Why We Spiral

As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.

But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.

The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.

a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly

but more importantly:

b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.

c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.

people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.

And you start of with

> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong

and end on

> This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.

on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.

PS: clattering teeth

I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.

He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.

The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.

> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats

This actually happened to me professionally.

A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.

I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.

What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)

He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)

Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.

And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...

Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...

I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)

>He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right.

In one situation for me, this was exactly the case. It became more clear as each week went by. It was a "bro" situation between the C-level and the new hire, and the C-level was a "30 under 30" so there was a high school mentality about it.

You can almost never win this situation, I have seen funded startups literally go under because of friendships and incorrect attribution of who did what.

> We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming

In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.

When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.

Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.

There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.

I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.

In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.

> He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.

I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.

If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.

It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.

Yeah absolutely! That’s the challenge I’ve seen with anxiety (I’m painting with a broad brush here, and I’m no authority). You can’t outright disable the smoke alarms because sometimes they’re actually working.

Ah, the true sign of a "team" - credit being apportioned...

The problem isn't one person being over looked, it's that one person is being praised.

We all make contributions that we feel are noteworthy, but when someone else's noteworthy contributions are highlighted we then have to ask, why theirs and not ours.

I actually never prescribed a specific solution on how to accomplish the education at all. This is kinda what I mean when I say folks don’t really process their feelings they act like what they feel is happening is true.

That's the difference between functional and disfunctional anxaety. The trick is to figure out which is which.

Frankly being able to point to specific behaviors that trigger vibes is something that comes easily to me as someone who, again, had to work through identifying trauma responses and reacting accordingly. It’s just a skill I think more people would benefit from picking up. I respond really poorly when I don’t feel understood, but I also have a tendency to be vague on details so it is normal for me to get misunderstood. Recognizing this is useful because I can use my gut frustration as an indicator, not that whoever I’m talking to is a moron or are intentionally bad faith misinterpreting me, but that I may be lacking clarity.

I am incapable of knowing which is which.

The problem is my rate of correct anxiety guesses is too high. I'm right a lot. But the ridiculous stuff sneaks in as well. This leads to me being constantly anxious and just hating my professional life.

How to fix? Sweet Lord in heaven. How to fix?

Strong agree that more people should have that skill. I've tried to get better at it but I'm probably still pretty meh.

I think good emotional regulation stuff like this would ideally be taught starting in kindergarten along with "don't hit your classmates". Maybe in a better time.

Keep an anxiety log for a few months. In my experience, this feeling of correctness is a retrospective impression that relies heavily on confirmation bias, and in reality is nowhere near that high. Either way, a concrete log will confirm or deny it.

If it's truly correct, then I'd say it's not anxiety and that you're probably more attuned to subtle cues. You can learn to pay conscious attention to these cues, evaluate them, and decide strategically if you want to act on them. The idea is to keep your advantage without the negative emotional reaction.

If it's not that accurate, having proof can help you internalize that you're just going through some particular emotional process, without according it any undue weight. Having let go of that, you can start picking up mechanical tricks for anxiety management, like breathing techniques.

If the friend was ignoring his gut feeling, what objective instruments did he use instead?

If none, wasn't it was just choosing one gut feeling over another gut feeling?

^^^ This ^^^

Also, a CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy) with a professional helps a lot.

I had opposite issue, again and again. "My gut" was actually correct again and again. I ignored it because if trying to be rational and objective. The gut was a lot more correct at identifying interpersonal threats and bad actors.

The problem with "trust your gut" is that intuition is a skill which needs to be honed. Everyone has different levels of blockage to being genuinely in touch with their "gut". I think some people are more naturally synthetic thinkers and already live in a more body-guided way. For the walking heads like most of us here on HN we would need to spend time re-learning how to calibrate the body to give precise readings. So the advice needs some caveats.

Even then shutting down the anxiety and paranoia is a good idea. You're friend didn't know how to process reality without feeling negative, maybe. But it can be done and they should probably learn how to do that. A calm & confident person can still see if a problem is coming, the real world isn't determined by the feelings of the viewer but by actual evidence present and a very fine sliver of basic world modelling. The difference is a well grounded person will just note it and feel pretty good about the whole process as they brush dust of the resume and start job hunting. Did their best, had a good time, made some friends, exciting new opportunities, etcetera.

Nobody has to be a pessimist to make accurate forecasts. It doesn't even help. The more your emotions and personality influence the forecast the worse a forecast it is, the future does not rewarp itself because the viewer feels positive or negative.

100% this.

Some people are indeed very good at picking up on specific behaviours. The problem is that requires maturity and self reflection, so it's not something you learn in a day.

The lesson here should be that trusting one's gut might be good, but acting out on it is bad. Don't spiral. Don't confront the possible charlatan. Don't react on your gut the second after the other guy stole your credit.

Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.

It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.

And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.

Good points.

I’ve also never worked at a company that had enough long term thinking to train up replacements. Several would only cut entire departments and/or only do layoffs.

So there isn’t really any point about worrying about being replaced (:>