Blink, Take 2

A few weeks ago, reader James Mitchell reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Now book_reader (Gary Cornell) writes with a very different take on Blink. "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. This book is over-hyped, and so underperforms. The point of this book can be summed up as: "Trust your intuitions. Well, not quite; trust them, if and only if they are good." Gladwell tells lots of anecdotes to indicate that sometimes less is more. But of course he also tells anecdotes that tell us sometimes less is less." Read on for the rest of Cornell's thoughts on the book. 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.

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.

Comments

My opinion

[MyLongNickName]

Follow your heart. Use your brain to train your heart.

Dear Slashdot,

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're a newly hatched pod person, you already know that my comments about Slashdot can serve as a provisional response to its conclusions until a more comprehensive treatment becomes available. But let me add that it may seem excessive to note that its convictions are as appealing as braces, acne, and a wooden leg at the senior prom. To organize my discussion, I suggest that we take one step back in the causal chain and straighten out its thinking. Slashdot will sue people at random long before it can convert me into one of its peons. Slashdot's trained seals do not concern themselves much with the people around them. History offers innumerable examples for the truth of this assertion.

A great many of us don't want Slashdot to push our efforts two steps backward. But we feel a prodigious pressure to smile, to be nice, and not to object to its avaricious, humorless apologues. Make special note of that point, because I do not appreciate being labeled. No one does. Nevertheless, I unmistakably think that Slashdot's opinion is a lazy cop-out. We can therefore extrapolate that anyone who says that Slashdot can clear-cut ancient forest lands and get away with it can be branded as both sadistic and sinful. You may have detected a hint of sarcasm in the way I phrased that last statement, but I assure you that I am not exaggerating the situation. Our long-corrupt legal system is parlously close to establishing a precedent that will enable Slashdot to lead people towards iniquity and sin. Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement, but for all of you reading this who are not cold-blooded Neanderthals, you can understand where the motivation for that statement comes from. Morally questionable, footling gutter-dwellers generally insist that Slashdot has no intention to encourage every sort of indiscipline and degeneracy in the name of freedom, but Slashdot's often-quoted generalizations belie this notion. This is a lesson for those with eyes to see. It is a lesson not so much about Slashdot's sordid behavior, but about the way that Slashdot is right about one thing, namely that fear is what motivates us. Fear of what it means when tendentious sociopaths till the pathological side of the feudalism garden. Fear of what it says about our society when we teach our children that Slashdot never engages in jackbooted, quasi-apolaustic, or fork-tongued politics. And fear of imprudent spoilsports like Slashdot who twist the truth.

I know more about revisionism than most people. You might even say that I'm an expert on the subject. I can therefore state with confidence that almost every day, Slashdot outreaches itself in setting new records for arrogance, deceit, and greed. It's sincerely breathtaking to watch it. If it weren't for self-absorbed wheeler-dealers, Slashdot would have no friends. I truly don't know what Slashdot's problem is, but it's easy to tell if it is lying. If its lips are moving, it's lying.

Slashdot seems to have a bitter ideological conflict with my statement that it has a hidden agenda. Yet I am surely not up on the latest gossip. Still, I have heard people say that there are two types of people in this world. There are those who use terms of opprobrium such as "cuckoo cheapskates" and "addlepated, lackluster publishers of hate literature" to castigate whomever Slashdot opposes, and there are those who combat the macabre ideology of commercialism that has infected the minds of so many loathsome propagandists. Slashdot fits neatly into the former category, of course. Aside from the fact that Slashdot makes it sound like it's some perfect angel of unstained ethical standards, from secret-handshake societies meeting at "the usual place" to back-door admissions committees, Slashdot's pals have always found a way to commit confrontational, in-your-face acts of violence, intimidation, and incivility. The salient point here is that Slashdot is inherently prolix, delirious, and brusque. Oh, and it also has an insolent mode of existence.

The really interesting thing about all this is not that

poetry time!

[aendeuryu]

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.