I amy be preconditioned, since I just read Blink, but notice what Reynolds says here about a patient he took to the hospital because he "there was something about him that set alarm bells ringing".

That’s experience speaking.

I think experience like that takes at least 5 years to develop, to the point where you get a "feel" for how a number of complex variables interact without knowing it. I have some of that feeling myself: I spend a lot of time walking into companies to do presentations or interviews for research projects, and end up getting a "feel" for what the issues are in the company almost as I walk in the door. Other people within consulting and research – that is, problem solving activities – that I know have described the same experience. Of course, you have to do a lot of documentation and testing and so on, just as Reynolds runs the ECG. But very often, the first feeling you get when you arrive somewhere ends up being your conclusions and recommendations also.

Of course, I may delude myself, and engage in on-the-fly evidence distortion and theory confirmation rather than theory falsification. But I wonder…