Gut Feelings

Sentimental people say that if you have a gut feeling, you should always follow it. Is this good decision making, though? I've studied tons of books about the flaws of human reasoning, and I would conclude that no, this isn't always the best choice that one could make. The school of cognitive psychology claims that our feelings are preceded by our thoughts. If we define the term "thought" more broadly as an "algorithm", then I would agree. When we feel a certain way, it's because we have a certain thought. An example of that is fear - the intensity of our fear varies depending on how dangerous we believe something to be for us. That belief could be totally wrong, which is the case with many, if not all, phobias.

There are some processes that are hardwired in our brains through evolution, which are called heuristics, also known as information-processing shortcuts. When we process new information, we package it into convenient chunks, that our limited brains can handle. During this process, we have to distort, delete, or generalize some of the information. So taking this in consideration, the beliefs that we form may many times be quite inaccurate. From this, it follows that our intuition may also turn out to be wrong.

I would say that the term "gut feeling" is synonymous to "intuition". I define "intuition" as an automatically-triggered behavior that has been learned through repetition and experience. For example, once learned, riding a bicycle becomes an unconscious process that we never think about. In other words, we develop intuition for riding the bicycle. Similarly, we might develop intuition for moral judgment. Imagine a coincidence where you've met 5 black people and they've all been mean to you. This might generate a subconscious prejudice against black people in you, because your brain might generalize, for your convenience, that all black people are meanies. This prejudice would be another type of intuition.

Another gut feeling you may develop is one for liking people. If you were raised by violent people, you might have formed a belief that "your mom and dad are good people because they have raised you, therefore being violent is also good". Once you leave the family, you end up falling in love with violent people, because that's what your gut feeling is telling you. But here, again, it turns out to be wrong.

I'm not saying you should never listen to your heart. I bet that most of the time, it's actually in your best interest to do so. But before you go with your gut feeling, if you have the time, think about how this decision is going to benefit you in the short term and in the long term. Think about the ways that you could be biased. Like my friend Chris Bradshaw says, "You should always consider your heart but follow nothing blindly".

Appeal to Genetics

I observe a trend in people who appeal to genetics and reject environmental influence, when talking about personal traits and psychological issues. It seems like they are mostly believers in fate who want to appear as rational skeptics, by replacing the word "fate" with "genes". But genetics and fate are two different things, and I don't want to undermine the importance of the former in no way. The genetic code is, indeed, the foundation of all human behavior, and it would be silly to disregard such a fundamental factor. But, as important as they are, the "instructions" of our genes can be overcome - the obvious example, of course, is birth control - therefore, being predisposed to something does not necessarily mean that we are bound to it. Hence, "it's in my genes" does not equal to "it's my destiny".

Surely, everything I am, everything I think, and everything I do, has been made possible by my genes. From this, many people conclude, that my genes are therefore directly responsible for my personal traits, and environment has nothing to do with my character. By this claim, they commit the fallacy of the single cause, where it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes. It's like saying that the hardware of a computer, alone, is responsible for what kind of software is installed on it.

Genes, indeed, have "programmed" my brain to process new information using various techniques, called heuristics, along with their many flaws. In other words, my genes are responsible for my brain's "Operating System". But would you say that the OS of a computer determines the software that will be installed on it? That's very similar to saying that my genes determine what's in my mind, e.g. my thoughts. Surely, operating systems, as well as genes, set up limitations to what kind of input can be understood and how it may be interpreted, but they don't create the input themselves. My genes do not create my environment.

Would you say that the Operating System is directly responsible for the viruses that have infected it? Some Mac and Linux fans will surely argue from this point, but wrongly so - having a weak immune system does not cause your illness, viruses do. Even if we accept the wrong premise that having a weak immune system causes sickness, this still isn't a fixed issue, and it can be overcome by strengthening the immune system, either by vaccination, or immunization. Vaccination would be analogous to installing an anti-virus software on your Windows; immunization - to finding a way of preventing future infection of the virus after having been infected with it (e.g. not going on suspicious porn websites).

When one has a psychological issue, appealing to genetics is very often, in my opinion, just another way for him to dissociate from the problem. "Hey, it's in my genes, I can't do nothing about it". An alcoholic might say that he was genetically predisposed to alcoholism, and thus avoid considering, for instance, his history of abuse as a child, which might as well be the cause of his addiction. From a practical point, I think genes ought to be the last place to look for a problem's cause, because it's not helping much to the present patient anyway.

In conclusion, genes have nothing to do with destiny, and have little to do with personal traits.
Prove me wrong, maybe?