What smart people do not know

"Your gut instincts infiltrate your innermost thoughts even when you believe you are being utterly rational. They shape how you frame problems and the options you consider. They inspire you to consult some people but not others, to collect data in some areas but not others, and to take some decisions seriously but not others. Yet while you can’t evade these emotions, you can understand and control them."  McKinsey Classics

McKinsey is probably the most respected consulting company worldwide. They only hire top guns from prestigious universities. The first 2 statements are right on, but then their point becomes error. The last sentence makes a leap of deceit and is dead wrong. Intuition is not emotion. Intuition is a material form of an abstract reality called faith and faith does overwhelm how we think and feel, it is a major influence to knowledge.

Faith is conclusive evidence we cannot observe, therefore we cannot prove. We accept unseen evidence as true because there is a mechanism in the human condition that relies on unobserved knowledge. This mechanism is not emotion. It is not how we feel. It is a thought or idea that flows from our soul to our mind. Sometimes we call it conscience, or revelation, or inner voice or in this case, "gut instinct."

It is true we cannot trust our emotions, they can deceive us. But we also cannot fully trust science. There are enormous biases and limits built in to the rational process of scientific inference. There's a new book out that calls "big data" the "the weapon of MATH destruction". The author claims humans produce flawed and biased algorithms and then use them to tease their idea of truth out of data for their own purposes.

Many smart people want to discount and dismiss faith, so they say it is just an emotion that needs to be controlled. The fact is no one, even smart scientists, operates without a reliance on faith. This is not and never will be the issue. Yet, many want us to think faith is weak and not helpful in decision-making.

While controlling our emotions is good advice, so is controlling our biases. But good decision-making is never about controlling the influence of faith. Ultimately, good decision-making is not about marginalizing faith, but ensuring the target of our faith aligns with "true north". Often we do not have a compass with us, but if we instinctively know where north is, the direction we go will be right. If not, it won't. Its the validity of the evidence in knowledge we cannot observe, but we trust, that will determine the effects of our decisions, nothing more and nothing less. "What does your heart tell you" is not about emotion, but about faith.

But, smart people who win by being smarter really don't want you to know this. So they misdirect you to ponder your emotions and discount your faith. Don't let them trick you .....