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.

> 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.

On the contrary, my gut feelings tell me that eating a lot at McDonalds will make me sick.

Fun fact, the guy who made "supersize me" also had a crippling liquor addiction when he was filming it. I'm not saying it's great food but the perception that eating it for a month will make you ill is hilariously overblown.

Imho, I think a lot of people assume cheap food will make you sick because it's cheap and americans tend to moralize pricing. A balanced diet is obviously better for you, but the human body is extremely resilient to nutritional imbalances in the short term.

What tends to drive unhealthy trends linked to fast food (or other highly sugary or fatty foods) is just price point and ease of consumption. It's a lot easier to buy burgers than it is to figure out how to fit making rice and beans efficiently and tastily into your already busy lifestyle. Buying calorie-dense food that's easy to consume will always be attractive.

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!”

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.

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.

Come on, that's not what they're talking about at all.

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.