Sometimes, our bad gut feelings lead us astray. Political actors use this to advantage—programming people with bad gut feelings and exploiting the political division to advantage. Rationality encourages us in these cases to set aside the bad-gut-feeling-generator (“rhetoric”), subject the bad gut feeling to higher scrutiny, and then decide how we ought to feel. There’s so much rheotric and so much negativity bias and bad gut feeling, that we might even start to adopt a rule of thumb that “most bad gut feelings are wrong.”
Do this to yourself too long, though, and you’ll overcorrect. If you have the ability to question rhetoric and be cerebral about morality and risk, then it might be time to bring feelings back into it. Let’s say you’re considering a risk. It’s low probability, but serious.
What would the appropriate gut reaction feel like?
Sometimes, our bad gut feelings lead us astray. Political actors use this to advantage—programming people with bad gut feelings and exploiting the political division to advantage. Rationality encourages us in these cases to set aside the bad-gut-feeling-generator (“rhetoric”), subject the bad gut feeling to higher scrutiny, and then decide how we ought to feel. There’s so much rheotric and so much negativity bias and bad gut feeling, that we might even start to adopt a rule of thumb that “most bad gut feelings are wrong.”
Do this to yourself too long, though, and you’ll overcorrect. If you have the ability to question rhetoric and be cerebral about morality and risk, then it might be time to bring feelings back into it. Let’s say you’re considering a risk. It’s low probability, but serious.
What would the appropriate gut reaction feel like?