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Comment by gorjusborg | Hacker News Reader

Oh hell yes.

The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine.

To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work.

Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why.

Trusting our gut is underrated.

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Emotions are guidance, not binding. If you are not able to manage them on your own (an important aspect of adulthood), they will get into your way at some point in life. Yes, they are real, but acting on your emotions unconditionally is dangerous when you are in a position of responsibility or power.

I didn’t get a sense from the article or post you’re replying to that acting on emotion unconditionally was desirable.

for that matter, unconditional anything is dangerous

unconditional rationalism seem to lead to a meaningless life (i.e. the shitty kind of nihilism)

unconditionally doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental gymnastics to let some symbolic-computable method dictate what we do... to follow this unconditionally is just as dumb as acting only on one's emotions

we have (are able to do) both; so let's use both.

>doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental

It's best if we replace "rational" for "what I think makes sense" or "what I think is the best course of action", etc...

Which is, of course, self-evidently what one should do.

"Acting rational" is optimizing one's utility function to the best of their abilities and knowledge. It says nothing about the utility function itself, and using unconscious/emotional/instinctive thinking leads to better results for their appropriate places (including figuring out the utility function/what you care about)

You don't do mathematics to catch a ball thrown at you.

A good piece of advice I've heard is that our goal should be to tune our intuitions so they can be reliable. Gut feelings are sometimes wrong and thus shouldn't be binding, but if we can improve their accuracy they can be extremely, extremely helpful.

Is there evidence that we can train our intuitions? I'm reminded of the expert art assessor in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" who immediately knew a sculpture was a forgery by gut instinct. (I know Gladwell's writing isn't often held in high regard, but it's a good illustration for my question). Surely, we aren't inborn with the ability to assess art validity, implying it's a trainable 'instinct'.

Don't we also recognize a horse by "gut instinct" or intuition? It is not that the jot down notes to make up our mind between a horse and a zebra. What we instantaneously identify does not come from nowhere, it is that our pattern recognition happens below our conscience. And this move from conscious to other-than-conscious happens for any simple or complex skill, when the latter is of course properly practiced, which means, most often, a lot.

Is the example provided by Gladwell different from the instance of "something is off" that many of us had when we got to our home and something, a plant, a chair, or something barely noticeable like a medal, had been moved elsewhere, and we could not explain why our "off" button went off?

If many among us had spent a lot of time dealing with art and forged art we would have acquired, conditioned on our "talent", similar "gut feelings" with respect to original and forged art.

"Optimizing for feelings" as suggested by the article is not about guiding your decisions purely on emotions; it's about designing products or services taking them into account.

When you average over the range of users, conveying the right emotions is an important feature on itself, even if it's not a functional requirement; a product that elicits positive feelings will be better that one that engenders negative ones. Developers ignore this tenet at their own risk, often creating functionally correct programs that their users hate to use because of their "death by 100 papercuts" interfaces.

UX people know that emotionally positive interfaces work better than equivalent ugly and cumbersome interfaces. Marketing people live their entire careers on generating those positive feelings artificially. Integrating into product and service design the creation of positive feelings of the kind that benefit users would be something that is beneficial to all of us, rather than the usual approach of maximising profits by capturing and directing customer expectations to profit-maximising environments.

I was raised to believe that emotions / "feelings" were something that happens to you (being human and all that) due to chemicals in your brain and body, and you cannot entirely control that aspect of things, but that your actions are indeed a thing you do have control over, and that falls entirely upon each individual human to control for themselves, despite any other factors such as emotion. While you may not easily be able to choose how you feel, you can choose what you do, and how you act or react. Emotion can as you say "guide", but cannot force your actions. That's all on you (or me, or anyone else).

I especially agree with your final statement there about the dangers when in a position of responsibility or "power". It's those times when people really should strive harder than usual to fall back on logic and facts despite any emotional reactions they may be leaning toward, although if the emotion they're feeling is "empathy", they might want to let at least a little of that leak through and "guide" their logical response to some degree.

> your actions are indeed a thing you do have control over,

And one's thoughts, which also affect the feelings

Meditation = a bit practicing being in control over one's thoughts?

Probably there are as many emotional reactions to some given aspect of software as there are people. How do you optimize for every individual?

You take cues from our friends in the marketing department. You don’t optimize for everyone. You niche down to the exact group of people you want to optimize for, find their commonalities, and optimize for those.

My 'angle' on this is about emotion of people working on the software project. If what you are building feels wrong, it probably is. Sure, some clever market-speak might be able to neutralize that emotion by showing a more flattering angle, but the initial reaction is usually the correct one; your conscious mind just hasn't caught up yet.

If companies and individuals followed their intuition rather than being a slave to a paycheck, we'd likely not have the many of the dark patterns and creep-tech we have now. People ultimately choose to implement their own dystopia, a few individuals cannot do it all with their own hands. People should listen to their conscience and vote with their feet.

However, it isn't solely the responsibility of the individuals involved to put the brakes on bad, unethical software. It is also up to governments to ensure that people feel safe to challenge their employer. It is also up to companies to foster a culture of doing right, then profiting, rather than profit at any cost.

I'll go ahead and give the U.S. government and corporations an F grade on that right now.

Personas?

https://www.nngroup.com/topic/personas/

Ignoring a person and self's irrational and emotional side is one of the most irrational quirks of so-called rationalists.

The other side of it is mediocrity.

Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way.

Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it.

Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds.

I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.

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