Is it? How do you show that? Was he just lucky? Did he divine the right answer by listening to the voice in his head?
I don't disagree with the premise; when your body is screaming at you to do something that should feel unnatural you should be listening. That's evolution and learned experience trying to steer you away from danger or toward some kind of reward. But the blanket statement of "Stop analyzing your gut feelings" is just silly.
My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time; if I didn't spend time thinking through the impacts of what may appear to be an "irrational" decision I'd expect to make many mistakes. This also gives leaders a complete scapegoat excuse when things explode (see WFH vs RTO, explosive hiring vs mass layoffs); hey, he was just following his gut, can't get it right every time.
Unless you’re a pilot. Or a serial killer.
Does it? Can you provide some examples?
My intuition rarely lets me down. Perhaps you don't have enough experience in the areas where you are trying to listen to your gut?
I'm sure if I was trying to apply my intuition to an area I didn't understand at all it would let me down.
That is different from listening to my intuition in a field I have been working in for almost two decades.
If you are a 2,5m of height and your basketball advice is to "just lift your arms and let the ball fall in", you are not wrong, but your advice only applies to yourself and a small minority with a similar physique. Similarily here, going with your gut is either good or absolutely horrible advice — depending on what someones gut tells them.
If you look at the history of violent crime for example, most of it was based on someone's gut feeling.
If you're the type who does a lot of overthinking and in hindsight could have just trusted your gut, it might indeed be good advice, if you're a bundle of bad impulses controlled by a thinking mind, rather not.
And advice that is not generally useful to all, should always be given with a caveat
I once wrote a literature review essay assignment [1] on when to trust your intuition and why meditation can help you to feel your intuition better. It was for a class called cognition and emotion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I remember specifically to write about this as it was slightly outside of the scope of the class. The professor green lit it because it was about cognition, emotion and we did have a lecture on how intuition worked in the brain.
That assignment has been life changing for me. Before it, I didn't really know much about how to train my intuition. Afterwards, I had an idea.
The assignment has been a long time ago, but what has remained in my mind is that:
1. Your intuition can only be trusted when you're an expert on something - or at least have some experience.
2. The experience needs to have enough volume and enough regularity. Think chess, but poker is fine too. With poker you just need more examples but ultimately there's regularity in the game. It's just more fuzzy. However, the literature showed that getting expertise/experience in something like clinical psychology can be way tougher as a clinical psychologist sees a low amount of patients (not thousands but dozens) and many clinical diagnoses are fuzzy in unpredictable ways as we have little clue with many conditions how things are caused or if we're even talking about the same thing inside a particular condition (e.g. many misdiagnoses happen).
3. Experience is narrow. You think you're a people person? Sure, but if you've only been a people person in the US, it won't transfer well to other cultures. Your intuition will fool you. There's a relearning period needed there.
4. You can strengthen to feel your intuition by enhancing your interoceptive awareness. This can be done by mindfulness meditation.
Yea, that's it? I think?
It's in part based on the work of Kahneman and Klein. Not the pop psychology books but their actual academic work. It's also based on some neuroscience that other researchers did. I vaguely remember something about beginner and expert Shogi players (Japanese chess).
:) Yes, but it's not every day that someone also follows up with a paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1t0hrl4pE
Are gut feelings naturally based on one's moralities or sense of justice? Are leaders typically moralistic in their decisions?
Chris Hitchins would probably argue that morals are innate--but what about in business? What if your gut feeling is based on some unjust yet common practices? Does that make you a "better" leader?
Just tossing this out there...
My gut says “I will feel bad”, my mouth screams “tastebuds demand an experience!”
Make no mistake, the term self-control doesn't just apply to food instincts, it applies to people instincts too. Your instincts want you to go around assuming that ugly people are bad and pretty people are good, but if you avoid every uggo you're gonna miss out (especially in tech) and if you trust every handsome salesman you meet you're gonna get rolled. Thoughtfulness and self-control are always warranted.
But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”. Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.
Imho, I think a lot of people assume cheap food will make you sick because it's cheap and americans tend to moralize pricing. A balanced diet is obviously better for you, but the human body is extremely resilient to nutritional imbalances in the short term.
What tends to drive unhealthy trends linked to fast food (or other highly sugary or fatty foods) is just price point and ease of consumption. It's a lot easier to buy burgers than it is to figure out how to fit making rice and beans efficiently and tastily into your already busy lifestyle. Buying calorie-dense food that's easy to consume will always be attractive.
Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.
Your intuition is probably telling you eating McDonalds cheeseburgers day after day is a mistake even while the scales are telling you it is fine.
This analysis allows discovery of the patterns recognized by the competent person, which teaches. The master level player calculates a couple of moves, and then ends up worried about a tactical threat. That's a useful way to think to learn about.
I have the same thing in tech. I can usually and pretty quickly figure out in what area and component an issue would be in. Our new colleagues have developed a habit of asking Why. And this has led to great knowledge sharing sessions and has in fact taught me a few things as well.
Though at the same time, among the technical leaders of the company, we've started to accept negative intuition without much explanation as well. If two or three people with decades of experience don't feel good about a decision, that's a bad thing. Even if they cannot voice that in a concrete way so far. Hiring is similar - an actual, but not necessarily concrete or constructive Nay out of 3 is a Nay overall.
This doesn't mean not to analyze your gut feelings. I don't see where the author makes this case at all. You can do both. You can pay attention to your gut feeling as a final check on analytic decisions and you can try to understand where that gut feeling is coming from (and in fact I believe you should).
> "[They] placed too much weight on the introspections that they generated at that moment in time, and thus lost sight of their more enduring attitudes.” [1]
The quote refers to this study [2] in which subjects had to chose a poster to take home. The group who was instructed to think about their reasons for their initial choice, and had the option to change it, were less satisfied with it three weeks later. As the abstract says:
> When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their initial evaluations.
This suggests that satisfaction is more correlated with initial gut feeling than reasoning, at least for aesthetic choices, but I think in many other cases as well.
[1] https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729319301...
I was skimming through it on a call and a certain address just popped out to me. I said "that's the one, I'm pretty sure I've seen that before." I had no real reason to believe this, I just had a very strong feeling that I recognized it from somewhere and felt like it was the right one. Sure enough it was. People on the call wanted to know how I knew, and I couldn't really describe it, it was just pure gut. That doesn't really translate well in a professional setting, people will think you're weird or withholding/hiding something.
https://www.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftwar...
"Warm fuzzies aren't in the spec."
Like suppose you're talking to somebody over text and your gut says they're being an asshole, but your brain is rereading what they say and can't find anything specific to call out.
Which is correct?
Well, I've found that the gut is systematically unreliable in a number of situations... Are you in a bad mood for example? They say never go food shopping when you're hungry.
Not to say mind > gut, because that's just as stupid as saying gut > mind. The point is that there are dozens of variables (variables like mood) we need to learn in such evaluations, and generalizations can rarely be useful.
In reality, intuition is simply a pattern recognition mechanism that sometimes work. Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. Our intuition has always said Earth is flat, Sun rotates around us, time is constant... Virtually every single thing in science is how our intuition (aka the primitive pattern recognition) was so magnificently wrong.
This is not really the case. If you look into how a lot of great science is done it often starts with intuition followed by testing / experimenting in order to validate.
99 attempts at creating a lightbulb... and counting.
For those of us writing glue code to connect services for the 100th time or a manager dealing with our 20th PIP is our intuition likely to be as faulty?
Has turned into
> scientists intuition is less reliable because the scientists are acting at the limits of our understanding
Is that your gut telling you that?
If you have a lack of knowledge, the ‘rational’ set of things to try can be so large that it’s overwhelming/impossible to actually try them. You have to pick something.
Intuition can help there (and is commonly found in almost all major discoveries), even if it isn’t necessarily right. Since it’s still more right than not listening to it.
But then you need to pay attention and do some rational analysis to verify, and then iterate.
My intuition has never been any help on picking them.
Not listening to it, and just not buying the tickets would be more profitable.
Honestly, you're trying to claim that intuition is the foundation, when it's almost as bad as blind luck.
The most exciting phrase ever uttered in science is "Huh, that's not right" or "Woops"
Why do you think this?
Or, after playing 10 times and not winning, to stop.
I prefer the term "persistent" although people around me have translated that to "stubborn" somehow :)
I'm saying intuition in a complex space we don't understand is less reliable than intuition in a simple well understood space.
Recognising that someone is angry is simpler than discovering how gravity works.
Science has a high failure rate and scientists heavily lean on their intuition.
This does not imply that it is intuition that causes the high failure rate.