It is the time and a city in the empire of Rome. An
augure sits in front of Angus Aurilius, a [made up] owner of a big
business house. The augure cuts open the entrails of a pig and makes
a prediction about the safety and profitability of next consignment of
spices coming from India. He gets gold if his predictions turn out to be
true.
Angus was literally trusting his guts. But we are all far above that kind of superstition aren't we?
My colleague and I are working on using someone else' code for making a data analysis result sheet for quite some time and are tired. After the [for a large number] 50th correction and they tell me that they feel the code will be debugged and work perfectly this time. They also add with a tired smile that they have felt that about ten times so far.
Lo! the code is debugged. We celebrate, they assert that they have learnt that they should trust their feelings.
Ten times of being wrong, and once being right, conclusion: I should trust my feelings.
A type II error - a false negative.
The position of a finance manager is vacant in a firm. There are three female candidate within the organization with the experience and qualification to do the job, but the general manager has interviewed them all and they feels in their guts that these candidates are not ready for the job. When they do find the perfect candidate, it turns out to be a guy with deep voice.
Aren't you glad they did not betray their gut-feelings?
A police person in the USA takes his gun out and shouts at two teenage black girls to "get their asses on the floor", does a gymnastic move and chases another set of black boys who were trying to run.
The situation is one where someone has called the police to say a group of people are vandalizing a community pool. The police person act on their gut-feelings and get the situation sorted in less than a few seconds with the result of several teenagers sobbing and crying sitting on the floor, worried for their safety and life.
Great job, trusting your gut-instinct, white police person, except that these black-teenagers happen to have membership to this pool for many years. You could have just asked before jumping the gun. People in skimpy swim suits with rubber floater are not very likely to bring out concealed weapons and threaten you.
Thrice in a row the made-up augure of the roman times saw that the gut of the pig had small specks of dark brown when the rain destroyed the spice consignment of the made-up business owner, enough to make him genuinely believe his correlations of pig-gut and storms.
Add to the mix some greed, profit motive, clever language, and rigged consequences - good prediction gets him lots of gold and bad only perhaps he has to change his patron, no one will hang an augure.
Modern day blind-faiths are not much different from reading guts. If you lost a job in the 2008 crisis or had a bunch of your savings lose their value due to market devaluations, you should be one to hate gut-thinking. What do you think the executioners of the financial deals were doing when they were betting on products (or the meaning of the assigned risk) they did not understand?
Add to the mix some greed ...
From global financial crises, to personal level reservations and chauvinism - gut-instincts are a close second to religion when it comes to the motivation of acting bigoted, racist, nationalist, and gender-biased. And I say that with all the rigor of gut-feeling analysis and zero data.
There is no non-thinking. What some of us very happily want to call instincts is sub-conscious or unconscious thinking. Humanly and scientifically there is no voluntary action possible without some level of thought. For a science refresher, involuntary are actions humans have little or no direct control over, such as the beating of heart, the working of nerves, or the knee-jerk reflex.
So then what is this feeling or gut-feeling we keep talking about?
Perhaps harmless hope and impatience, as in the case of code debugging. But not always harmless - sometimes it is the act of following deep rooted beliefs as a default, as in the case of the police person, the general manager, or the financial executive.
Conscious thoughts, reflexes, blind faiths and myths, cat-calls and wolf-whistles, smiles and frowns, all our reactions come from millions of years of evolution. Identify the pattern of wrongs in the following of gut-feelings all around you, and do what we do best: evolve! Let's be better humans.
*Apologies for the title. The kind of people I write this piece for, would not have even clicked to open the link if the title said do not trust your gut-feelings. But I expect they will not read this through to get to this part, so I write of them in third person.
Angus was literally trusting his guts. But we are all far above that kind of superstition aren't we?
My colleague and I are working on using someone else' code for making a data analysis result sheet for quite some time and are tired. After the [for a large number] 50th correction and they tell me that they feel the code will be debugged and work perfectly this time. They also add with a tired smile that they have felt that about ten times so far.
Lo! the code is debugged. We celebrate, they assert that they have learnt that they should trust their feelings.
Ten times of being wrong, and once being right, conclusion: I should trust my feelings.
A type II error - a false negative.
The position of a finance manager is vacant in a firm. There are three female candidate within the organization with the experience and qualification to do the job, but the general manager has interviewed them all and they feels in their guts that these candidates are not ready for the job. When they do find the perfect candidate, it turns out to be a guy with deep voice.
Aren't you glad they did not betray their gut-feelings?
A police person in the USA takes his gun out and shouts at two teenage black girls to "get their asses on the floor", does a gymnastic move and chases another set of black boys who were trying to run.
The situation is one where someone has called the police to say a group of people are vandalizing a community pool. The police person act on their gut-feelings and get the situation sorted in less than a few seconds with the result of several teenagers sobbing and crying sitting on the floor, worried for their safety and life.
Great job, trusting your gut-instinct, white police person, except that these black-teenagers happen to have membership to this pool for many years. You could have just asked before jumping the gun. People in skimpy swim suits with rubber floater are not very likely to bring out concealed weapons and threaten you.
Thrice in a row the made-up augure of the roman times saw that the gut of the pig had small specks of dark brown when the rain destroyed the spice consignment of the made-up business owner, enough to make him genuinely believe his correlations of pig-gut and storms.
Add to the mix some greed, profit motive, clever language, and rigged consequences - good prediction gets him lots of gold and bad only perhaps he has to change his patron, no one will hang an augure.
Modern day blind-faiths are not much different from reading guts. If you lost a job in the 2008 crisis or had a bunch of your savings lose their value due to market devaluations, you should be one to hate gut-thinking. What do you think the executioners of the financial deals were doing when they were betting on products (or the meaning of the assigned risk) they did not understand?
Add to the mix some greed ...
From global financial crises, to personal level reservations and chauvinism - gut-instincts are a close second to religion when it comes to the motivation of acting bigoted, racist, nationalist, and gender-biased. And I say that with all the rigor of gut-feeling analysis and zero data.
There is no non-thinking. What some of us very happily want to call instincts is sub-conscious or unconscious thinking. Humanly and scientifically there is no voluntary action possible without some level of thought. For a science refresher, involuntary are actions humans have little or no direct control over, such as the beating of heart, the working of nerves, or the knee-jerk reflex.
So then what is this feeling or gut-feeling we keep talking about?
Perhaps harmless hope and impatience, as in the case of code debugging. But not always harmless - sometimes it is the act of following deep rooted beliefs as a default, as in the case of the police person, the general manager, or the financial executive.
Conscious thoughts, reflexes, blind faiths and myths, cat-calls and wolf-whistles, smiles and frowns, all our reactions come from millions of years of evolution. Identify the pattern of wrongs in the following of gut-feelings all around you, and do what we do best: evolve! Let's be better humans.
*Apologies for the title. The kind of people I write this piece for, would not have even clicked to open the link if the title said do not trust your gut-feelings. But I expect they will not read this through to get to this part, so I write of them in third person.
