the sound of your own voice
When I was a child, I knew a girl my age named Lynn. I recall her as a sturdy, kind-hearted child with a generous nature, a little dull but impossible to dislike. She was the only Linda I knew. Today, when I meet someone named Lynn, I immediately associate her with those qualities. I know that there is no real correlation between that name and those qualities outside of my own childhood experience, but there’s that intuitive nudge that tells me that Lynns are OK. This intuition is false. There are plenty of Lynns in the world who are nothing like the Lynn in my mind. If I relied only on this intuition, this gut feeling that someone named Lynn will be friendly but dull, I could easily be led astray. We all have these built-in associations, spun from a lifetime of experiences. It’s impossible to be aware of all of them; if you think you have no unconscious biases, you are incorrect. This is, at root, the problem with “trusting your gut.” You don’t even know what is down there,...