> Reed Hastings' decision to pivot Netflix into original content production is a great example ... based on years of experience in entertainment and technology
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.
All these articles proposing "intuition" as secret magic dust is quite funny. This is culturally amplified by movies and media ("May the force be with you", "follow your feelings").
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.
I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the title. I think there's definitely merit to not analyze your gut feelings. With that said, I would have a framework on when it is appropriate to trust them at least.
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).
[1] https://melvinroest.github.io/articles/intuition.pdf
This reminds me of this quote I love:
> "[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...
Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day. Some degree of self-control is probably warranted.
I use my intuition a lot and have learned to listen to it. Sometimes though, it sucks when you intuit something, turn out to be correct, and you don't really have a good explanation to your peers as to why you knew it was correct. I remember one time in my career, we knew we had a rogue server somewhere (out of probably 100k+) we had to decommission but no one in the org knew where it was and everyone that did had long been gone. All we knew was that it was out there in the stack somewhere, because we'd see the effects of its existence elsewhere in the metrics, but this thing was like a complete ghost. All we had to go on in the end was nginx logs that had hundreds of thousands of IP addresses in them, go through them one at a time with a script and run a certain curl to it, and hope we got lucky it was the one we wanted. Even then there was a ton of false positives.
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.
Mh. I'm treating too many things like chess, but in chess, intuition of very competent players tends to be deep pattern recognition. This kind of positive or constructive intuition in a concrete context warrants analysis imo.
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.
Interesting HN post today on Zarathustrian philosophy:
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...
> Contrary to common wisdom, which suggests using analysis to verify gut feelings, intuition often works better as a final check on analytical decisions.
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).
One of my personal favorite reasons to yell at the sky is the legions of managers who style themselves as "leaders", who show up to provide exactly zero leadership (at best), and actively derail projects led by anyone other than them.
I don’t understand the headline: Why is it counter-intuitive to follow your intuition?
Sounds like an attempt to analyze the very thing the article claims should not be analyzed.
There must be a German word for what the article does with its title against its content.
Eh, the more I think about it though the more I can think of times that "Going by my gut" when my brain and gut disagreed where my gut was wrong.
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.