Most of us like the fantasy that if we stop thinking, or stop thinking so much, and let things flow naturally, everything will turn out fine. In reality, sometimes the first impulse is the best, other times the greatest deliberation is best, there are many spaces in between, and I know of no recipe for telling reliably which situation is which.

In Macbeth, William Shakespeare's rapidly falling hero loses what he considered a good opportunity and in a moment of enlightenment decides to hesitate no more. Instead, he will now put into effect his first impulse immediately before the moment can pass. First order of business: send soldiers over to the castle of one of his commanders where they'll kill everyone inside, including women and children. This is too much even for Lady Macbeth, who'd goaded him into his first murder, and it's pretty much the final straw for them both. Only the most craven of cronies follow them from there. Soon they are both dead and utterly disgraced.

We all know Macbeth shouldn't have acted that way, whether he considered it "genuine" or "brave" or "his true self" or anything else. But if it really was what felt natural in that moment, how do we distinguish? Any list of moral injunctions quickly becomes simply a list. "Always follow your instincts EXCEPT" is not in the spirit of "always follow your instincts," and "be your true self EXCEPT" is not in the spirit of "be your true self."

Our brains are highly parallel, made of about 86 billion neurons running side by side, communicating sporadically (for them) but extensively. We cannot describe 86 billion lines of thought at once, however simple each might be. Our senses and instincts supply us with rapid interpretations and small sets of options tuned to these. Often this works relatively well, and experience improves the auto-interpretations and sets of options. But we must make ourselves aware that the system works via zillions of shortcuts that result in many biases. "I always follow my gut" can only mean "I'm quite biased and could be less so."

Various lines of research suggest that when we make decisions holistically - by intuition, instinct, feeling - rather than deliberatingly and logically, we often make better decisions. When I say "often," I should probably say "very often" or even "usually." As mentioned earlier, 86 billion lines of thinking can't really be tracked at once. Even if each is highly fallible and nigh nonsensical, the sum of their efforts may actually be quite good. This, in part, is the fabled value of believing in yourself, trusting your instincts, and so on.

It's also, I would argue, a lot of the value of "having faith," even in a religious sense. One function of religion, and a core one, has most likely been giving people a sort of permission to worry less and let things flow. The religion provides a set of pointers - an eightfold path, ten commandments, five pillars, mystery of the way with social commentary to boot, etc - to keep "just let things flow" from becoming too problematic the way it did for Macbeth.

This is useful, but I would argue that it is not the end of the story.

Sometimes, we have also found, a great deal of what Edgar Poe's detective Dupin called "ratiocination" - in other words, thinking deeply and logically - is exactly what the doctor called for. Science through the centuries has roundly disproved the notion that mere mystery, mere trust, mere acting natural, was all we could ever need. It turns out figuring shit out is hard work, and that kind of "overthinking" is tremendously useful both for individuals and for society.

More recently, Barack Obama was a proponent of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I haven't read it (yet), but I gather it's about this very topic. Sometimes our best bet is to turn off explicit "thinking" and go with the parallel votes of our parliament of neurons. Other times, the best bet is to break things down, break things down some more, assess, weigh, discuss, second guess, third guess, gather more clues, filter them for reliability, and on and on, practically as much as you can bear and perhaps a little more; don't overlook the power of outsourcing.

Another book I haven't read and should is The Wisdom of Crowds. We all know mob rule is hardly ideal, or most of us anyway (I won't speak for the anarchists), but there are certainly times when groups of people, just average people, are likely to do better than any one person, even a panel of experts. How can we tell the difference? It's a related problem. It's again parallel versus serial thinking, group versus individual. Multiple lines versus one step at a time.

The power of parallelism explains why instinct and crowds often know better than careful analysis or experts. But the power of parallelism is not magic. It is very much within the realm of science. It is not infinite. It is not immune to study.

Just because going on instinct often works out, and in some situations might even be relied on to work better than trying to use logic, does not mean that this approach is always better. Nor does it mean the parallel paths could never be split out into single chains of logic. We should not, in my opinion, turn it into a religion. Windex may be better at cleaning your windows than alternatives you've tried; you might even have some research backing that up; but please let's refrain from gathering at altars to Windex.

For some of you, this might give another angle on why I object to certain kinds of popular advice - along the lines of you must be confident, stop caring what anyone thinks, always trust your gut, just be yourself, etc. These directives help by putting us into parallel frames of mind, but shutting off logic is far from a panacea, and sometimes - let's remember Macbeth a moment, again - it's an atrocious idea.

Trump's problem is less that he's insecure than that he's too constantly confident. People who believe confidence is equivalent to goodness or admirability have trouble recognizing that the Trumpian kind, the vaguely magnetic and vaguely disgusting hubris that make people like him "successful," is, nevertheless, an *excess* of confidence rather than, per se, toxic insecurity. Chalking the negative consequences up to low self-esteem is a rationalization.

Parallelism is not always the answer, just as trying to use logic is not always the answer.

So far I have attempted to - and perhaps have - cracked the "sacred cow" of "always go with your gut" and related urgings to get married to parallelism and only parallelism. But what can replace it, other than a creeping worry that whichever way we approach a problem, we're doing it wrong?

Well, I cited two books that might have useful suggestions I don't know about.

Very approximately, it's art versus science. If I'm improvising music, I go with my instantaneous feelings; that's a vibe I cultivate, and the more I do, the better my playing seems to get (more or less). Something very similar seems true of dancing. These are modes of self-expression. There isn't really a wrong way to play, and provided you aren't hurting anyone, there isn't really a wrong way to dance. Trusting your own sense makes your movements more coherent, and this tends to make them more elegant and emotional as well. On the other hand, how you feel really makes no difference to whether your math work is correct.

Yet this does not mean no physics is in art and no feeling is in math. The Yin-Yang isn't a terrible representation of parallel/serial dualism. My spontaneous music would be much worse if I hadn't, in other moments, slaved over chords and scales and principles of harmony and which note is the "right" next note in this famous piece I love and so on. Meanwhile, my math wouldn't math if I didn't use my imagination. Mathematicians' brains look a lot like jazz musicians' brains when they're at work. Left-brain versus right-brain is too simple.

Are we talking about a matter of opinion? Something subjective? Which job or college or club is "right" for you? Parallel is more indicated. What about something objective? Something that just is, regardless of how anyone feels about it? Serial is more indicated.

Most of life is some combination.

To let things flow, it really helps not to be worrying, and so as not to be worrying, we may make general reassurances to ourselves that are not, in point of fact, really true. "Everything will be fine!" When has that actually been true overall? "God is protecting you!" Is he, now? Probably not particularly. Take a look at other lives. Is God protecting them? I see a lot of suffering and death, much of it radically unfair, so unfair it almost seems to be rubbing the point in to us all that the universe insists on not being fair. That doesn't feel like godly protection.

Yet we tell ourselves these comforting things to help our minds settle into parallel operations that often work out quite well for us, as they evolved to.

The view above seems, to me, more detailed, more plausible, and more explanatory than what I hear day to day. It is a result of thinking both fast and slow.

In some ways, religion can be explained by one simple thing: communication is extremely important for humans. To decipher messages, our brains are closely attuned to correspondences. When certain flavors of pattern are detected, we try to read what is being said to us. These patterns may show up - we'd then call them coincidences - when no one is speaking. Chance will produce some naturally. Our brains are still triggered, on this primordial level, to search for a message. We feel as if someone is talking to us, even watching us, when no one is there.

It's the same broad class of phenomena as deja vu: you didn't actually experience an exactly matching situation before, but that *feeling* has been triggered. Deja vu seems to happen when an *element*, some small piece, of the situation is familiar but you can't identify which one; the feeling of familiarity can then infuse and even overwhelm the gestalt. Similarly, coincidences that make us wonder whether they were somehow intended can give us the conviction that they *were*. Therefore, the feeling goes, *someone* must be there to have *intended* them for us. Someone extremely highly informed and aware of everything, to be able to arrange for this special moment, this message we have received from beyond.

Imagine you're walking in the woods. You hear a sharp rustle behind you. What's more evolutionarily sensible:

1) to assume no one is there

2) to assume someone is there

If you guessed 2, I think you got the right answer. We evolved to *assume*, for safety or other important reasons, that someone is there when we experience certain categories of sensation.

We know some of these will happen at random without anyone being there. And we can posit that evolution will have given zillions of people the *feeling* that someone was there when no one was there.

We can also guess that some of those people will continue to believe their initial hunch, even when no clear evidence follows.

I often think of the wind. The wind will have been one of the phenomena *most* responsible for giving creatures - many animals before us, not just us - the *feeling* that someone was there when no one was there. It makes good evolutionary sense to be able to filter this well, but wind is highly variable and "inventive," so it'll fool *anyone* some of the time.

Now imagine you are a deer, or a monkey. You don't have the same critical thinking skills. Maybe when you hear the wind, or the sharp rustle, and you turn around, your initial feeling is that someone is there, but then when you see nothing more, you simply assume they have left and you move on with your day.

That is, you might not have particularly clear thinking about how it works. And, contrary to the usual assumptions, you, as an animal, might have rather an animistic view of nature. That is, you might well think the wind and rain and streams and light above and so on are changes possessed of a certain amount of sentience, like yours or even greater. They might self-evidently be spirits. Or gods.

I suspect a number of animals have feelings we might call religious.

Or maybe our hyperspecialization in communication enhances this phenomenon and sets us apart, gives us much more of a feeling of hiding sentiences.

I have a sympathetic view about all this. I too have such feelings, and they're interesting. And am I a perfect gauge of when there is and there is not someone there? No. I'm also limited in how much I can say for sure. My filter and everyone else's is finite. It cannot be perfect.

But that just means I could be wrong about anything and so could you.

The argument I'm making here could be extended, but I think it's sufficient to explain a lot.

The usual view of the political spectrum is this kind of smooth dichotomy, almost a yin-yang emblem of balance. There's one side, there's the other side, there's a lot in the middle, and then there's the "horseshoe theory" connection between the two far ends, almost like a wormhole.

There are several problems with this view.

1) Politics isn't unidimensional. There are more dimensions, several very well known and influential.

2) Even if we zoom in on this conservative-liberal essence, it's probably not accurate to represent the idea as a single variable on a spectrum.

3) Depicting conservative-liberal as a spectrum implies that the ends are complementary and equally valid.

What happens when 3 fails, for example when one end of the spectrum develops an aversion to information, science, education, empathy, etc?

Now you've got two sides, still, but one of them is frequently or largely wrong. Yet there's this illusion that both have a lot to offer, even are equally valid.

I'm for equality and egalitarianism, but I'm not for telling people their delusions are real.

Color makes up so much of vision, yet it seems mnemonic. For example, this red colander from the dollar store and these red apples near it are about the same color, but the similarity is superficial. What makes the fruit skin red and the plastic red are not the same. While the redness of the apples tells me a smidge about ripeness, the redness of the colander tells me nothing of the sort; it's a decoration. The colander is red for a sensory pleasure of redness. We seem to use color to help us distinguish among items, but not, day to day, to tell us in absolute terms what they comprise.

When we go for a walk and look at things, their colors often tell us very little. If we were more scientific, the colors might help us identify some materials on a molecular level. But the colors in themselves do not. Objects that reflect red do not seem to share anything else with each other, in general.

When we look out into the universe, the overview is a little different. Wavelengths are our best clues for identifying what elements and compounds our telescopes pick up. The complexity of materials we can infer out there is lower. Around us here on Earth, colors help us (like thumbprints) sort objects and materials yet tell us little to nothing about their character. White may evoke purity for some, oppression for others; even for the same people and same items, these reactions may be evoked at different times. When I see blue sky and blueberries, the similarity of hue tells me nothing, so far as I can see. Yet I know that clear daytime skies and the light dusty patches on those berries look similar, despite, I think, having nothing in common beyond a relatively small wavelength gap.

A price tag does not accurately measure the value of anything.

Most of us accept this on some level, yet we spend lots of time living as if prices do accurately reflect value.

And some of us are deceived entirely. There are monetary fundamentalists among us.

It isn't that we shouldn't have prices or money, but given that neither actually reflects value - does not reflect it either accurately or precisely - it is rather dangerous to encourage an illusion otherwise. That wouldn't be like an illusion in the movie theater, where you can forget you're watching a movie but five minutes later walk out, step into your car, and drive away, no crazier than before. When we believe money truly reflects value, some truly horrible things happen: children starve, diseases aren't treated, people freeze sleeping on the street, etc.

People make a big deal about not caring what anyone thinks, and then they become spiteful dolts over the silliest things. It's as if what they really want is to warn others not to care what they think, so they can opine recklessly in reaction to others. The old two-way street clogs up. Many seem, by this prosaic "not caring" heroism, to be admitting their own opinions tend toward moronic jerks of the knee.

I care what people think, and that's in part because my thoughts are worth something; I want people to care what I think in turn, given that I care what they think.

It isn't that *I* think it, or that I *think* it, but that I have put a lot of care into the thought. That is why I think others should care, and it is why I care.

When there's some issue that's polarized, people tend to model this mentally in "black and white," ie, binary. That mistake drives a lot of polarization. And it usually is, in fact, a mistake.

I'd say when you're considering A or B, it would be much better to think of it as a qubit rather than a bit.

It isn't ALL A, NO B versus ALL B, NO A, usually. Not necessarily. It could be A. It could be B. It could be A and B in different amounts or at different times (or for different entities or goals). It could be neither A nor B. It could be 50% A, 1% B. It could be 100% A, 100% B. It could be 0% A, 0% B. Get it? This is how qubits work.

Even if the reality is 0% A, 100% B, it helps to understand why A might appear true, might seem like a more compelling explanation, might be easier to understand or remember. Just as we shouldn't think only in binary, it's also true that when we explain why an incorrect view is maintained by some people, we shouldn't only ascribe malicious motives, or only ascribe innocent ones.