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Comment by hakunin | Hacker News Reader

I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.

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Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.

Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam.

If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

For fun a few years ago I went through the process of deciding what my favorite song was. I had a gut feeling but wanted to take a scientific approach, I listened to my top listened songs from the last decade over and over as part of a bracket system, where I was trying to explain logically why one was better than the other.

Anyway at the end of it I chose a song that I later realized was definitely not my favorite despite me being unable to explain logically why my favorite song is my favorite song. Basically having to explain things made my ratings worse.

Fascinating. What a fun experiment for one thing - makes me want to try - and what an unexpected outcome. It seems so paradoxical that it’s hard for me to even think about what might have caused that.

> Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision

"Less correct" is perhaps more what I mean. Disagreeing with the opinions of experts is, generally, the same thing as being less correct.

> If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

A different way to test this would be to make two judgements — one snap decision based on vibes, and another based on a thoughtful chain of reasoning that you explain or write down — and then see which judgement was actually more correct _for you_ (perhaps after some time has elapsed).

I’m on board with the idea here, but the way you worded it makes it sound like “rationalizing” which is generally considered harmful.

Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?

I get the impression you're using 'rationalizing' to mean finding a reason for an emotion that doesn't necessarily match the true source of the emotion. This is different from recognizing the existing rationale, which is exactly why it's generally considered harmful. If one gets in the habit of finding new rationales for their emotions that sound more favorable, they can also get in the habit of no longer keeping their true rationales in check, which I would assume tends to result in sociopathic behavior.

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