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> One should completely distrust and be hostile towards a "feeling" until one is confident he/she understands why the feeling exists and is the way it is. I ge

> One should completely distrust and be hostile towards a "feeling" until one is confident he/she understands why the feeling exists and is the way it is. I get the impression this is a very common sentiment in the engineering community, actually - I was raised this way. In my family, step one of "digesting" a feeling was always understanding why you felt it. Someone told me recently that "your feelings do not have to make sense to be valid and action-worthy", and I was stunned — all these years no-one had told me. It is immensely true. If you insist on understanding your feelings before taking them into account, I think it's easy to fall into the trap of disregarding ones you think you shouldn't have, or choosing not to act because rational beings rise above their feelings. There are also some feelings you may never understand, and you could spend years sitting around trying to grok them. It is perfectly valid (at least to me) to say "I made this decision because I felt this way at this time." No further explanation required.

marmaduke 8y ago
To continue that thought, intuition enters in engineering after several years: you see the work of someone else and think, “yuck.” Often, I then search for a reason and voice that instead of “yuck,” but it still starts with a feeling. This is relevant because when you’re hacking away, you can “feel” out the solution of a problem, instead of approaching it axiomatically (even if the latter is often useful)
saiya-jin 8y ago
This is a very subjective topic, but I have a different approach (coming from 37 years of experience with... me) - emotions are great. Spice of life, sometimes even meaning of life. Revel them. Enjoy them. Immense in them, both positive and negative (without one, there wouldn't be the other anyway). But - don't make important life decisions based purely on them. Never. If the emotion-based decision doesn't stand some simple test of logic, it most probably ain't a good one. I've seen many people making utterly bad choices in life that affected them negatively for the rest of their lives (ie wrong life partner, wrong place to settle etc.) just because they felt at that moment it was the right choice. From logical cold-hard-facts point-of-view, it clearly wasn't. Life of misery and regrets ensued. Emotions are finicky, tomorrow they can easily change (if I wanted to be snarky I could say that's the source of many men vs women misunderstandings but there is more to that topic). But that's me - this works for me very well. If a different approach works for you, long term, by all means stick to it.

marmaduke 8y ago

To continue that thought, intuition enters in engineering after several years: you see the work of someone else and think, “yuck.” Often, I then search for a reason and voice that instead of “yuck,” but it still starts with a feeling. This is relevant because when you’re hacking away, you can “feel” out the solution of a problem, instead of approaching it axiomatically (even if the latter is often useful)

saiya-jin 8y ago

This is a very subjective topic, but I have a different approach (coming from 37 years of experience with... me) - emotions are great. Spice of life, sometimes even meaning of life. Revel them. Enjoy them. Immense in them, both positive and negative (without one, there wouldn't be the other anyway). But - don't make important life decisions based purely on them. Never. If the emotion-based decision doesn't stand some simple test of logic, it most probably ain't a good one. I've seen many people making utterly bad choices in life that affected them negatively for the rest of their lives (ie wrong life partner, wrong place to settle etc.) just because they felt at that moment it was the right choice. From logical cold-hard-facts point-of-view, it clearly wasn't. Life of misery and regrets ensued. Emotions are finicky, tomorrow they can easily change (if I wanted to be snarky I could say that's the source of many men vs women misunderstandings but there is more to that topic). But that's me - this works for me very well. If a different approach works for you, long term, by all means stick to it.