something doesn’t fit a pattern—like a kitchen fire giving off more heat than a kitchen fire should—a competent expert senses it immediately. But as we see every time someone spots the Virgin Mary in burnt toast or in mold on a church wall, our pattern-recognition ability comes at the cost of susceptibility to false positives. This, plus the many other ways in which the tip-of-your-nose perspective can generate perceptions that are clear, compelling, and wrong, means intuition can fail as spectacularly as it can work.
