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Blink
First, Gladwell introduces a concept called "thin-slicing." This involves the human brain's critical reduction of information to make predictions about complicated systems. For example, a system developed at the University of Washington can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be divorced within fifteen years, based entirely upon one hour of observed interaction.
Next, Gladwell discusses analogous ways the human brain uses thin-slicing to make subconscious snap decisions. Interestingly, this rapid decision-making process can easily be primed by external influences. External influences affect more decisions than many people care to admit; these factors form the basis for snap judgments and first impressions.
Gladwell relates a study of how well a subject's personality was evaluated either by strangers who visited the subject's dorm room for fifteen minutes or by friends that knew the subject well. Friends were more accurate about extraversion and agreeableness, but the strangers were better at gauging conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. Thin-slicing isn't always correct; it depends on having the right information.
Superficial traits can be used to the advantage of an actor trying to project a particular characterization. Similarly, an authority figure can dress and behave in a particular fashion to influence subordinates. Warren G. Harding made overwhelmingly positive first impressions throughout his political career, although he is considered by historians to be one of the worst American presidents. Despite his consistently lackluster performance, his attractive bearing and appearance camouflaged his shortcomings.
On the other hand, by understanding the fallibilities of intuition, one can influence others' unconscious decision-making processes and be more aware of influences on one's own intuition. People can control and develop their intuitive decision-making skills. For instance, a successful car salesman would never be distracted by the appearance of a customer to the detriment of a sale. A portion of the book discusses physiological tests that reveal the strength of stereotypes in subconscious decision making by measuring reaction times.
Having defined the capabilities and limitations of intuitive decision-making, Gladwell spends a chapter focusing on spontaneity through the story of General Paul Van Riper and Millennium Challenge '02. A technologically advanced military with a vast array of information collection and "common operational picture" was pitted against a less technologically capable adversary led by General Van Riper. Much as David defeated Goliath, Van Riper's force inflicted staggering losses on his information-gorged enemy. His victory illustrates the utility of pre-arranged structure (such as "commander's intent" or "desired endstate") to empower subordinates to make spontaneous decisions. The fog of war couldn't really be defied, but decision makers could be trained to cope well with uncertainty.
The latter parts of the book discuss how intuitive decision-making can fall short. Humans' senses and subconscious minds can be negatively affected in stressful environments where stimuli are distorted and thin-slicing can easily go awry. Gladwell takes examples from recent developments in police procedures designed to avoid situations that adversely affect law enforcement personnel. For instance, many departments make their officers patrol individually. Without partners, they are more likely to wait for backup before entering dangerous situations. The author also performs a detailed deconstruction of the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City. He concludes that the tragedy was not a product of conscious injustice, but simply a chain reaction of impaired snap decisions made within seven seconds of violence.
Overall, Blink makes for a quick read and is sure to stimulate conversation. Its premise is simple, and it contains ample food for thought. Its discussion of priming the intuition with particular stimuli and impaired "thin-slicing" provides a useful tool in deconstructing human behavior. The strengths and weaknesses of intuition-priming and thin-slicing are useful knowledge for any professional decision-maker.
You can purchase Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Steve Sailor reviewed this book recently too.
It only took me two seconds to decide this was a bad book. Sounds kind of new-ageish.
For example, a system developed at the University of Washington can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be divorced within fifteen years, based entirely upon one hour of observed interaction.
Where is that system, i want it.
ajf
Sounds like most slashdot postings... thinking without thinking..
"It's the art of fighting without fighting." Now thats deep.
Doesn't compare to the star-nosed mole, who strikes me as two notes cooler by the fact it overclocks its own brain:
"The pace of the star-nosed mole's feeding is so fast that it is approaching the maximum speed at which its nervous system can process information."
More revelations worthy of a New Yorker article just make me yawn. And, more evidence of my, um, correct opinion is corroborated here, in Black Table's "believe the hype?" review.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Researcher: Thank you for participating in our study. According to our model, you and your spouse are likely to be divorced within fifteen years. Have a nice day!
Isn't that kind of news likely to be self-fulfilling?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
His previous book "The Tipping Point" has gotten some buzz in recent years around nonprofits I know. Haven't read either, but by the descriptions it sounds like The Tipping Point is about crowd/mass decision-making in the sociological realm and this one's about individual decision-making in the psychological realm. Interesting if he stuck to one topic, but not one field.
I understand this behavior because I see it; Our very own Fearless Leader exhibits this "thin slicing" with a remarkable success rate.
I do a significant amount of research in an effort to predict certain kinds of market trends and behaviors but what bothers me is that he [often] gets the same results without that work.
Nevertheless, I wonder mostly, why he is dismissive of a technical method that produces his results. Sometimes, it produces different results, and for those times he is extremely grateful, but when it doesn't- that is, when a technical and exhaustive method yields the same result as his snap decisions, he is very frustrated that the technical method was performed at all.
Like it's "obvious" to those of us without the manager hair and posture...
The more interesting part of the Van Riper story (according to Gladwell's book) was that this war game was used as a test of concept to see if the US could invade Iraq successfully utilizing technology to remove the fog of war.
Van Riper (playing for Iraq) utilized (what seemed to the military brass to be) unorthodox methods and won. The military brass found this to be unacceptable and changed the rules of the war game midway, so that Van Riper lost. Then the US invaded Iraq.
Basically a case of "if the results of the test do not coincide with what we are looking for, change the test."
Blink
The Tipping Point
The Wisdom Of Crowds
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Gladwell and James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" got into an interesting co-review of each other's work on slate. I would think that the slashdot crowd would associate more with Crowds since it could be used to laud the value of the FLOSS development models.
Personally, I'm interested in reading both.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
What we need to learn about is reason, science and logic; the very things that are NOT intuitive.
Intuition - we already got.
Funny also how he mentions that he got into the topic because cops jumped to the conclusion he was a bad guy 'cause he was a longhair.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
This is the kind of book review I want to read on Slashdot. Unlike many magazine book reviews, this one is not an excuse to hijack the book's potential audience for the reviewer's own take on the same subject. Even the summary on the Slashdot homepage helped me learn whether I want to read the book or not. The review was also focused, balancing some "plot" coverage with style and subject explanations. So after about 90 seconds, I felt familiar enough with both subject and book to decide, if I have to, whether to read the book, and maybe track developments in the subject. It's inuitive when you know how! Give ThinkMagnet (James Mitchell) more books to review.
--
make install -not war
I'm on the road mangling the network at one of our satellite locations, and went out seeking coffee Tuesday night. I went to a local book store, grabbed a book that looked interesting and sat down to read while I slurped. Sitting on the table was a copy of Blink that another customer had left there. I picked that up and was immediately engrossed. I've already decided (no two second jokes here, it took a few dozen pages) to start handing it to various friends and coworkers.
I highly recommend this one, and am glad I stumbled across it. As soon as I get home I'm gonna find a copy of Tipping Point.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I've got a real problem with this entire concept. It encourages actions based on an evaluation of past patterns, which in turn discourages uniques and inovation. Also, people trusting their intuition and gut is a lot of what is wrong about people in the first place.
Sigs are awesome huh?
In application of this, let's say we didn't have time to actually figure out whether the number is prime. I might say, "4,294,967,297 is a big number, which means it's generally unlikely to be prime." I look at the last digit, and there's no real clue there (an even number or 5, for example, would be a giveaway).
The question then becomes whether the OP is the sort of guy who would pull a big number out of nowhere, or whether he would go through the trouble of finding an actual prime number that was big enough that people wouldn't know immediately. With some loose data about the sort of people on /. and the amount of time generally spent composing /. posts, as well as the general tone of the message itself, I'd guess "no". I'm guessing he didn't bother to come up with a real prime number.
I could be right or I could be wrong, and I'm not really sure of exactly what went into that guess. I haven't even done the math to figure out if I'm right, but if I had to make an immediate guess whether 4,294,967,297 was prime, I'd have to make quick generalizations off of incomplete data and "go with my gut". Mathematical proof wouldn't be an option.
Instead, you could react by saying, "Well, these guys see some problem signs. Let's figure out what they are, and start fixing things." If you follow through (consistently), you may well save the marriage.
I haven't looked at the study, but it wouldn't shock me if what they look for is whether the couple expects to have to continually work to make the marriage work, or if they just assume that it'll all work out fine on it's own.
I've been married almost 15 years, and we've had to kind of rebuild our relationship about ten or twelve times in those years. You can't just sit around and let entropy do a number on you...
I haven't read the book myself, but Posner's somewhat scathing review doesn't keep me from wanting to read the book. It does, however, make me want to read it with a critical eye.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Gladwell responds, though:
"I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions -- like predicting hitting ability -- that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well."
So the question becomes, then, how do we know when we can make an appropriate snap judgement about something? Why is "this statue looks like a fake" reasonable but "this guy looks like an athlete" not?
Gladwell makes the point that too much data can hinder, rather than help, but you end up needing to make a judgement on how much data is too much then. One of the examples Gladwell gives in "Blink" is of doctors making better diagnoses of heart trouble when they have less data- they jump to the heart, rather than investigating everything else chest pain could be. But do you really want your doctor operating on less than complete information- and if so, where do you set the line at? "Sorry, Doc, I'm afraid if I tell you how long I've had this pain, you might misdiagnose me."
I agree largely with Gladwell's ideas that snap judgements can be better than waffling, but he definitely should have done more to point out differences between good snap decisions and bad ones- he points out the "Warren Harding Effect" where someone "appears qualified" for something, but doesn't say enough in my opinion about knowing when your prejudices are boldly leading your gut astray.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
You might be disappointed by Blink.
I think Gladwell had a ton of great stories like he did in Tipping Point. But I think Blink is a bit more diffuse -- no equivalent to the classification system in TP that you mention.
I like the concept of "thin-slicing" and very much enjoyed the stories in Blink. But I didn't think there was a core argument that stuck together, just a brief concept and some surrounding stories. I'm still not sure I know how to apply the idea of thin slicing myself or how to improve my abilities, other than to assume that with increasing expertise, it'll improve.
In another post, I suggested that people wait for the paperback or borrow it from the library. Blink is a solid book, but IMHO not worth the $$ right now.
Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.
But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:
Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.
Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race.
Because there were already plenty of books on the market advising corporate workers in tiresome detail how to look before they leap, the sales potential of a book telling them, "Wotthehell, just go ahead and leap," was clear.
Unfortunately for Gladwell, the best-known examples of thinking without thinking are racial and gender prejudices. But, then, you've forgotten Rule #2--Readers despise logic and consistency. So Gladwell just assumes that his otherwise beloved "rapid cognition" is 100% wrong whenever it's based on race or gender stereotypes.
(And that's why he makes a $1 million annually and I don't.)
The most intriguing aspect of Gladwell's book is that its hopeless confusion and mind-melting political correctness stem from the author's own racial background. Although mostly white, Gladwell is partly of African descent (his mother was black, Scottish, and Jewish). But he doesn't look noticeably black in most of his pictures.
The origin of Blink, he writes on his website, came when, "on a whim," he let his hair grow long into a loose but large Afro.
As you can see in this picture of Gladwell with his Afro, he wound up with more of a Napoleon Dynamite Mormon 'fro than the genuine kinky kind that ABA basketball players espoused back in the 1970s. Still, it does finally make him look marginally black.
As soon as Gladwell grew his Afro, he claims, he started getting hassled by The Man: highway patrolmen wrote him speeding tickets, airport security gave him the evil eye, and the NYPD questioned him for 20 minutes because they were looking for a rapist with an Afro.
"That episode on the street got me th
Seastead this.
Because what we really need is more encouragement for people to stop thinking about things before doing whatever fool thing pops into their head.
It was either him or one of his colleagues on CBC radio some time recently (past month or so) and the way the theory was pitched, it just sounded like nonsense. On top of it they spoke like marketing people, which made me think it's all really B.S.
So he should have been let finish, for glory points? Not what the game's about. War games are about gathering info. What if we change this or that parameter? Add this or that constraint? And so forth. If the game's been played out to a successful conclusion - guaranteed victory by one side or the other - then it's over. In other words, it wasn't one war game where they rigged the result, it became two war games, one in which David won, another in which Goliath won. Both chock full of useful info to be analysed.
When I first saw the title The Power of Thinking without thinking , my first reaction was to reword the title in my head to The Power of Voting Republican.
Which is what comes from making a knee-jerk reaction rather than actually thinking about it - you got the parties flopped. B-)
On most issues both Liberals and Conservatives want the same things: Peace, prosperity, justice. The main ways they differ on how to get them - and how they think about it.
Liberal ideology encourages making snap judgements on an emotional basis. (Notice the substution of "I feel..." for "I think..." in their rhetoric.) Their policies (when they think about them at all) are based on either direct action to solve perceived problems by pushing in the desired direction, or indirect action to suppress something that is conceptually associated with the problem. And they treat people as members of classes - dealing with all the members of the class on the bases of the steretypical member's behavior. All of these approaches have a common thread: "Damn the side effects."
Conservative ideology, on the other hand, promotes thought about problems. The targets are largely the same. But the solutions take into account the unintended consequences of directly attacking the problem - which are often a cure far worse than the disease.
Conservatives are often people who were liberal in their younger years. They TRIED the simple solutions and found out that they made things worked. Then they thought about THAT, and came up with (or signed on to) other approaches - that were counter-intuitive but actually made things better rather than worse.
Thus the Winston Churchill quote: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain."
Unfortunately a lot of people either never find out that some "obvious" solutions don't work or never learn to think, and thus get stuck at 20. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've actually always figured that both approaches are equally wrong, and equally right. To view the world through either viewpoint -- always conservative, or always liberal -- is simply foolish.
;) ).
Both the Democrats and the Republicans base their ideologies on broken mythologies. The Democrat mythology is that if you allow the government to solve problems, it will. The Republican mythology, on the other hand, is that if you allow the private sector to solve problems, it will. Both mythologies are equally wrong.
There are aspects of Republican ideology which appeal to me, but, on the whole, I find that the Democrat ideology is more grounded in reality, which is why I tend to vote Democrat, in spite of having several very close friends who are Republicans (they're all very intelligent, just mistaken in their party choice; I don't hold it against them
My reactionary judgement against Republicans, as typified in my earlier post, usually stems from the way I perceive that the Republican party has gone: derailed from a party of intelligent and sincere conservatives (wither Goldwater?) to a mob of hard-core right wing Christian militants, of which our President is a typical example.
On a more positive note, I agree with you that both sides do want to find the best solutions to the problems that ail our nation and our society. Where I disagree is with the idea that "liberal thinking" is de facto wrong, and that "conservative thinking" is de facto right.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
The "people trusting their intuition" part is pretty much right-on, but throwing out intuition is a bad idea too.
I started playing with an open question in mathematics a while back (the "twin prime conjecture"). Within the first month of working on it, I had arrived at quite a few interesting conclusions related to the problem and come up with some new and unique (to me) ways of looking at it.
I've spent the past four years proving that several of those initial observations were correct. Repeatedly.
The "gut reactions" that I had in that first month got me a long ways into the problem. Taking the time to prove the various results took me a long ways further: it got me less interested in the problem (a long-term form of ADD?), it vetted out many of my mistaken reactions (there were plenty of these), showed me how strong a couple of the initial month's ideas are, and allowed me to see the broader scope of the problem and the related ideas I came up with.
But that's the thing in mathematics: with any given problem, you try what you know about (gut reactions); if that doesn't work and you decide to keep working at it, you may have an incredibly difficult process to work through to find the solution (if one exists), but that part of the process is valuable in itself for when you might be faced with a similar problem in the future.
Same for "gut reactions" in real life... just like I didn't rush out and publish my twin primes findings right away, it's usually not a good idea to make irreversible decisions right away. You just keep the gut reactions in mind as you move forward and make decisions based on the reconciliation of your initial reactions with long-term knowledge of the subject.
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
The real research on this topic is that of Simple Heuristics that make smart - Gigerenzer & Todd (OUP, 2000) - on first appearance a dry academic psychology text on bounded rationality and how we use lots of shortcuts to get close to the right answer to complex practical problems. the slightly artificial but effective example they give is determining German city size.. which is bigger Wiesbaden or Stuttgart? you've probably no idea..(German readers - don't interupt just yet) but may have at least heard of Stuttgart as might surmise that it was larger. Not only would you be right in this case but you've just discovered the highly effective "recognition heuristic".. and whats more your ignorance works for you..
asked to say which was bigger from pairs of biggest 73 german cities, american college students were more accurate than germans in germany.. the result was reversed for american cities. neat huh?
This heuristic can then be extended to something called 'take the best' which uses extra information in a very frugal fashion.. all you do is compare two items on the best cue you have..(in this case 'have i heard of it?') if your best choice discriminates between them then pick the one it tells you to, if not move to the next best cue (for city size being a state capital or having a premier league sports team are good indicators)
this is a very plausible model of a low cost stategy that might be used in human decision making.. the most surprising thing being that it gives the computationally intensive and informationally exhaustive multiple linear regression a real run for it's money in accuracy at a fraction of the cost in storage and calculation.
just thought i'd let you know.