like to move through similar situations, taking what you like and leaving the rest. Over time, these observations become part of your own repertoire, not as rules to follow, but as examples of what responses are possible, and what responses are good.
Building Endurance: Making Intuition and Taste Learnable
Intuition and taste matter little if they don’t accumulate. Integration is what allows these capacities to compound over time and to become not just individual skills but shared knowledge that strengthens collective judgment.
I believe deliberate reflection practices capture what would otherwise slip away. For instance, in the field, this would look like debriefing not just what was measured but what felt off before you or anyone on your team could name why. In conversation with others, say after a contentious stakeholder meeting, this might look like writing down the moment when the conversation shifted and what you or someone else did (or wish they’d done) in response. These aren’t just mindless, check-the-box, documentation exercises; they’re how we learn to trust our own noticing and refine our sense of what works.
Integration and learning also happens when we make our intuition and taste visible to others. Teaching what you’ve learned forces you to articulate what had been implicit. Mentoring a junior colleague through a difficult decision reveals the chain of reasoning beneath your gut feeling. Sharing a misstep in a team debrief creates permission for others to acknowledge their own uncertainty. Over time, these small acts of transparency build a culture where judgment isn’t mystified but made learnable.
The practices themselves are modest. Some keep decision journals tracking gut feelings against outcomes. From this we can learn both when, and when not, to trust our gut. Others build reflection into project closeouts, asking not just what succeeded but what caught them off guard or surprised them. I suspect many of us have learned the value of going on so-called ‘tangents’ in the classroom, which may allow us to articulate what had otherwise remained implicit or subconscious. The scale of the practices we build into our work and lives is less important than their consistency. Repeated small acts of reflection can create feedback loops in which we notice more because we’ve trained ourselves to capture what we notice, and then we respond better because we’ve studied what worked before.
Building these habits over time, we keep intuition and taste from atrophying between the moments when they’re most needed, and sharing with others makes judgment collective rather than individual, so that each person’s documented uncertainties and hard-won insights become material others can learn from.
Closing
Thank you for staying with this exploration. I’m trying to move my work in a direction I don’t yet fully understand, which is uncomfortable. But I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that something important has been left out of how we talk about good work and that others among you have learned to hide your intuitive practices or downplay your aesthetic judgments to appear sufficiently rigorous.
If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. What does intuition look like in your practice? How do you think about taste—or whatever you call that sense of what’s fitting and humane? Where have you found space to cultivate these capacities, and where have you felt they had to stay hidden? This is an invitation to a conversation, not a conclusion. I’m hoping we can learn together.
