But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interaction… like if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with them… you might want to avoid that.

In such cases, it seems to me that a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality. For example:

• If someone asks you to join a new business venture, verify that they are reliable by asking around, check their track record of past ventures, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, etc.
• If someone asks you out (and you find them attractive or are otherwise inclined to accept; otherwise, vibes don’t matter, you just say “no thanks”), stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.
• If you’re considering sharing something private with someone you don’t know well, don’t.

These approaches work well with people you get bad vibes from and also with people you get good vibes from.

In short: trust, but verify.

I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.

Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.

It seems like the most common situation when you'd ignore bad vibes would be when a trait like this confuses your signals. When you identify a negative trait that "feels more obvious", especially if it's socially taboo to be prejudiced against (race, ethnicity/accent, LGBT-status, mental/physical disability), this can interfere with your ability to correctly interpret other evidence (including "vibes"), so that it's very easy to overcompensate the other way. 

The classic example from women's self-defence classes: you enter an enclosed space (e.g. a lift) with a man of a particular ethnicity who makes you instantly nervous. You consider not getting in, but then think "oh, this must just be his ethnicity I'm reacting to", castigate yourself for your prejudice, ignore the bad vibes, get in any way, and it turns out he was dodgy. 

Or a neuro-atypical colleague suggests a small business venture in a manner that would normally raise red flags. You get "bad vibes", but you interpret this as irrational prejudice against autistic behaviour traits, so you go along with it despite your vibes. Only later do you realise that your red flags were real, and your correction for prejudice was adding unnecessary noise into your decision-making.

I don't know whether there's evidence to back this up, but my sense is that "correction for potential prejudice" would be the major source of error here, especially among people who are more reflective.

There's a version of this that's directional advice: if you get a "bad vibe" from someone, how strongly should this influence your actions towards them? Like all directional advice, whether it's correct or incorrect depends on your starting point. Too little influence, and you'll find yourself surrounded by bad characters; too much, and you'll find yourself in a conformism bubble. The details of what does and doesn't trigger your "bad vibe" feeling matters a lot; the better calibrated it is, the more you should trust it.

There's a slightly more nuanced version, which is if you get a "bad vibe" from someone, do you promote it to attention and think explicitly about what it might mean, and how do you relate to those thoughts?

I think for many people, that kind of explicit thinking is somewhat hazardous, because it allows red flags to be explained away in ways that they shouldn't be. To take a comically exaggerated example that nevertheless literally happened: There was someone who described themself as a Sith Lord and wears robes. If you engage with that using only subconscious "vibe" reasoning, you would have avoided them. If you engaged with that using verbal reasoning, they might convince you that "Sith" is just a flavorful way of saying anti-authoritarianism, and also that it's a "religion" and you're not supposed to "discriminate". Or, phrased slightly differently: verbal thinking increases the surface area through which you can get hacked.

I think I usually understand why when I get bad vibes from someone.

1. Yoga sex cults have a bad track record for turning out to be abusive. So, if I know the guy is in some kind of yoga sex cult, I am going to suspect that there will eventually be some sort of sex scandal, even if I don’t have evidence for the exact specifics.
2. Given some past examples, I’ve seen, I now have a “tip of the iceberg” theory for bad behaviour. Like, if I know the guy has done some bad stuff, it is statistically likely that he’s also involved in some other bad stuff that I wasn’t in a position to observe,

when I first encountered Eliezer Yudkowsky, I actually had a bad vibe about him. If I’d followed that feeling, I would’ve missed out on learning from one of the authors who has helped me a lot.

Have you ever been completely wrong about a bad vibe? If so, what did you learn from it?

Thanks for the essay! I really appreciate occasional reminders of the importance of not automatically discarding intuitions, feelings, or non-explicit thoughts. These can often carry valuable information that might not be immediately accessible to our conscious reasoning.

I’ve had a few experiences with “vibe checking,” and over time, my reflex has evolved into asking myself: What did my unconscious notice that led to this heuristic? This framing helps me align my intuitions with explicit evaluation criteria, comparing what I feel to what I consciously understand about the situation or person. When I can pinpoint the source of a vibe, I consciously choose whether to endorse or override it. If the source remains unclear, I tend to default to an “evolutionary psychology” perspective—assuming that my intuitions evolved to help me in an ancestral context, and unless I know a specific instinct is maladaptive in this situation, I err on the side of caution.

I’ve had a few recent experiences that seem relevant to the topic. I recently changed environments (new workplace) and have been introducing “rationality concepts” to someone with no prior knowledge of the topic. In this process, I've been questionned on my belief about the world my value and of possible prejudice caused by these opinions. 

Here are two recent cases where I noticed my own heuristics in action:

1. Assigning roles based on physical tasks: When thinking of who to call to move furniture, I felt it more natural to involve “men” (many cis, one trans) despite the trans man not being particularly buff. This prompted me to examine whether I held a prejudice linking masculinity to physical strength. Upon reflection, I realized I was evaluating a mix of two factors: physical strength and grit. I associate grit—perseverance and toughness—more strongly with masculinity, which heavily influenced my selection process. This realization helped me separate the two traits and recognize how much weight I was giving to perceived grit over physical attributes (and my belief that both of these are correlated to "men/male" and my brain took a short-cut)..

2. Epistemic and expertise biases: I noticed that in some interactions (depends on topic & interlocutor), I don’t expect my interlocutors to spot inconsistencies or teach me something new about a belief I have. This led me to examine whether I was holding a prejudice toward certain groups or individuals. On reflection, I realized I tend to assess two dimensions in others:

   • Epistemic clarity: Their ability to articulate a clear, internally consistent worldview, along with their confidence calibration.
   • Expertise: Whether they’ve been exposed to topics I haven’t and have synthesized those experiences into insights I find valuable.

   These assessments aren’t necessarily prejudicial, but they are heuristics that shape my expectations of others. Recognizing this has helped me question whether these assumptions are fair and whether I might be missing out on valuable perspectives. I will try to keep that way of thinking a habit of mine (hopefully it will stick !)

I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on this topic and the discussion it has sparked. It’s fascinating to unpack these layers of intuition, especially when they can guide or mislead in subtle ways.

I don’t have any rigorous principled argument for this, other than just the empirical personal observation that ignoring the feeling usually seems to be a mistake.

Likewise only empirical personal observation, but having interviewed and hired (or not) a lot of people. I would say I have got better over time - and separating first impression/prejudice from vibe is mostly achievable. And vibe definitely counts and is valid. 

There are also people who I trust to be much better than me at hiring good people, and they also consider vibe valid (but are also very rigorous about applying wide ranging interview&selection methods).... And there are people I trust to be awful at choosing people!

Normally though I would say you can find some way to put that vibe into a more specific concern/worry. And then you can normally create some form of question or test that might give a little more data on whether your concern is valid. 

Clearly not all situations give the luxury of devising such a thing, but often just a couple of minutes of conversation can be enough. 

Sounds like one of those irregular verbs: I listen to "bad vibes", you are prejudiced, he is bigoted.

Does anyone have any generally helpful advice for someone who doesn't really get vibes? Should I just continue to be more timid than normal, or is there a helpful heuristic I can use (aside from the 'don't talk to strangers, don't join MLM's, be wary of things that are too good to be true' stuff that our parents tell us at a young age.)

Ignoring everything underneath the title, this advice makes more convenient what people wanted to do anyway, changing nothing about the typical quality of the implementation; not the cruel extent nor the unjust kind of it. "Oh, not even rationalists will object? Excellent."

It would fall harshest on those who are most small, most libertarian, and most habitually argumentative, and not on dogmatic censors, nor coercive aesthetic isolationists, nor speech duressors.