I’ve spent a lot of years in labs, and the part of this that landed hardest is the confabulation. You get an old hand who glances at a plate or a chromatogram and says “that’s contaminated” before anyone’s run a number, and they’re right, and when you ask how they knew they hand you some tidy story that clearly isn’t the path they actually took. The framing here — that the deliberate steps weren’t filed away somewhere private, they were shaded out — is a better account of that than anything I’ve come across. The stairs went dark, so they re-grow a plausible meadow under the canopy that killed the real one.
Where I want to push back a little: is the canopy really a subtraction all the way down? In practice we fight it. A decent lab notebook is exactly the “crossed-out line kept alive on purpose” — you write the failed run down so the meadow doesn’t vanish. And “cut a clearing” is just training a new tech: make the expert narrate, and half the time they find out they don’t do what they thought they did.
So maybe the sharper question isn’t why intuition can’t be queried, but which setups keep a seed bank against it. Labs try to. Grandmasters don’t. Worth chewing on.