What's your first impression of Blink?
My husband grabbed it from the counter the day I brought it home & promptly started reading it. He likes it, but now he's paranoid about my facial expressions. I guess I'll figure that out when I read the book.
My husband grabbed it from the counter the day I brought it home & promptly started reading it. He likes it, but now he's paranoid about my facial expressions. I guess I'll figure that out when I read the book.
9 comments:
My first impression was that of a bunch of random stories that seemed to contradict themselves. I wasn't sure what Gladwell's point was at the beginning, or how the stories & research fit together.
Now that I've finished it, I can see his organization a bit better. So much for first impressions!
I knew everything I needed to know about this book in the first two sentences.
Okay, not really – that’s just a “Blink” joke. Or maybe it’s more a criticism than a joke.
I’ll acknowledge that it was a fun read, and I enjoyed the book’s investigation of the process by which we make decisions. But the point of the book is less than clear until you get to the Afterword, and even then it’s pretty hazy. For a while (the kouros, predicting the futures of the married couples in the videos), the point was “Judge a book by its cover.”
Then (Harvard’s implicit-bias computer program) it was “We all judge books by their covers, and there’s nothing we can do to reprogram ourselves.”
Then (Amadou Diallo) it was “We’re not capable of accurately judging a book by its cover.”
Then (ER symptom analysis, cop-training, and especially in the Afterword), “We have to reprogram ourselves to know how to judge books by their covers more accurately.”
And as near as I can tell, that’s where he left it – that “blink” judgments are only reliable for those who have the requisite expertise and training to make such judgments. So a well-trained teacher, doctor, cop, etc., should trust his or her instincts. The question is: How do we know whether we have the right expertise and training to thin-slice? It seems that we all have to go through years of making very deliberate decisions until we’ve made enough good ones that our snap judgments are likely to be right. Which we probably already knew.
I guess the good thing about making snap-decisions is that they leave us plenty of time to clean up the messes we make by not thinking things through.
(NB: Divine Comedian is Dewey S.)
Oh, and Gladwell’s ultimate proposal to reform unfairness in the judicial system is . . . , well, it’s one of those ill-considered “blink” judgments by someone who is thin-slicing outside of his area of expertise.
First of all, he's got chapters in the book about how we can accurately judge other people’s facial expressions, determining credibility, mood, nervousness, etc. Then at the end of the book he triumphantly proposes reforming the judicial system to take criminal defendants out of the sight of the jury, thereby eliminating the juries’ ability to make those in-person credibility determinations that he says we’re intuitively so good at. He notes that a roomful of law students (!) thin-sliced it and thought it was a good idea. (Insert your joke here.)
Okay, let’s unfashionably think this through: Under his proposal of removing a defendant from the jury’s sight, you conceal his ethnicity. But you’d also have to conceal his name so that Tony Soprano is not wrongly stereotyped. Then you might have to hide any Italian-looking relatives, too. And witnesses. And references to cannoli. And anything else that might let the jury decide the case based on a stereotype.
And once we tried to shield the jury from their own racial biases, wouldn’t we need to shield against all of their potential biases? A bias against male defendants could only be solved by describing a defendant as “he or she” and altering his/her voice when he/she testifies from the next room. Ultimately, any potential prejudice could justify the exclusion of information.
My point in a nutshell: “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, on the night of June 29, the defendant, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. X, told his or her wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend or life-partner or same-sex platonic friend that he or she was going to his or her church or synagogue or mosque or humanist association meeting with his or her classmate from LSU or Tulane, where they were both football players or soccer players or mathletes or slackers. . . .”
Begin at the afterwards for the premise then
Look closely at the stories for
Information and ideas that may challenge you to
Never make decisions again relying only on the
Knowledge you have acquired through research, but valuing your gut, too.
The Divine Comedian leaves me speechless.
Regarding Blink, I agree with him on almost every point.
I look forward to his views on A Whole New Mind.
Right on, Duckie!
Wow. D-scan took the unformulated thoughts right out of my brain! Can I just put my John Hancock right under his spot-on evaluation?
Okay, for the sake of representing the adolescent population I'll pitch in a few excess and random thoughts.
First I want to put in a disclaimer I Hope my peers will see. Blink is excellently written-- I don't mean the content; I refer to the prose. Gladwell's tone is inviting and conversational, he really draws you into the book by presenting fascinating tales that one could loosely call examples. To be real examples, though, they'd have to support his point. He'd have to have a point, too. A really certain one that he continues to enforce throughout his book. Which he doesn't, because I don't think he actually realizes what his point is until the afterword.
Which leads me to my next complaint. The book seems to follow Gladwell's thought process more than it seems to be an organized suggestion for the reform of standard decision making. I won't go into detail since Mr. Scandurro really sums it up perfectly, but the whole time I was trying to figure what his point was! I think I even realized what (if anything) one might infer from all his "examples" before he did. He can't seem to decide how he feels, so he instead flip-flops, second-guessing and contradicting himself the whole way. It's as if he needs to explore the subject more before really coming out with a final hypothesis. Of course it doesn't help that he himself is only a journalist. You'll excuse me if I therefore remain unconvinced.
I may be revealing myself as simple-minded, but did anyone else have trouble understanding exactly what he meant by "thin-slicing"? He uses it for such a variety of situations, in such a variety of ways that I'm still not quite sure what it is. I know that he advocates these "blink" decisions based on intuition instead of rational deliberation but I'm not sure where "thin-slicing" fits in. This complaint, I think, is indicative of a larger problem with the book, that is, that Gladwell is not sure what exactly he's talking about.
And in reference to Mr. Scandurro's comment on the court system, I couldn't agree more. How thin, exactly, did you slice the situation, Mr. Gladwell? Thinner than paper, surely. I'm no law student and in five minutes at least half of Mr. Scandurro's criticisms came to mind.
I leave this book mildly impressed by Gladwell's research (though not at all impressed by his conclusions) and with a faint interest in learning more about those facial expressions he references. As for my decision making process, it remains unchanged, and I remain thoroughly unconvinced by Gladwell's poorly thought-out book.
Well...I don't disagree with anything that's been said. I would just like to add that when I first saw "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" on the cover, I thought, "Wow. I am going to dislike this book." But I couldn't make such a blink decision without some knowledge of Gladwell or other books of the same type, right? So I read the book--and I still didn't like it.
That can only mean my blink decision was a good one. Anywho, I think I'll just keep thinking the way I think I think. This, I think, is the same way I think I thought before reading "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking."
"...whatever associationsa you may have with my name..."(13) really is this guy that famous or just concieted?
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