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You Have to Feel It

(mitchellh.com)
359 points tosh | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 14:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mcdeltat ◴[30 Aug 25 22:47 UTC] No.45078646[source]▶
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.
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kingkawn ◴[30 Aug 25 23:18 UTC] No.45078868[source]▶
This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.
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1. card_zero ◴[31 Aug 25 01:46 UTC] No.45079606[source]▶
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.

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2. kingkawn ◴[31 Aug 25 10:21 UTC] No.45082030[source]▶
Pedantry disqualified all subsequent value of your thinking