Blink, Take 2 172
| Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | |
| author | Malcolm Gladwell |
| pages | 288 |
| publisher | Little, Brown |
| rating | 4 |
| reviewer | book_reader |
| ISBN | 0316172324 |
| summary | Over-rated and over-hyped; lukewarm anecdotes but no real meat. |
I wonder why is this book so popular. Any reasonably intelligent person, especially one with a penchant for Dilbert cartoons, already knows what the author is getting at. For example, the (fun) chapter on Warren Harding where Gladwell points out that this terrible president became president because he looked so presidential, is nothing more than the various Dilbert cartoons on "pointy haired boss" writ large. Scott Adams said it better in just a few panels: because we intuitively equate certain kinds of look and feel with positive qualities: tall people do better, beautiful people do better. Or, to put it another way: human beings tend to be shallow and stupid, and prone to letting their unconscious rule them at times when they shouldn't. Why? Because as he says: "our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated values." (As he points out, the number of women in orchestras went up dramatically when blind auditions became commonplace.) So trusting our intuitions may lead to incorrect conclusion. Except when they don't.
Forget Dilbert cartoons for a second: all this book does is bring attention to a phenomena that should surprise no one, least of all someone who has had any contact with research scientists, research mathematicians or inventive computer scientists. It simply tells us that smart people can have really good intuitions about problems that emerge in a "blink." He then coins a word for this phenomenon: "thin slicing." Whoopee, a new word for an old phenomenon. When I was a research mathematician, we used to call it a "sense of smell." I like our term better, much more concrete.
I can't remember how many times I was sitting in front, or for that matter was myself in front, of a blackboard, writing something down, and overheard people saying "that doesn't smell right," or "that smells good." If it didn't smell right, we took another path to the proof, or made another conjecture. If it did "smell right," we tried to prove it or look it up. How developed your sense of smell made up a great difference in what you accomplished. Trouble is, at least in mathematics, the field I am most familiar with, nobody ever figured out how to develop a person's sense of smell: that's why so few people ever did much research beyond their Ph.D. And nothing in this book will help you do so. Or, take chess: anyone who has watched grandmasters play speed chess and looked at the amazing beauty of some of these games knows that quick pattern matching is one of the keys to their amazing talents. Car salesman who can read people do very well, etc. Intuition is a great thing -- if it is good intuition.
Anyway, I am of course pleased to have discovered that what I and every scientist/mathematician had been doing, probably since the days of Archimedes, is "thin slicing." I'm being a little harsh actually: I did find parts of this book worthwhile: the parts where he describes attempts to algorithmatize good intuition (such as the amazing work by Paul Ekman on teaching the understanding of facial expressions so as to help us see what's really going on "in there"). Of course, this isn't new either: the expert-systems approach to artificial intelligence has tried to do this with varying amounts of success. He highlights what is actually one successful example of this approach in the book without pointing out that this is actually old hat: heart attack detection from the constellation of symptoms that will present themselves in an emergency room. What he doesn't say is that there have been many other interesting approaches for automating the intuitions great clinicians have about medical diagnostics that go back at least thirty years.
So there is some good to this book. We should try not to use the intuitions of the many, but rather understand, learn and ideally, algorithmitize the intuitions of the few. The only trouble is the importance of this was described far more beautifully 90 or so years ago by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in one simple paragraph from his great book "An Introduction to Mathematics:"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."
In sum, this is not so much a bad book as one that is much ado about nothing. "Know that your intuitions can be useful, but take your intuitions with a grain of salt" doesn't seem all that insightful to me. Come to think of it, I think my mother told me this.
I'd go further, actually: calling this is a book is simply to acknowledge its appearance between a single cover: it's essentially a collection of New Yorker articles with all the virtues and vices that that magazine is known for. All the sins of Gladwell's previous best seller The Tipping Point are written larger and are more obvious here. He describes, but gives little insight into the phenomena of intuition. Likewise, he rarely tells you how to take advantage of intuition when it arrives (the fatal flaw of the Tipping Point). Personally I suggest that we try harder to algorithmatize intuitive genius, by those rare individuals who have it, and thus follow Whitehead's intuition on how to make civilization progress.
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Score:3, Interesting)
A Good Read? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether or not Gladwell has any stunning insights, one reason for the book being popular is that he writes well and the book is entertaining.
I watched him talk about the book on C-SPAN [c-span.org], and enjoyed the talk. I also read and enjoyed his previous book (The Tipping Point), which was similarly enjoyable without being incredibly insightful or a great learning experience.
It's okay to have nonfiction that isn't dull or stodgey. It's even possible for such popular books to encourage people to read more about particular topics.
Fun is good!
Re:Right on the money (Score:3, Interesting)
They apply mental energy that overpowers the gut feeling and somehow you're now required to rationalize the jam texture on the scale of 1 to 10 (what the hell is texture anyway, and did you ever pay attention to it in your life?), so the decisions are changed.
NPR talk on Blink (Score:2, Interesting)
NPR has several mentions [npr.org] and talks [npr.org] on blink. He also spoke at the Commonwealth Club [bizjournals.com]
Overall, some of his discussions (for example, about the police shootings in New York or the effects on a high speed car chase on one's lack of judgement) were interesting and worthwhile to understand. But his inaccurate comments on the Getty Kouros [getty.edu] turned me off on the work. Factual inaccuracies have a tendency to make you, um, blink. He presented it as obvoius that it was a forgery, but the tremendous amount of scholarship to date cannot confirm or deny whether it was a genuine or forged work. It's hard to trust a work's conclusions when the facts they are based on ignore the truth.
Intuition: Just another (blackbox) data point (Score:5, Interesting)
But the value of intuition-provided data is hard to analyze. On the one hand, intuition does tap into many million years of the evolution of intelligent social animals. The subconscious mind runs some very impressive pattern recognition algorithms that can often recognize what the conscious, analytical mind cannot. On the otherhand, modern global technological civilization is a long way from pre-technical, tribal subsistence. Anyone who studies human decision making and cognition will become quickly aware of its rather severe limitations and curious quirks.
The core problem with intuition is that it seldom yields to analytical introspection. Intuition is a blackbox to the more rigorous processes of vetting and weighing data for more formal decision making processes. Thus, many people, especially people of a quantitive/analytical mindset, don't trust their intuition because they cannot analyze it. For better or worse, that makes the data provided by intuitive feelings suspect even if they are sometime 100% correct.
Tipping Point... (Score:3, Interesting)
"This is pop-psych trash at it's worst. I gave away my copy because I'm embarrassed to have people see it on my bookshelves."
Everytime I see his name I cringe.
Re:Ripping off Ayn Rand... sort off (Score:3, Interesting)
"I'm not conciously trying to decide each and every word I am typing (and mispelling - yes, I know)."
Hmm...not so sure about that. How could anyone misspell the word "arise" unless they were doing it deliberately? Looks like your example is bust
I hope that means you're lying - the alternative is rather scary
Oh and in response to your actual comment...Wouldn't there be some theoretical point at which you would actually start automizing these assessments? So, before you've automized such things, you would consciously look at someone's hair, nose size, height, hair color, facial expression, neatness, etc. in order to develop opinions about them? Only time this could happy is childhood...and, well, I don't know about that
Anyway, it reminds me of Hume's explanation for the emergence of cause and effect relationships - mainly, the habit of associating two things together (remember, Hume said that all knowledge comes from experience, as opposed to say Descartes who thought that the mind was the source of all knowledge).
One area that I found useful (Score:5, Interesting)
The author described the situation of how negative intuition can be managed. In the case of police officers, the shortening of time by rushing into a situation can turn an innocent man holding out a wallet into a perceived gunman. To counteract this, good police officers are trained to pull up behind a suspect, wait in the car to fill out reports, then walk up to the car, stand behind the driver's shoulder before asking for a driver's license and insurance.
Why all this time? To prevent the adrenaline/short bad decision making procedures from taking over and making a threat out of nothing.
So I'm still interested in reading the book to see what it says about using intuition controlling techniques to minimize bad decision making - but I can see the reviewers point that a good chunk of the book is going to be one long exercise of "duhhhhhh".
Re:Ripping off Ayn Rand... sort off (Score:1, Interesting)
Sometimes this works to an advantage, it prevents you from being caught up in a lot of hype or scams that other people seeing them for the first time fall prey too, but it also hurts in that you may completely gloss over and ignore something that truly is unique to your life experience becuase you've already pre-judged it's parts.
Has anyone but the reviewer even read this book? (Score:5, Interesting)
One reviewer comments about how they hated the book (only after thinking about it after the fact).
Then a set of individuals who haven't even read the book incorrectly categorize it as self-help, and delight in adding manure to the top of the pile.
I, for one, have actually read the book and I can tell you it's a great read. I've recommended it to all my friends and family. Not because it will change the world, but because, for me, it opened the door on a set of psychological experiments of the subconcious. There were fascinating anecdotes and, more importantly, actual research that addressed the issue of subconcious behavior and thinking I truly enjoyed. The author is not trying to convince you he has a new take on the subconcious -- but, instead, pointing out where current research is and how it relates to our intuitive understanding.
The first time I heard of relativity I thought it was very strange. Then the more I considered it the more I realized how completely intuitive and obvious it is. Then followed a 'duh' moment where I realized the universe must behave in this fashion. That doesn't take away from the fact that relativity was revolutionary.
The fact that there is research on the subconcious that, after you've considered it, seems obvious doesn't detract from the point that it's original and interesting.
Open your mind.
And please ... enjoy the book. You can bitch at me later if you think I've wasted your time. The whole book took me a two legged flight from Oakland to Albuquerque and I couldn't put it down.
YMMV