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Please don't apologize for trying things. :) To answer your question. I have personally been more right than wrong when i have followed a gut feeling. I also a

Please don't apologize for trying things. :) To answer your question. I have personally been more right than wrong when i have followed a gut feeling. I also act when i go with it more often than when i dont. When i am 'rational' i often DO NOT act because rationality tends to lead to pessimism. Atleast with me.

waru 16y ago
Hm, well, this thread doesn't appear on the "ask" section of HN, only in "new", so I think I may have missed something if there's a way to control that. Rationality can definitely lead to pessimism if you're not careful, but I think most pessimism is actually quite irrational. Rationality can also be used to support optimism (for example, it's rationally possible that I become really successful). So I try to live by what I call "optimistic rationality" (if that hasn't been coined already. :) )
- JangoSteve 16y ago
  It's there now. Sometimes it takes a minute.
- taphangum 16y ago
  (i don't know how to quote stuff you've said above so assume i have :)) I think that pessimism and rationality are close cousins. In that modern terms like 'be rational' tend to really mean that we should 'be skeptical'. Which tend to mean that we should 'be pessimistic'
  - waru 16y ago
    That's true about "Be more rational." (ie "Your idea is stupid; quit being adventurous."). That's why I hesitate to say "rational optimist," because rational as an adjective has such skeptical, pessimistic connotations. Some "skeptics" drive me nuts.
j_baker 16y ago
I think you might be confusing instinct with intuition. Intuition is a means of taking in information. Psychologists call it irrational because it isn't really a decision making process. Instinct is very rational, we just don't usually recognize it as such because it isn't concerned with verbalizing its logic. For instance, the game of basketball actually requires a lot of logic if you think about it. It's just that it requires a very fast-acting form of logic. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for a basketball player to say something like "I know I can make this goal because of Jordan's theorem". By the time they finished that thought, the other team might have already scored.

waru 16y ago

Hm, well, this thread doesn't appear on the "ask" section of HN, only in "new", so I think I may have missed something if there's a way to control that. Rationality can definitely lead to pessimism if you're not careful, but I think most pessimism is actually quite irrational. Rationality can also be used to support optimism (for example, it's rationally possible that I become really successful). So I try to live by what I call "optimistic rationality" (if that hasn't been coined already. :) )

JangoSteve 16y ago
It's there now. Sometimes it takes a minute.
taphangum 16y ago
(i don't know how to quote stuff you've said above so assume i have :)) I think that pessimism and rationality are close cousins. In that modern terms like 'be rational' tend to really mean that we should 'be skeptical'. Which tend to mean that we should 'be pessimistic'
- waru 16y ago
  That's true about "Be more rational." (ie "Your idea is stupid; quit being adventurous."). That's why I hesitate to say "rational optimist," because rational as an adjective has such skeptical, pessimistic connotations. Some "skeptics" drive me nuts.

j_baker 16y ago

I think you might be confusing instinct with intuition. Intuition is a means of taking in information. Psychologists call it irrational because it isn't really a decision making process. Instinct is very rational, we just don't usually recognize it as such because it isn't concerned with verbalizing its logic. For instance, the game of basketball actually requires a lot of logic if you think about it. It's just that it requires a very fast-acting form of logic. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for a basketball player to say something like "I know I can make this goal because of Jordan's theorem". By the time they finished that thought, the other team might have already scored.