You have chosen a very bad example: a "decision maker" that is both "shielded from the consequences of their decisions", and who also lacks technical depth if I

You have chosen a very bad example: a "decision maker" that is both "shielded from the consequences of their decisions", and who also lacks technical depth if I'm to read between the lines. Except with a miracle, no amount of reasoning can save this person from taking a bad decision. And no, I'm not referring to "personal decisions" - I make technical decisions based on emotions all the time. It works for me because I have both skin in the game, and the technical knowledge. Yet I chose to use emotions as a shortcut, because I have no time and no interest to put on paper why I recommend clickhouse for a timeseries. I do it because it feels right, because I have a bad vibe from the weird benchmarks published by competitors, and a good vibe from clickhouse based on when I last played with it. This saves me time and effort, which is best spend on things that matter. Some people use different names for this heuristic (cf "thinking hard and slow"), because emotions have a bad reputation, based solely on bad examples of people who can't rely on anything else, and just don't care about the consequences. Emotions integrate inputs. Lack of good inputs = bad decisions, emotions or not, aka "garbage in, garbage out"