6 ms·

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it c

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded. Or a terrible argument that plays to some emotional point so is accepted. It's all feelings. Rare is the opposite.

QuantumGood 1y ago
You can analyze in different ways by choosing different frames of reference, etc., but choosing how to feel isn't the same. For most, "choosing to how feel" is difficult to attempt.
kingkawn 1y ago
This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.
- reval 1y ago
  There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?) Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling. What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
  - kingkawn 1y ago
    Pedantry disqualified all subsequent value of your thinking
financetechbro 1y ago
My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed
- ratmeadow 1y ago
  I also worked in finance and couldn't agree more. The whole corporate thing is a farce. Spend a year "gathering data" or "planning" only for everything to boil down to one guy making an arbitrary decision which no one goes against because "that's just how it works". That industry exists no matter how you decision-make because it's slurping off an endless money fountain.
txrx0000 1y ago
People want different things. Even if two perfectly rational people agree on a shared model of reality, they still might not agree on what actions to take as a matter of aesthetic preference. That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit. I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.
Aurornis 1y ago
> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions. However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes. When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched. Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic. I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.
- cjk 1y ago
  This exact same phenomenon bit me at a previous job. We hired a couple of really smooth-talking grifters, and it took a tremendous amount of time to get rid of them. Vibes matter.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    The problem with this sort of hiring over time (we hired grifetrs because vibes) is that you never get to compare your vibe failure rate with those who had bad vibes but would have been better hires. If you go with vibes too much you only ever accumulate data saying that vibes matter.
- t43562 1y ago
accrual 1y ago
This can apply on the personal level too. Almost everything we want is less about the thing, and more about the feeling we think the thing will give us.
hakunin 1y ago
I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  I’m on board with the idea here, but the way you worded it makes it sound like “rationalizing” which is generally considered harmful. Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    I get the impression you're using 'rationalizing' to mean finding a reason for an emotion that doesn't necessarily match the true source of the emotion. This is different from recognizing the existing rationale, which is exactly why it's generally considered harmful. If one gets in the habit of finding new rationales for their emotions that sound more favorable, they can also get in the habit of no longer keeping their true rationales in check, which I would assume tends to result in sociopathic behavior.
- henrebotha 1y ago
  Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.
  - mock-possum 1y ago
    Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam. If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.
WhiteNoiz3 1y ago
Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either mode of thinking is inherently worse (we need both), but in our society the feelings part has traditionally been discounted as being 'illogical' by academics.. I think AI has shown us that parallel processing is actually incredibly important to thinking. But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).
- pixelready 1y ago
  I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us use our efficient system 2 thinking most of the time while avoiding all that messy cognitive dissonance that would arise from a conscious awareness of how chaotic such a system would be at the scale of… oh, say, a global civilization of such creatures ;)
  - TuringTest 1y ago
    Rationalism is overrated anyway. All rational thought depends on its axioms/premises, and there's no rational way to define a new axiom - by definition they are asserted from scratch, so you need to depend on gut feeling to choose a good axiom over a bad one. Rationalism "only" works to discard or modify some subset of your axioms when you discover that they lead to incompatible conclusions; which is a good outcome if you want to achieve a consistent theory, of course; but it doesn't help in selecting one consistent theory over a competing one. Again, those preferences are led by emotions.
Geste 1y ago
Yes. If you didn't know about the case, Damasio's Eliott is the personification of this observation : you have to feel first. https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecu...
docmars 1y ago
I think a lot of the dysfunction we see in the world can be attributed to people feeling positive emotions towards deeply problematic logical decisions, so they favor them for whatever perceived benefit they'll get from that decision, often overlooking the long-term impacts or how it affects others around them. We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response. It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.
antithesizer 1y ago
[dead]
whatsth4t 1y ago
Even expressions of rationality comes from a feeling we must do so. Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical. Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other. There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature. Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance. Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection

QuantumGood 1y ago

You can analyze in different ways by choosing different frames of reference, etc., but choosing how to feel isn't the same. For most, "choosing to how feel" is difficult to attempt.

kingkawn 1y ago

This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.

reval 1y ago
There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.
card_zero 1y ago
Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?) Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling. What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
- kingkawn 1y ago
  Pedantry disqualified all subsequent value of your thinking

financetechbro 1y ago

My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed

ratmeadow 1y ago
I also worked in finance and couldn't agree more. The whole corporate thing is a farce. Spend a year "gathering data" or "planning" only for everything to boil down to one guy making an arbitrary decision which no one goes against because "that's just how it works". That industry exists no matter how you decision-make because it's slurping off an endless money fountain.

txrx0000 1y ago

People want different things. Even if two perfectly rational people agree on a shared model of reality, they still might not agree on what actions to take as a matter of aesthetic preference. That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit. I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.

Aurornis 1y ago

> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions. However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes. When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched. Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic. I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.

cjk 1y ago
This exact same phenomenon bit me at a previous job. We hired a couple of really smooth-talking grifters, and it took a tremendous amount of time to get rid of them. Vibes matter.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  The problem with this sort of hiring over time (we hired grifetrs because vibes) is that you never get to compare your vibe failure rate with those who had bad vibes but would have been better hires. If you go with vibes too much you only ever accumulate data saying that vibes matter.
t43562 1y ago

accrual 1y ago

This can apply on the personal level too. Almost everything we want is less about the thing, and more about the feeling we think the thing will give us.

hakunin 1y ago

I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.

pfannkuchen 1y ago
I’m on board with the idea here, but the way you worded it makes it sound like “rationalizing” which is generally considered harmful. Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?
- LoganDark 1y ago
  I get the impression you're using 'rationalizing' to mean finding a reason for an emotion that doesn't necessarily match the true source of the emotion. This is different from recognizing the existing rationale, which is exactly why it's generally considered harmful. If one gets in the habit of finding new rationales for their emotions that sound more favorable, they can also get in the habit of no longer keeping their true rationales in check, which I would assume tends to result in sociopathic behavior.
henrebotha 1y ago
Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam. If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

WhiteNoiz3 1y ago

Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either mode of thinking is inherently worse (we need both), but in our society the feelings part has traditionally been discounted as being 'illogical' by academics.. I think AI has shown us that parallel processing is actually incredibly important to thinking. But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).

pixelready 1y ago
I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us use our efficient system 2 thinking most of the time while avoiding all that messy cognitive dissonance that would arise from a conscious awareness of how chaotic such a system would be at the scale of… oh, say, a global civilization of such creatures ;)
- TuringTest 1y ago
  Rationalism is overrated anyway. All rational thought depends on its axioms/premises, and there's no rational way to define a new axiom - by definition they are asserted from scratch, so you need to depend on gut feeling to choose a good axiom over a bad one. Rationalism "only" works to discard or modify some subset of your axioms when you discover that they lead to incompatible conclusions; which is a good outcome if you want to achieve a consistent theory, of course; but it doesn't help in selecting one consistent theory over a competing one. Again, those preferences are led by emotions.

Geste 1y ago

Yes. If you didn't know about the case, Damasio's Eliott is the personification of this observation : you have to feel first. https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecu...

docmars 1y ago

I think a lot of the dysfunction we see in the world can be attributed to people feeling positive emotions towards deeply problematic logical decisions, so they favor them for whatever perceived benefit they'll get from that decision, often overlooking the long-term impacts or how it affects others around them. We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response. It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.

antithesizer 1y ago

[dead]

whatsth4t 1y ago

Even expressions of rationality comes from a feeling we must do so. Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical. Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other. There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature. Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance. Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection