That's such a little neat trick, it's great. Sometimes I think that some civilizations back then had figured out more about how to be a society at least in some respects, than we have today.
I feel so too, but note that there is a survivorship bias. Consider you have 5 thousand years of societies trying out various forms of living together. Which forms will survive today in the stories? The ones someone felt interesting enough to preserve. Same goes for buildings. There used to be pretty of ugly buildings in the old times as well, they just got demolished and replaced by other buildings, while the beautiful buildings were not demolished.
Yes, our gut is our second brain, it’s the subconscious.
To dismiss one’s instincts is irrational. Our bodies developed fine-tuned monitoring and alerting systems (our instincts). To ignore your gut is to ignore your hard-earned experience.
Trust your gut. The scientific reason for why it’s telling you that will be explained later.
> Trust your gut. The scientific reason for why it’s telling you that will be explained later
Usually that's good advice :-)
In other cases, some people got bullied as children or grew up with a weird parent, and because of that feel in their gut, their intuition tells them,
that no one likes them, and they better stay at home and avoid people. Then, trusting one's gut or intuition, can damage a whole life.
What you call "the guts" and intuition and feelings, can learn the wrong things, during childhood. Can be good to apply some logical reasoning, and also talk with other people if it's something important
Your gut is where prejudices, racism, nepotism, and a whole bunch of other bad shit resides. What the gut optimizes (reducing threats, reproduction, getting food, etc) is very frequently selfish short term thinking.
This depends on the nature of the decision. If it's whether or not to vaccinate or insulate your attic you probably are better off trusting your brain. Many of the problems we face today are due to people spurning eggheaded decision making.
Here’s a familiar bit of egg-headed decision making, to prove to you it is the brain that’s the problem, not the gut.
Ask the grunts/troops/anyone who is actually writing code: how do you really feel? Most feel in their gut things got too complex and bad decisions are being made.
If these engineers only actually listened to their gut, they would be pushing back hard to get complexity reigned in, to get back to a much cleaner architecture. But for a myriad of reasons, such as not wanting to appear clueless in a fast changing tech world, the engineers stay silent.
The rationalization is a very brain activity.
Do a reality check on yourself. What feels have you been rationalizing or dismissing? Take a look by observing—what kind of feeling is it? Where is it in your body? (A lump in your throat, tightness in your stomach?) Observe what it is. Don’t explain it away or it will stop being observable.
Once you observe, you will learn new information, which will then inform your subsequent decisions.
The scenario you outline is of a person experienced in a technical field having second thoughts about something, but not raising the concerns sure to external factors.
This is very different from the scenarios mentioned by the GP, where people who are not experienced in the technical field (i.e. not immunologists or HVAC engineer, respectively) ignore the advice of people who are experts, just because it feels right to them in their gut.
I would say, listen to experts (and not your gut) when outside of your field, and listen to your gut (but not only your gut) when in your field.
I agree that listening to expert advice over your gut is the right thing to do.
But that’s besides the point—-learning to trust expert advice is a brain behavior that has to be properly learned. (For example, many of us have learned to catastrophize and over-generalize, where bad advice from one expert suddenly translates into not listening to all future experts).
I’m imploring: do not dismiss your gut, folks! Please continue to use brain, but stop dismissing your gut.
Yes, I agree that you should also not dismiss the brain when making decisions. This is widely assumed to be the desired, appropriate behavior. (Whereas dismissing your gut is widely regarded as the right thing to do, which is actually a wrong thing to do and is an avoidable bad decision.)
However, I think you underestimate the brain thinking that the anti-vaxxers are making—-believe me, they have done hardheaded rationalization of their beliefs.
Egg-headed decisions come from bad brain thinking, not from trusting your gut.
We definitely rely on technological advances a lot. It might mask our social development status.
To go further, I would say, that there is a mismatch between how much we advance technologically / scientifically and how much we advance with regard to how we live together in a society.
There are so many things going wrong, which one might think have no place in these times, but reveal the savage greed of humanity. Surely in the past there was probably even more stuff going wrong, but today those things are catalyzed by globalization and technological means. Our greed in the small can affect the whole planet. Basically, I am not sure we are ready, in terms of social advancement, to responsibly handle the technology. By that I am not talking about this person or that person specifically, but about us as societies, democracies, and other forms.
Its also quite possible were just looking at the past through rose coloured lenses.
When reading about how past civilizations live you only read the condensed version, the highlights. Whereas when loving modern times every little flaw and problem is visible, you spend 24 hours a day living it, not just 10 minute on highlights.
Not all of the things you mention seem necessarily connected to how people act in a society. Probably most of what you mention is the result of not having modern medicine and modern technology and knowledge.
The point I made is not about those. I am not saying, that the past were happy times. It is about how we behave with regard to each other in the society and how that did not change as much as technology and scientific advancement has been achieved.
For example we are destroying the planet right now. This was not possible hundreds of years ago. We did not have neither the technology nor the number of people to do it. -- Are we advanced enough in social and/or ethical matters, caring about the third world countries, our children and future generations and how they life on this planet, to stop the disaster? Future will tell, but damage is being done right now, which we should not be doing.
