You Have to Feel It

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.

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).

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 ;)