Trusting Your Instincts - Long Boring Esssay Warning

A few years back I was contemplating intincts, and how they have generally never worked out for me. My instincts have always been bad. Really bad. Poor judge of character in other people, poor big-picture decision making abilities, etc.

I had gotten into the habit of trying to rationally evaluate everything in life, with the assumption that brute force analysis of any situation would be far better than just letting my capricious and unreliable whim dictate what choices to make.

I have to tell you, that's a really god damn tiring way to live. This is going to take a bit of explaining though, so bear with me.

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As a budding young skeptic I had, for a while, had a really dim view of instinct or unthinking reactions. A phrase I can't recall the origins of had stuck in my mind: It's better to respond than react. Reaction implies a hasty sort of quick retort. Response implies some deliberation and analysis of things.

The big real life examples I had seen were the hordes of credulous weirdos on the internet. yes, I know, very poor role models there. But still, there's a pervasive meme out there among young zealous born again Christians that boils down to "too much thinking is bad". These people are very easily persuaded by group-think, personal anecdotes, and all manner of irrational nonsense.

And, at the same time, among a lot of the skeptical or atheist communities I've participated in online and in real life, the perception is that people don't think nearly enough. Obviously I'm part of the later camp, or at least I have been.

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The thing is, I don't think these arbitrary definitions or divisions are valid. Or perhaps it's just been my perception of things that's been off.

I'm now of the mind that there's nothing wrong with trusting your instincts...to a point. I got to thinking about this idea again because of this old news story. It's been something that's been rolling around in the back of my mind for most of this year now; in my subconscious, if you will.

There's nothing wrong with trusting your instincts. As the article indicates, it appears that gut reactions are actually pretty damn good at getting the correct answers. That runs contrary to how I'd been trying to handle things for the last few years. However, I think that using your instincts shouldn't be the end-all of decision making. GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

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I suppose the point I'm trying to make about myself, and perhaps for any other neurotic creative types, is that there actually is a perfectly rational reason to let go and go with a gut reaction on some decisions, especially quick ones. Everything does not need to be analyzed to death, we've got a LOT of software in our grey matter churning away to process data and filter out superfluous bullshit in the background.

This has been pretty helpful in my game designing and coding endeavors. Game design is all about crunching numbers and sorting out how you can quantify the world with data and random variables. You need to be pretty sharp with simple math and some aspects of game theory to "get it" and make something decent.

However, it's an easy thing to get lost in. Personally, I find that I can't see the forest for the trees in a lot of my early game design efforts. Once play test time comes, the rules are clearly bogged down or suffering from some major nit-picky issues. Letting things go a bit and trusting my gut reaction, my instincts, has so far seemed like a good little mental tool to make high level decisions. I can waste hours spinning out numbers on how some game mechanic will work, but when it comes down to it, I can set the mechanic I'm trying to figure aside, and then give it a quick glance the next day and make a good snap decision on how to handle it, what small rules to trim and what to stream line or simplify.