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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?
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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.
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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...
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.
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.
The fine women at Pop Goes The Culture do a very nice job of talking about and breaking down the writing of Malcolm Gladwell.
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)
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?
If you think the ichi ryu is not about developing intuition to see the connection in all pursuits, and practicing your craft until you can perform without thought, you have not understood the Book of Five Rings.
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
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.
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 .....
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.
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