Slashdot Mirror
Blink, Take 2
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.
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.
Why do people always expect self help books to be useful? Doesn't that defeat the whole point?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
...but it is definitely true. I've personally seen many times where this has worked for me, something which I imagine most people have.
Why do you think they tell you to go for your first guess on tests?
Follow your heart. Use your brain to train your heart.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The book is extremely ambiguous, not very helpful, and basically words things most people already know in ways that make it seem like it's new and insightful. That's pretty sad. I'm sure there will be a bunch of people who are completely absorbed by this and will say that it "changed their life", or some such rubbish.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
The cover just didn't feel right.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bought the CD version of the book after I read the previous Slashdot review, since it has been on my wishlist for a while. Right now I am on disk 6 (out of 7) in my car, and generally it's underwleming. Interesting, but nothing new, you don't learn a whole lot.
The author does bring up good stories and examples about the Aeron chair and cola sampling methods and some musical artists and TV shows that were rejected by public, approved by someone with a gut feeling, and then re-recognized by the public as masterpieces.
In a nutshell? Trust the gut feeling, but it can fool you sometimes.
And then he spends almost an entire chapter telling you how racist you are based on some test, where more people associate the black race with "bad" than with "good", and then same people have troubles putting the words "good" and "black" in one basket. Interesting, but still, not really useful as far as personal growth and self-education.
"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose."
-- George Carlin
I am scientifically inaccurate.
... that read this, and then went NUTS telling us to think faster and go with our instincts.
Of course, then we got screamed at by her for not thinking and making more screw ups than normal.
She was also more concerned with what I was having for lunch than what I was doing for the company.
A simple example is that in typing these sentences, I'm not conciously trying to decide each and every word I am typing (and mispelling - yes, I know). You can gradually autamatize many functions through practice - taking concretes, making them abstracts, and then re-applying those abstracts to other situation where they arize. One such automization that Rand writes a lot about are emotions.
This "blink" sounds awfully similar to Pirsig's idea of "Quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...
Some of Neuro Linguistic Programming tries to do just that. Check out Robert Dilts work on modeling geniuses. http://www.journeytogenius.com/prdbook2.htm#sgv1
Alzheimer's For Dummies?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
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, 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!
NPR has several mentions and talks on blink. He also spoke at the Commonwealth Club
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 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.
And so it came to pass that a new form of dupe
hit Slashdot's front page, and Gary's got the scoop.
He's given us an opinion, on this new book called "Blink"
So that we may compare what these two guys think.
While James thought that "Blink" had passed the test,
This new guy, Gary Cornell, remained unimpressed.
James thought that Blink would spark conversation,
But Gary can't quite understand James's elation.
There's a lack of depth here, Gary purported,
and a theory that the author inadequately supported.
But let's not get caught up in Gary and his dissing,
Since it's possible that there are some points that he's missing.
So let's all begin our analyses microscopic,
while this particular post gets modded offtopic.
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.
So tha[tt] explains how Bush pulls off his illusion. He must have read this book! I guess some of us must be impervious to the way he dresses and acts since I don't feel like he has made many positive moves. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Ugly, ugly sentences! I think: that the reviewer: needs to study his: punctuation. What a: mess.
thats why i get all the flamebaits.
That said I think the reviewer is over thinking the "act on your instincts book".
Maybe the bigger point is that intuition is just another datapoint. As such it can be good or bad, precise or noisy, accurate or biased. To place too much trust in intuitiion is as dangerous as placing too much trust in any given, more "scientific" data point. Yet to ignore intuition is to ignore potentially valuable data..
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Here's my March 24th, 2000 amazon.com review of the author's previous book, "The Tipping Point":
"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.
Another day, another shoddily written piece of self help junk. Seriously, people talk about quacks as a thing of the past, but they still exist in full force, and usually make names for themselves through books like this one.
Then again, with depression, anxiety and mental illness constantly on the rise in Western countries, I can't see his sales declining anytime soon.
Rather than purchasing such inept diatribe as this, I suggest opting for books related to Buddhist teachings, as these often provide much piece of mind, aswell as physical practices (namely Yoga and Meditation) rather than just repetitive thought patterns that do a lot less good for ones peace of mind.
This is the first time I've ever seen a book get a bad review on /.. I just assumed they thought every book was fanastic.
The fine women at Pop Goes The Culture do a very nice job of talking about and breaking down the writing of Malcolm Gladwell.
Don't ever follow your instinct blindly!
Instincts are usually a very superficial judgement of a situation.. it is a primitive level on which to make judgements.
In cases where you must respond quickly and have no time to think, analyze, research and verify, primitive REFLEXES can help out.
In all other cases, leave decision making based on instinct to animals.
Those who claim you should follow your heart, do what makes you feel good, not what IS good, and follow your instincts, are both the SHEEP and the SHEPHERD.
Going by intuition is going by feelings and vague subconcious analyzations.
FUKKIT!, that didn't make mankind smarter than animals. Leave intuition up to animals.
It is commerce who wishes to teach you to 'follow your heart, follow your guts'.. I think if you follow your guts, it'll only lead to shit.
No, your brains should verify your feelings, not the other way around.. follow your higher conciousness, not your lower.. follow your reason, not your 'gut feeling'..
Commerce, politicians and whoever wishes to gain and remain in control, preach this practice, since they thrive on lust and impulsive behavior (purchases) and physical and emotional needs, they want you to base your decision making on the same things SHEEP do!
You can't review a book on Slashdot unless you summarize each chapter in mind-numbing detail!
"When I finished this book I was impressed. Then I blinked -- and realized that I was taken in by its surface attractiveness. After the initial glamour wore off, I was left deeply unsatisfied."
Maybe Gladwell was banking on people learning to trust their first instincts after reading his book.
Since you obviously chose to second guess your first assessment of the book, it's pretty clear that you didn't pick up on Gladwell's meaning.
It's irrelevant whether or not your second assessment is more correct than your first - how dare you second guess yourself after reading through an entire book that tells you how great your instincts are!
Looks like you're in a fix there, buddy
( Yes, I'm being facetious...thanks for the review I'll now second guess my planned decision to buy this book)
Much of your review smells to me of the "that's obvious" response. Yes, much of what Gladwell writes about is "obvious" in the sense that other people have felt, hinted or alluded to the same phenomenon. However, it takes a talented writer to make it coherent and identifiable for a large audience (you're reacting to the "identifiable" part). I know when I read the book, I could point to a lot of things he writes that I had intuited before. But what's useful about the book is how he synthesizes many different types of examples to show that this is not simply a quirk of some people.
That you can identify with what he says so readily is why it's a good book in the first place. I do agree, however, that he leaves you feeling incomplete because there's no applicable, take-home message in the end, but I'm sure this is by design, not by omission or inability. Tacking on a how-to at the end would change the tone and focus of the book. Gladwell, or some other author, can focus on that separately in another book.
anticipation is more relavent then intuition. blinking isn't a reaction for no reason.. it is based on anticipation of a scenario. preparing for what will happen before it happens. our muscles are actually preparing for the next step before we make the next step...
read anticipation by minhai nadin or google anticipation..
How ironic - an enormously redundant review on how enormously redundant a book is. For once, the summary of the review did a better job than the review itself ...
And she probably thoroughly ripped this idea off of Miyamoto Musashi.
Wow even book reviews are being duped now.
I've been watching closely the trend between supposedly "self-help" book. Many end up taking you to the new age and esoteric alley - so that you can get in touch with your inner self and awake the cosmic karma hidden thru the eons - WTF?
If you remember the previous discussion on the self-help market, you'll realize most self-help books are just means to gain more money at the expenses of others' suffering. I made a joke about it, but in the end, it's more or less the same:
"trust your self. Take away the negative from you and be happy." Say, those are the nicest $29.95 i've ever heard.
IMHO, the book of proverbs is FREE, and I've found more hints on helping yourself than this overhyped "literature" of today.
This is not from a read of the book, but from watching a Book TV lecture (I'm sure somebody's going to make a joke about that, but anyhow).
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".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Do you have a link? Or perhaps the name of the author of that review?
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
where is Link?
"Influence" by Robert Cialdini. explains why "thinking without thinking" isn't necessarily good, and how marketers use it against us.
Please repeat after me: one phenomenon. Two or more phenomena.
"That's a very interesting phenomenon."
"No, it happened five times. Those are five very interesting phenomena."
Thank you.
Aside from that, I liked the calling out of the book for its unclothed-emperor-ness.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
Maybe this is what the author omitted.
You can trust your intuition when it's advising you to do something not purely for your own benefit, when it means going out of your way, when it's not all about you.
Now there's REALLY no reason to buy the book. Oops, sorry.
I bought a copy of "The Millionaire Next Door". It basically talks about how most millionaires are actually average folks that are somewhat frugal with their money.
When I finished the book, I thought to myslef "Well, one thing that the millionaire next door certainly wouldn't have done is spend $25.95 on this book..."
Make more people underestimate me
What cod piece?
From CNN.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Gladwell is everywhere lately. I haven't read his books but his persona irritates the hell out of me.
I'm annoyed they're selling him for this great thinker when he's just another popular non-fiction writer (who, of course, milks it for all he can, including consulting gigs etc.)
It's all a fad. I'll be glad when it passes.
From the Logician
Help fight continental drift.
Oh come on! I thought it was funny!
"Trust your intuitions. Well, not quite; trust them, if and only if they are good."
I wonder if that equivalence is intentional.
I mean, the above says that (implication <=) if your intuitions are good, you should trust them. That sounds fine. Rather obvious and therefore useless, but fine.
But it also says that (implication =>) if you trust your intuitions, they are good.
That sounds like...excellent. All we need is blind faith in our intuitions and everything always turns out just as we thought. What a relief.
Actually, No. President Bush did not read this book, but Karl Rove sure did.
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
While the idea of mathematics "smelling" good or bad is interesting (and matches my own experience -- although we tended to talk in terms of looks and not smell), I think that it's equally interesting to look at less atypical subjects.
When a person looks at someone across the street and thinks "that person is up to no good" or turns a faucet and thinks "this feels like it's about to break" a whole lot of powerful subconscious reasoning is at work, and it's worth considering this, as well as the ability of academic researchers to bypass huge amounts of tedious work with a sudden insight ("yes, but the quantum case won't work out" says Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmann in "Surely you're joking..." -- something it takes his supervisor six weeks of difficult math to confirm).
When considering the value of intuition it's worth considering the cost/benefit. E.g. if you think "something doesn't look right" and investigate it, you might be wrong nine times out of ten, but the cost of those nine times might be miniscule to the benefit of the tenth. (Let's say you're a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant.) OTOH if you discard a line of research on the grounds it doesn't "smell right" you may be losing out on a Fields medal. There are entire fields of mathematics that don't "smell right" to large numbers of mathematicians. (Then there's the "Axiom of Choice" which doesn't smell right to many of us -- but smells no worse than its contradiction.)
The problem with overreliance on intuition is that one can easily fall prey to "cognitive illusions". It is easy to slip into these errors unless you are consciously aware of them. Many of them are very seductive, and much like optical illusions probably reflect "bugs" in our inbuilt algorithms for making judgments.
This review is different and tangential. The first review was slightly positive, but more intended to focus on describing the structure and content instead of passing judgment.
Whatever you think about this bestseller, it's definitely making waves, for better or worse, in the Noosphere. Besides, there's supposedly no such thing as bad publicity, I think it's ironic that this review will keep the book in the public eye for at least a modicum longer.
Hum. On second thought, maybe I shouldn't.
probably something other than the NUTS she was having for lunch... at least that's what my initial instincts tell me!
One of the examples Kahneman cited was research of addmittance process in medical school. According to it, medical school was much better off when making decision just by looking at the application, as opposed to interviewing prospects, because after interview people in charge of admission were much more likely to use their intuition, which led to more mistakes than they would make, have they based their decision on statistics.
It's almost as good as, 'who moved my cheese' and a tad better than 101 ways to catch a husband (oe wife).
That's fucking hilarious. Instead of having people waste their money on self help books from the West you suggest they waste their money on self help books from the East? Why? Becuase the East is more mysterious? Or becuase they've been peddling their crap for longer?
To say it's all about intuition is a narrowly focused review. If you focus widely it's about a time based theory of decision making.
Gladwell's ideas are very similar to John Boyd's Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop. To anyone who has read military strategy, particularly maneuver theory, the section on Paul Van Riper and the millenium challenge demonstrates this very clearly that you must act swiftly or in military parlance - operating inside your adversary's time scale.
To those not familiar with the OODA loop it basically goes like this:
Observe - Observe enemy
Orient - become oriented to the enemy action.
Decide - make decision
Act - take the action
Understanding the OODA loop enables a person to compress time, that is the time between observing a situation and taking action. The loop itself is much more highly complex than the above list and has multiple pathways that I couldn't discuss here. Anyway...
Two important concepts guide the OODA loop.
Firstly guiding all these actions is a implicit intent, or as Boyd put it-Schwerpunkt, the main focus of effort or a common outlook of the decision maker/s.
Secondly, and MORE importantly related to the book blink, is the concept of Fingerspitzengefuhl (roughly translated to fingertip feel). It means a leaders instinctive and intuitive sense of what is going on or what is needed in battle. When one has fingerspitzenghefuhl you can bypass the loop and observe and act simultaneously. The speed must come from a deep intuitive understanding of one's relationship to the rapidly changing environment. According to Boyd to shape and understand the environment you need to manifest four qualities: Variety, Rapidity, Harmony, and Initiative. Anyway I've rattled on too much...
I guess the main point is that the reviewers focus is way to narrow and doesn't encompass what the entire book is trying to say. The book should probably be read with some form of hard, longer term, decision making skills as well, something along the lines of Neustadt and May's Thinking in Time: The use of history for decision makers. That might be better for you guys who have a bias against 'new-agey' stuff.
It doesn't answer the question at all, its mostly gratuitous. But it does address the argument that this book is "old wine in a new bottle." Its a perenial subject. Perhaps it wrong to look for originality in this work, but there's a demand for books that re-affirm "common sense."
Of course, there's more to it than that; Boyd's briefing on the subject, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," ran fifteen hours over two days; he refused to attempt it in less. You can get a start at http://www.d-n-i.net/ or http://www.belisarius.com/default.htm or by reading "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art of War" by Robert Coram.
Boyd's work is the basis for the way both Gulf Wars were fought (not necessarily the larger decisions leading up to or following them), and is the inspiration for MCDP-1 Warfighting, the US Marine Corps manual which forms the basis of the way they fight today. Boyd and his colleagues tried, with some success, to reform the military establishment in the United States, including the way they design and buy their weapons systems. However, his work goes far beyond warfare; his "reading list" for his colleagues spans many subjects in great depth. It is printed as an appendix in "The Pentagon Wars," by James Burton.
Sounds like he rewrote the most important idea from "Power of Silence," from Carlos Castaneda.
Now that is an great book to read, even if you don't believe a word of what he says.
wow...I have never seen such a well crafted ad hominem reply. Nice troll.
The GNAA has rather a lot at its disposal. Read at -1 more often if you really want to see them.
but Richard Posner (yes, that Richard Posner) savages this book in a review of his own.
t ml
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-blink.h
Good to read, just for blood on the floor.
I think in the judgment and decision making (JDM) realm none of this particularly earth shattering and others have expressed more valid models. In particular, Gary Klein has done a lot of work with decision making under stress and time pressure. He packaged these ideas as Recognition Primed Decision Making. Basically, intuitive decision making is effective when a person has built a broad corpus of experiences that allow a quick leap to an appropriate answer. A neophye, on the other hand, has to grind through cues, develop courses of action and evaluate them in a much more explicit nature. Thus... "Before we did this study, we believed that novices impulsively jumped at the first option they could think of, whereas experts carefully deliberated about the merits of different courses of action. Now it seemed that it was the experts who could generate a single course of action, while novices needed to compare different approaches." (Klein)
I read the book last weekend. My wife had purchased it after hearing all the hype from some friends, and in my opinion, this book represents the worst sort of new-age-self-help drivel that we've seen a lot of in the last decade or so.
While it pretends to be a scholarly treatment of a useful phenomenon, as the reviewer notes, the end result is ambiguous. Should you trust your intuition more or less? Well, only if you're mostly right! How can you know?
Like many of the self-help courses and books that clutter modern bookstores, there's no useful methodology here - just half an insight without any real guidance on how to apply it.
Yes, it's insightful to discover that some people have better intuition than others. And it's not much of a stretch to discover that (for instance) some subject matter experts have better insights in their subject areas.
What's missing in this book is how to do any of the things that might flow from the initial insight:
(1) Learn how to inprove your intuition in your own area of subject matter expertise.
(2) Learn how to test your intuition in various areas of SME so that you can know when to rely on it and when to not do so.
(3) Learn how to develop reliable intuition in new SME areas.
Without any of these, this entire book is nothing more than an extended foreward for the book that should have been written.
The book was brought up in a recent Modern Philosophy class, this philosophy basically waves bye-bye to any notion of rationalism in favor of empiricism (or an element of skepticism). Interestingly, it jives well with the philosophy that sells the iPod Shuffle ("Life is Random...so choose an iPod Shuffle" in marketing lingo). And iPods in general - don't think about the fact that you will have to pay $10,000 to fill up that iPod with legal music on iTunes...just go with the gut reaction when you see it! Not that Napster is much better - rent a gazillion WMA files and lose them all after a year. Blink. Blink again...no sale for either (or for the Blink book either).
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
The review is also similar to one by Tad Homer-Dixon that appeared a few weeks ago in the Globe and Mail's weekend book section (article is at http://www.homerdixon.com/whatsnew.html). Yes, an underwhelming book. I see a pattern emerging .....
Anybody else? Reading suggestions?
When this review was not there yet, read it on a intercontinental flight and discovered that my "blink" in buying books is not so good.
There is no explanation or help to develop this blinking, no "10 points plan", "blinking for dummies" or anything like that.
The first time I heard of relativity I thought it was very strange.
That observation, of course, completely contradicts the premise of the book.
I've recommended it to all my friends and family.
Oh, you're one of those.
In all seriousness, I suspect that this book would not play too well with Slashdot readers simply because a large proportion of us are programmers or other technical types. We're already more than usually familiar with the subjective experience of the intuitive "blink". We're also, by nature, fairly practical, so if the book doesn't offer any useful information on harnessing intuition, it's going to be an exercise in been-there-done-that for most folks here.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
On a more serious note, sometimes being insightful is just that: rewording a common conception into a clearer form. In another sense, insight might be said to be the taking of an idea that we all know and take for granted, an idea that's grown stale from being said too many times in tired colloquialisms, and making it fresh again.
I often wind up doing this kind of translation for fellow employees and friends. What's baffling to me is that often what they say and what I say seem almost entirely identical. It sometimes makes you wonder if maybe it's not that effect mentioned earlier in the review of certain people being perceived differently based on appearance. Our engineers have a reputation for being somewhat difficult to understand (Admittedly often for good reason), so when I state the same thing, it's perceived to come from a more understandable source.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Relativity doesn't relate *at all* to the way the universe behaves in an everyday way. Relativity (beyond the "duh" level of pointing out that one inertial frame of reference is as good as another) is completely non-intuitive; that's the point. Now, relativity should have been obvious, or at least obvious as something to test, once people figured out that light appeared to be going the same speed regardless of the relative speed of the source, but that's totally different from intuitive.
I'm assuming you're talking about special relativity here (the vastly simpler version). It specifies how distances literally shorten in the direction of motion, faster moving objects are more massive than slower moving, and clocks slow on moving objects. (Of course, all of this is talking about relative motion.) You're saying that's intuitive? On what basis?
Though if you think it is, you clearly do need some kind of help. Get thee to the nearest chain bookstore and reach out blindly for Dr. Phil.