What stock do you put in gut feelings?

You have to go with your gut on decisions where you won't ever get enough information that will strongly weight things one way or another, whether it's constrained based on time or availability of info. That's the only way to avoid regret. If there's a lot of reliable information pointing the other way, you might need to figure out why your gut is pointing the other way. Sometimes it's because you don't trust those sources, and sometimes it's because you're clinging to a decision you made earlier with less information so you have choice bias kicking in.

To give a low-stakes example, fantasy football is filled with decisions where information helps a bit, but in most cases any difficult decision will come down to luck. So, you should pick the players you like better or just have a better feeling about, because even if it turns out you were wrong, at least you were true to yourself and will probably feel less regret about it. It feels extra bad to be convinced into making a decision that went against your gut based on outside sources, and you still end up wrong. So, maybe it's more about avoiding this kind of situation.

I'm a very anxious person by nature. If I have time I have to employ logic and think through big decisions quite carefully. It can be a long and arduous process, often requiring a loooooot of research. It can also be very painful for people around me so I sometimes get coaxed into certain decisions (for better or worse).

If it's a life or death situation and I need to make a quick decision, I have to go with my gut. More a "shoot first and ask questions later" approach in that case.

If I went with my gut at decision time I wouldn't be able to:

• Get a driver's license (public transport is plenty, cars are a money sink, don't flatten the kid crossing the road)
• Solo travel to other countries (you don't know the language, you're just wasting money, you've seen plenty of botanic gardens already, they have fried spiders and crickets for lunch)
• Progressively overload while lifting weights (you'll break your back and knees spending more at rehab)
• Learn to make bread and ice cream (just buy the thing right there instead of making it from scratch)
• Comment online (others can articulate your point better, you have more important things to do)
• Switch bank accounts (you have everything setup already and moving everything else is a pain)

Call it laziness or efficient minimal caloric expenditure. I naturally just don't want to do stuff I really don't have to. But when I actually do the thing against my gut, it usually goes in the "that's not so bad" camp.

That said, I do lean on it more in other things:

• People interactions and relationships - it seems to know people so much better than I can rationally explain. They're dodgy, their response time is off from normal, they're nice to you because they want your money, MLM sell coming up etc.
• My expertise in the job/career - zero budget and management spreads everyone thin, it knows this server and app will break first. I've put this to excellent use in terms of malicious compliance. IT like many fields loves a good story of heroically fixing something broken and "saving" the business rather than boringly preventing the problem from happening in the first place.
• Being more selective of which communities to actually contribute and participate. Reddit has turned into a bot-infested hellhole that favours bots fishing for human replies. The "What's X for you? Thoughts? For me it's ___" type posts. Once you learn to recognize that sentence pattern it's hard to unsee. Thoughts? Thoughts. They really love their thoughts. Can we at least get these LLMs to churn out words that don't end in thoughts?
• Second reddit farming that I've noticed and avoid thanks to the gut: the perpetually unaware/unsure comment that abuses Cunningham's Law knowing someone will chime up and correct/add detail and keep thread participation going. "Wasn't there a cruise ship infected with hantavirus recently?" "Didn't Anthropic had an AI model that was too good to release to the public?"

I would go with "not a lot". I've been hypercritical of many things around me and I'm quick to label something or someone as "unlikeable". If I trusted my gut feeling every time, I would be in an echo-chamber bubble that I would never modify.

Not trusting my gut feeling and actually puting myself into new experiences and challenging my fears have been my greatest paths to happiness.

I wish I trusted my gut more when I was younger. Every big decision where I didn't, instead taking the more practical 'safe' path that experts advise, the outcome was almost inevitability worse. I'd be a multimillionaire if I stuck with my gut on AMD and Bitcoin.

It mostly has worked out since starting to listen in my 30s. I've cashed out quite a bit making housing jumps at opportune times, against all advice to the contrary.

I like to think that, outside of exploit scenarios like casinos and high-pressure sales tactics, your gut feeling is the algamation of who you are; knowing everything that will make you happy and all the things you have learned.

The key is looking inward periodically and genuinely questioning and listening to your inner self. If you cannot figure out why you feel the way you do, your gut is blind.

When I lost my job I pulled a bunch of money from my 401k and paid the tax hit on it. Was it a good decision? I didn't strictly need to. Time will tell, but my gut was strong.

We didn't jump abroad the way my gut reaction urged in wake of Trump's reelection. We're becoming increasingly uneasy that we should have listened.

I find I'm generally able to figure out the actual reasons my gut is telling me what it is. Once there then it stops being a gut feeling and another set of risks and concerns to factor into my thinking.

If my gut persists I generally dismiss it as fear or anxiety that's not worth worrying about too much aside from as a tie-breaker.

Especially when the clearly articulable pros are stronger on one side but your gut favors the other?

Interesting question! I favor my gut pretty strongly in this scenario. What I have found is that invariably my gut feeling is based on something real (whether positive or negative). I may not have realized what exactly it is yet - a desire, hidden reservations - but with more reflection I can figure it out. Every time, I've ultimately been able to resolve the tension. Often it turns out that the list of pros isn't actually as positive as it appeared.

The Gift of Fear is a pretty decent book about (negative) intuitions, where they come from, and the importance of trusting them. I've found the same applies for positive intuitions too, though.

I have a couple of suspicions: We aren't always conscious of what we have observed and we aren't conscious of everything we know. Secondly, even what we are conscious of often isn't easily articulated or reduced to being either a pro or a con. I think these things make up a large proportion of gut feeling.

When I've got out a bit of paper and drawn up pros and cons I've often made fairly poor decisions given hindsight and I've tried to both get better at noticing and articulating what I know and listening to my gut. My decisions have not necessarily improved but I am probably a bit happier.

I've had a few times in my life where I've ignored my gut feeling on something and ended up regretting it. (And at least one of them was in a really spooky couldn't-have-known-ahead-of-time premonition sort of way.) I generally trust my gut instinct these days, especially as a tie-breaker.

For some things I've found, I find myself studying things thoroughly, making to weigh pros and cons or one thing vs. another... and then just tossing all that and going with my gut.

(I see that last as kind of like taking notes in a class. If I've taken good notes, I usually don't need to look at them again. Often the simple act of taking the notes is more valuable for internalizing the material than the notes themselves or studying them later.)

I am mainly an information driven* person in how I decide things. Which means I never blindly trust my gut feeling**. If I can, I always try to figure out what the feeling is based on are at least make a logical case for whatever my feeling is pointing towards. Not just that, I also actively do try to make a case for the opposite to avoid working myself in a self induced bias filter bubble.

There are times where there simply is no information available and there it depends. If a decision can wait I rather wait, sleeping over something often brings new insights. If I really need to decide in the moment I will go with my gut but generally not be happy about it until I see the result.

* Information can also be earlier experiences, knowledge I already have.
** In the context of things that have some stakes involved

If I have to make a snap decision and/or I'm in an emotionally charged situation, my gut won't get to play any part in it. Usually, in such cases, I try to not make any decisions at all if possible.

The more time I've had to consider and develop my viewpoint, the more I'll rely on my gut. But in that case, my logical processing and information-gathering have had a fairly deep impact on how I frame the decision in the first place, so it would be misleading to say I'm just going with my gut.

In other words, I'll try to rely on neither and delay the decision until I get to a point where I can rely on both simultaneously.

I feel like gut feelings are the accumulation of your experience up until that point, so I'd say I put all stock in it. Your gut isn't some magic Spidey sense ;)

That said, if it's a knowledge-based decision like which camera should I buy, then I'll absolutely rely more heavily on research.

For myself, the first thought is usually wrong. When I was young, I thought I was always right. However, now, I know that I rush to conclusions always. However, when I think about it, then sometimes I am right. However, I am usually still wrong. Therefore, I do not trust myself that much anymore. To make good decision, I leave to scientist, or I ask my niece, who is computer programmer, very smart.

Myself, I say many things that I believe, but I doubt them even as I say them, and I doubt them more after I say them. Except when it is about the aesthetic, then I know I am always right, no doubt.

For other, maybe it is different.

If I need to make quick decision, then I make decision, and we shall see if the result is good or evil.

I actually operate almost entirely on instinct. Everything from my job to my relationships, I’m flying by the seat of my pants on every single decision I make.

I suffer from some variety of mental illness due to the sensory weirdness of being autistic, or I might just actually be dumb and seriously just have less brain capacity than most people, but whatever the reason critical thinking is definitely not my strong suit and I pretty much just rely on luck for everything.

Ive gotten as far as I have in life only because people tend to like me.

Something I've realized as I have put more and more focus on radical self awareness and self reflection, and understanding my thoughts and feelings and where they come from to the point I truly don't think I do or think anything that I can't trace back to it's origin, is that bad "gut feelings" are just me picking up on patterns that go against previously established patterns or expected patterns. It's an instinctual survival mechanism ingrained in our animal brains.

I think it's interesting when people talk about things like "gut feelings" because they too are picking up on patterns but they just aren't aware of themselves enough to be aware of the patterns they're picking up on, it just happens subconsciously and is translated as a mysterious uncomfortable feeling. So I just think it's interesting that people kind of announce their level of self awareness by bringing it up.

Now that doesn't mean those gut feeling are always right, because the baseline/comfortable/safe patterns we pick up on aren't ingrained in our genetics, it's learned. So your gut feeling is saying "this thing deviates from normal, be cautious" but your baseline might be messed up or skewed and the deviation is what's actually safer. It's why trauma victims can feel safer in chaotic environments and fall into self destructive patterns and don't really know what to do with themselves in safer environments or when they meet safe people.

So when I get those kinds of gut feelings, I try to identify what my baseline/expected pattern was and what the deviation from that pattern is. That usually allows me to narrow it down pretty well and find the origin of that gut feeling and make a logical decision on if to trust it or not.

I usually let data speak for itself when I make my decisions. I will agonize over things and spend ages doing my research. I inherit this from my parents, my dad once spent 18 months agonizing over which specific trim level/engine to get in a car he wanted to get. That being said though, my gut definitely does override data sometimes. I finalize my decisions when I feel ready to do so. Most times, doing enough research and gathering enough data will get me to that point. Sometimes, my guy will just override things if I feel I am going too deep down a rabbit hole or am otherwise not making meaningful progress towards a final decision.

I have an abnormally quiet gut, so sometimes I have to actively coax it for input. In this cases, I don't trust it without further analysis, but it can be handy for picking up on details I missed or understanding my motivations better.

But if I get a gut feeling about something without actively trying, I definitely put a lot of stock in it. My gut is very rarely wrong in these instances; for example, if I do a calculation and end up with a result that feels wrong, I've almost inevitably made a mistake and my answer is way off. When my gut's wrong, it's almost my interpretation of the feeling that's wrong, rather than the feeling itself: for example, suddenly getting a weird feeling that a stranger is stalking me, and it turns out they've mistaken for someone else and they've trying to get a good look at me to double-check before they say hello.

The big exception is if I'm sleep-deprived. Then I find myself jumping at shadows (often literally) and leaping to some very unsound conclusions.