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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And one's thoughts, which also affect the feelings
Meditation = a bit practicing being in control over one's thoughts?