[HN Gopher] A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership
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A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership
Author : mooreds
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-11-07 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sudarkoff.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sudarkoff.com)
| wobblyasp wrote:
| > Reed Hastings' decision to pivot Netflix into original content
| production is a great example ... based on years of experience in
| entertainment and technology
|
| Is it? How do you show that? Was he just lucky? Did he divine the
| right answer by listening to the voice in his head?
|
| I don't disagree with the premise; when your body is screaming at
| you to do something that should feel unnatural you should be
| listening. That's evolution and learned experience trying to
| steer you away from danger or toward some kind of reward. But the
| blanket statement of "Stop analyzing your gut feelings" is just
| silly.
|
| My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time; if I didn't spend
| time thinking through the impacts of what may appear to be an
| "irrational" decision I'd expect to make many mistakes. This also
| gives leaders a complete scapegoat excuse when things explode
| (see WFH vs RTO, explosive hiring vs mass layoffs); hey, he was
| just following his gut, can't get it right every time.
| mulmen wrote:
| > I don't disagree with the premise; when your body is
| screaming at you to do something that should feel unnatural you
| should be listening. That's evolution and learned experience
| trying to steer you away from danger or toward some kind of
| reward. But the blanket statement of "Stop analyzing your gut
| feelings" is just silly.
|
| Unless you're a pilot. Or a serial killer.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time
|
| Does it? Can you provide some examples?
|
| My intuition rarely lets me down. Perhaps you don't have enough
| experience in the areas where you are trying to listen to your
| gut?
|
| I'm sure if I was trying to apply my intuition to an area I
| didn't understand at all it would let me down.
|
| That is different from listening to my intuition in a field I
| have been working in for almost two decades.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| You only have to read my sorry posting history to see where
| my intuition has let me down.
| melvinroest wrote:
| I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the
| title. I think there's definitely merit to not analyze your gut
| feelings. With that said, I would have a framework on when it is
| appropriate to trust them at least.
|
| I once wrote a literature review essay assignment [1] on when to
| trust your intuition and why meditation can help you to feel your
| intuition better. It was for a class called cognition and emotion
| at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I remember specifically to
| write about this as it was _slightly_ outside of the scope of the
| class. The professor green lit it because it was about cognition,
| emotion and we did have a lecture on how intuition worked in the
| brain.
|
| That assignment has been life changing for me. Before it, I
| didn't really know much about how to train my intuition.
| Afterwards, I had an idea.
|
| The assignment has been a long time ago, but what has remained in
| my mind is that:
|
| 1. Your intuition can only be trusted when you're an expert on
| something - or at least have some experience.
|
| 2. The experience needs to have enough volume and enough
| regularity. Think chess, but poker is fine too. With poker you
| just need more examples but ultimately there's regularity in the
| game. It's just more fuzzy. However, the literature showed that
| getting expertise/experience in something like clinical
| psychology can be way tougher as a clinical psychologist sees a
| low amount of patients (not thousands but dozens) and many
| clinical diagnoses are fuzzy in unpredictable ways as we have
| little clue with many conditions how things are caused or if
| we're even talking about the same thing inside a particular
| condition (e.g. many misdiagnoses happen).
|
| 3. Experience is narrow. You think you're a people person? Sure,
| but if you've only been a people person in the US, it won't
| transfer well to other cultures. Your intuition will fool you.
| There's a relearning period needed there.
|
| 4. You can strengthen to feel your intuition by enhancing your
| interoceptive awareness. This can be done by mindfulness
| meditation.
|
| Yea, that's it? I think?
|
| It's in part based on the work of Kahneman and Klein. Not the pop
| psychology books but their actual academic work. It's also based
| on some neuroscience that other researchers did. I vaguely
| remember something about beginner and expert Shogi players
| (Japanese chess).
|
| [1] https://melvinroest.github.io/articles/intuition.pdf
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to
| the title.
|
| :) Yes, but it's not every day that someone also follows up
| with a paper.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Sounds like an attempt to analyze the very thing the article
| claims should not be analyzed.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Interesting HN post today on Zarathustrian philosophy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1t0hrl4pE
|
| Are gut feelings naturally based on one's moralities or sense of
| justice? Are leaders typically moralistic in their decisions?
|
| Chris Hitchins would probably argue that morals are innate--but
| what about in business? What if your gut feeling is based on some
| unjust yet common practices? Does that make you a "better"
| leader?
|
| Just tossing this out there...
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers
| one after another, day after day. Some degree of self-control is
| probably warranted.
| biorach wrote:
| Come on, that's not what they're talking about at all.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| It's exactly what they are talking about. Metaphorical or
| literal, gut feelings can become wildly miscalibrated, e.g.
| due to food going from scarce to common. Introspection and
| discipline are needed to keep it from going terribly wrong,
| and while diet is a good example and riffs off the metaphor
| it absolutely applies to other gut instincts too.
| spython wrote:
| Honestly, my gut is much less welcoming to the idea of me
| visiting McDonalds than my mouth.
|
| My gut says "I will feel bad", my mouth screams "tastebuds
| demand an experience!"
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Right, and there are better burgers than McDonalds. My point
| here is just to bring up an example of instincts getting
| horribly miscalibrated in a way that highlights the need for
| thoughtfulness and self-control.
|
| Make no mistake, the term self-control doesn't just apply to
| food instincts, it applies to people instincts too. Your
| instincts want you to go around assuming that ugly people are
| bad and pretty people are good, but if you avoid every uggo
| you're gonna miss out (especially in tech) and if you trust
| every handsome salesman you meet you're gonna get rolled.
| Thoughtfulness and self-control are always warranted.
| spython wrote:
| You can calibrate your gut feeling, though. You do it,
| every day, as you go through life. You get a gut feeling
| that a specific person might be difficult, and you can
| override it consciously.
|
| But I often find that the "gut" feeling is more often
| right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact
| that it takes hundreds of little things into account and
| models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling
| you will have in the end as "gut feeling". Your own black
| box of neural networks in your gut.
| slashdave wrote:
| On the contrary, my gut feelings tell me that eating a lot at
| McDonalds will make me sick.
| bdamm wrote:
| Exactly. This trope gets repeated all the time about "listen to
| your inner voice" or "gut feelings" and we hardly ever talk
| about the alternatives. My gut tells me all kinds of things,
| sometimes contradictory things depending on the time of day.
| And its all but impossible to discern the difference between
| what my "gut" is telling me vs what the little voice in my head
| is telling me, which may very well be at odds. Plus all this is
| corrupted by "dopamine chasing" behaviors, or the equivalent.
| Add on top of that people for whom their gut instincts may have
| led them into pain in the past. It's not simple at all.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds
| cheeseburgers one after another, day after day.
|
| Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is
| talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.
|
| Your intuition is probably telling you eating McDonalds
| cheeseburgers day after day is a mistake even while the scales
| are telling you it is fine.
| tetha wrote:
| Mh. I'm treating too many things like chess, but in chess,
| intuition of very competent players tends to be deep pattern
| recognition. This kind of positive or constructive intuition in a
| concrete context warrants analysis imo.
|
| This analysis allows discovery of the patterns recognized by the
| competent person, which teaches. The master level player
| calculates a couple of moves, and then ends up worried about a
| tactical threat. That's a useful way to think to learn about.
|
| I have the same thing in tech. I can usually and pretty quickly
| figure out in what area and component an issue would be in. Our
| new colleagues have developed a habit of asking Why. And this has
| led to great knowledge sharing sessions and has in fact taught me
| a few things as well.
|
| Though at the same time, among the technical leaders of the
| company, we've started to accept negative intuition without much
| explanation as well. If two or three people with decades of
| experience don't feel good about a decision, that's a bad thing.
| Even if they cannot voice that in a concrete way so far. Hiring
| is similar - an actual, but not necessarily concrete or
| constructive Nay out of 3 is a Nay overall.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > Contrary to common wisdom, which suggests using analysis to
| verify gut feelings, intuition often works better as a final
| check on analytical decisions.
|
| This doesn't mean not to analyze your gut feelings. I don't see
| where the author makes this case at all. You can do both. You can
| pay attention to your gut feeling as a final check on analytic
| decisions _and_ you can try to understand where that gut feeling
| is coming from (and in fact I believe you should).
| yokto wrote:
| This reminds me of this quote I love:
|
| > "[They] placed too much weight on the introspections that they
| generated at that moment in time, and thus lost sight of their
| more enduring attitudes." [1]
|
| The quote refers to this study [2] in which subjects had to chose
| a poster to take home. The group who was instructed to think
| about their reasons for their initial choice, and had the option
| to change it, were less satisfied with it three weeks later. As
| the abstract says:
|
| > When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on
| attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem
| like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their
| initial evaluations.
|
| This suggests that satisfaction is more correlated with initial
| gut feeling than reasoning, at least for aesthetic choices, but I
| think in many other cases as well.
|
| [1] https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2
|
| [2]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729319301...
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I use my intuition a lot and have learned to listen to it.
| Sometimes though, it sucks when you intuit something, turn out to
| be correct, and you don't really have a good explanation to your
| peers as to why you knew it was correct. I remember one time in
| my career, we knew we had a rogue server somewhere (out of
| probably 100k+) we had to decommission but no one in the org knew
| where it was and everyone that did had long been gone. All we
| knew was that it was out there in the stack somewhere, because
| we'd see the effects of its existence elsewhere in the metrics,
| but this thing was like a complete ghost. All we had to go on in
| the end was nginx logs that had hundreds of thousands of IP
| addresses in them, go through them one at a time with a script
| and run a certain curl to it, and hope we got lucky it was the
| one we wanted. Even then there was a ton of false positives.
|
| I was skimming through it on a call and a certain address just
| popped out to me. I said "that's the one, I'm pretty sure I've
| seen that before." I had no real reason to believe this, I just
| had a very strong feeling that I recognized it from somewhere and
| felt like it was the right one. Sure enough it was. People on the
| call wanted to know how I knew, and I couldn't really describe
| it, it was just pure gut. That doesn't really translate well in a
| professional setting, people will think you're weird or
| withholding/hiding something.
| kqr wrote:
| Isn't this the sort of thing e.g. Klein researches? You can
| read up on that to get better terminology to discuss your
| intuition in terms of.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| One of my personal favorite reasons to yell at the sky is the
| legions of managers who style themselves as "leaders", who show
| up to provide exactly zero leadership (at best), and actively
| derail projects led by anyone other than them.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| Reminds me of this article that seems disappeared from web, so
| here my copy:
|
| https://www.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftwar...
|
| "Warm fuzzies aren't in the spec."
| zug_zug wrote:
| Eh, the more I think about it though the more I can think of
| times that "Going by my gut" when my brain and gut disagreed
| where my gut was wrong.
|
| Like suppose you're talking to somebody over text and your gut
| says they're being an asshole, but your brain is rereading what
| they say and can't find anything specific to call out.
|
| Which is correct?
|
| Well, I've found that the gut is systematically unreliable in a
| number of situations... Are you in a bad mood for example? They
| say never go food shopping when you're hungry.
|
| Not to say mind > gut, because that's just as stupid as saying
| gut > mind. The point is that there are dozens of variables
| (variables like mood) we need to learn in such evaluations, and
| generalizations can rarely be useful.
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