It’s about six-forty in the morning and I just finished Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. I have yet to read The Tipping Point by the same author, but now, I am not sure that I will.

The problem with any book is its reputation - especially if there is a lot of it. For some reason - it kept reminding me of Freakonomics - only this was esoteric on the dull side.

There is a trend (I am not sure who started it) of looking at the world as if suddenly we are finding new things. These books go on with examples and experiences - and it just seems never ending. Some examples are interesting - but then it does get boring after a while. India Unbound, The World is Flat (left it halfway), and now Blink. I am given to believe that the Tipping Point is similar. I call these, the “books that tell us what we know”. And I may add, “that we choose not to know”. Possibly we are bang in between a revolution of how we see our world - and these are the small changes that we dont notice. Hmm. Need to read Tipping Point.

Freakonomics stands out - because the relationships that it talks of - are curious, to say the least.

Blink is a good book, mind you, nothing wrong with it - but it failed to impress. At least as much as the promise that people said it held. The theory that the book talks about is absolutely bang on! And I should have known. I don’t pick up books recommended by some people. Then many people talk about it - I know all the more I shouldn’t pick it up. But then you feel left out - because everyone is talking about it. That is not the Blink moment. The moment I choose not to pick it up is the Blink moment.

Recommended only if you want to be told, with never ending examples of, what you possibly already know. Yawn, need to get forty blinks…er…winks, or more.

SO GOOOOOD! and Malcolm Gladwell excels again and again.
Just the type of books I like it's under psychology type because it explains the subconsciousness but it's so good not boring because everything is explained with daily examples.
10 stars out of 5!!!!

Meh. So first impressions can be amazingly accurate, that's the first message. Or not. That's the other message. So he relates plenty of examples and counter-examples, but he is only reporting interesting (if somewhat obvious) results - many of them, like a magpie picking up glittery objects, and there isn't any conclusion - nothing to tie it all together. Well he's a reporter not a scientist, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect him to have one. But the jargon! He calls this ability (or inability) to size things up in a flash "thin-slicing" .... over and over again. But I guess I could go 2.5 stars

An awesome choice of title first of all as it aptly highlights the direction in which the present day decision making process is going towards. With increasing complexity and requirement of multi tasking, decision making is that one quality that every one yearns for. But the travesty of the truth is that very few are there amongst us who really know the process of decision making. Well I used to think that you sit, process and decide. That's one method ofcourse. The other one that comes to my mind is you run, slip, dash and just pick one from the options available to you with just hope, and logic being the last thing, on your side. ;p

Adding to the joy, various experimental findings have been highlighted in the book forming the crux of the fun which I won't disclose here as it'll rob you off the fun in it. IN the book, author explicitly says that decision making process actually has two approaches. The first one that i mentioned above involves comprehension, cognition and lot of data crunching leading to the conclusion. But the underlying assumption in this process is that you have an unlimited supply of time (which is hardly ever the case). The second one that i mentioned above is called rapid cognition and in a cursory glance it would seem to you as a random act. We pick an option under such circumstance only when we know that picking is compulsory and we would be better off with a wrong choice rather than with no choice at all. If someone picks the right one, losers instantaneously brand it as luck by chance. What if i told you that even behind your rapid cognition, there is a basis. There's reason that you chose a particular option and only that option amongst all the options. It has a direct relation with the memories and experiences that have created your subconscious since you have stepped foot on this planet.

The best example of this can be seen in our own society. If some guy is seen with a tattoo, long hair, ostentatious clothes, our mind immediately forms an image of him as someone who's born with a silverspoon or has no regards for the life he is living, he must be arrogant, impertinent etc etc. Where do all these ideas come from? They are nothing more than what we have been fed into our minds repeatedly and on a daily basis. In India, the organisational hierarchy of the family leaves little room for individual thought process and as an aftermath, the habit of questioning and curiosity goes down the drain. Cultural practices as such, leads to the creation of these kind of biases and prejudices which in turn has brewed a great deal of hypocrisy in our generation as the same characteristics that I mentioned above becomes desirable to an individual and even after he/she attains it, he/she remains contemptuous of the practice as a whole because that's what he/she has been fed with. How often have we seen that a guy in public transport even if mistakenly outrages the modesty of a female passenger, the crowd goes berserk and thrash the guy presuming that he must have had bad intentions. His pleas and requests fall upon deaf ears as people have already taken a snap judgement and no amount of explanation can convince them otherwise.

Talking about all this brings us to a very important question. Are we slaves to our snap judgments? Can't we break free the shackles of biases and prejudices? To answer this, it is important to know that there is one big similarity between our conscious and subconscious thinking process. Both of them can be trained and taught through repetitive exercises only. It might be possible for some of you to think that since subconscious decision making is a quick process, training it will also be likewise but it isn't. Author substantiates this claim by quoting instances in the book in which body guards, police officers are provided training of this sort in which they control their adrenaline rush by repeatedly practicing in high-stress situations in which they learn to control their heart-rates, resisting their brains to keep the amount of input from dropping which ultimately helps them to take judicious action in such situations.

Thomas Hoving, a curator, says that:

" I try my best to create best first impressions of the people, activity or an object during my first interaction as I believe that our subconscious is an untapped source of abilities and possibilities and it can be educated and trained in a manner such that we harness it for the greater good and for all this to happen, I need to have a positive frame of mind for every new experience of life."

Do you agree? I most certainly do;);).

Much like the reason behind my majoring in Economics, I like Gladwell because he opens my mind to new ideas and new ways to think. Much like Economics, I believe he's far from perfect, but I really enjoy viewing the world through his lens.

In just about anything, when people start acting as if there is only one way to do something, I stop listening to them. This goes for many things, but especially politics. If you DO, however, find someone who is omniscient and knows exactly how every policy will turn out in the end, please let me know. I may listen to their one way of seeing the world. Otherwise ...

What I got from Blink is that there is a lot to our instant thoughts and feelings and many times much more than we give them credit. The traditional wisdom is to plan and make huge weighty decisions based on every single bit of information that we have at our fingertips (which is just about everything, google!). This is actually a big reason my wife and I get into ... disagreements (we'll go with that). She likes to plan everything down to the last detail and I like to be a bit more relaxed.

So it would seem that this book is a big proponent of my way of doing things, but it turns out it's not so much.

We should trust our gut-instinct, says Blink, if we have many hours of experience in said realm of understanding because we have developed the skills to make sense of those small details and because we have the ability to "thin slice."

Gladwell also makes the point that not always can we trust our gut-intinct, however, because our gut-instinct tends to be racist, even when we are not in fact consciously racist. Also, our instincts can get overwhelmed by heightened arousal, such as when people can't even dial 911 in an emergency because their senses are overloaded.

But then again, you can practice and have these types of unconscious reactions mitigated.

The interesting story-telling style of introducing these topics is, of course, what really gets me. It's the stories that are often unbelievable that have me clamoring for more, just like in Outliers (although I think Outliers was a little better written) and I would assume his other books.

He goes into why The Getty art museum spent millions on a fake kouros (Greek statue) and why cops probably aren't racial profiling when they beat people like Rodney King, but because of a few key mistakes such as allowing their unconscious to get overwhelmed and also because they were a group of officers instead of just one.

He talks about people who can listen to a couple and tell when they should start talking to their lawyers and people who have developed the actual abilities that are shown in the TV show "Lie to Me." How looking at a person's room for 5 minutes may give a complete stranger a better picture of a person than a good friend.

I've always loved these types of explanations for things. There's the old wisdom we have and the wisdom we assume when we don't have any other way to describe a particular event and which is completely wrong. I love thinking new ideas, even when it's old news and that's why I'll keep coming back to Gladwell.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Rating: 2.5 stars
Date read: 17 June 2024

"Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant - in the blink of an eye - that actually aren't as simple as they seem." Gladwell has chosen an interesting topic to examine, and provided many examples, however, the whole thing is rather superficial. I still have no idea why or how the brain does this. I can make a guess and come up with hypotheses, do some research, but the book doesn't really cover any of this. So, fascinating topic, lots of examples, superficial coverage. Ultimately disappointing.

I could've used a bit more clarity on how to determine when intuition is useful or not, but overall this was an engrossing and fascinating read.

Won't do my typical long review for this book.

I'm actually writing something more substantial that deals with these issues, so I'll save some of my energy for that. (And there is quite a bit more that needs reading).

The short-short version of my usual long review is that Gladwell has some very good exploratory writing that he has written through anecdotes. This shouldn't surprise Gladwell fans.

The problem with this book is that we never know whether he is intervening in the art vs. science debate, the intuitive vs. structured methods debate, or the rationalist vs. heuristic learning debate. If we were to read the book through any of these perspectives, unsurprisingly, the answer would be -- it all depends.

Intuition can be the answer -- unless it's the problem.

Intuition can be made better, through science. Unless our science is actually the problem, in that case, trust expert judgement (not necessarily the same thing as intuition, right?). The concepts get fuzzy. And actually, it seems like Gladwell is taking liberties with his subject matter to explore a range of things that might only be slightly related.

One might take away from this book that we need to be aware of our own cognition, or that we need something called an epistemological frame. How do we know what we know? When is information too much information? When do we need rigor? When do we need to make a decision quickly?

In any case, we're not sure what we're supposed to take away because the book hasn't quite settled into a fuller version of itself. That is my intuition as a writer. Gladwell has a second or third draft, but not quite a final draft. And that final draft might be a little beyond his capabilities. He might need a co-author, more time, or expertise to help his cause.

There is a deep literature that deals with all of these subjects of epistemology, analytical failure, art vs. science (and so on). But since the book scrapes the surface of applied psychology, we're left with a few good stories and some things to think about.

One has to remember that the author is a journalist and kind of intellectual voyeur -- thin-slicing is not only one of the topics of his book, it is also his profession.

Not bad for a book written for a popular audience, but not great.

مالكولم غلادويل "حكواتي شاطر" يجيد حبك القصص بشكل مثير جداً، ولو سمعتَ أو شاهدتَ له مقطعاً مصوراً لما أصابك الملل أبداً في تتبع قصصه.
لعل هذا الأمر لا ينسحب على كتبه ( التي يكون عمادها 80% قصصاً متنوعة ) ويدسّ في كل قصة حكمة أو لفتة نفسية أو تجربة اجتماعيّة.

في هذا الكتاب يريد أن يقول رسالة واحدة: ما تظنّه للوهلة الأولى ( الانطباع الأول ) في غالب الوقت يكون صادقاً.
ويضرب لها الأمثلة.

مما يعيب الكتاب التطويل الممل في بعض القصص، وتكرارها على أكثر من فصل لتوضيح فكرة قد توضحت في مثال أول.

ثاني كتاب أقرأه لنفس الكاتب... و مهم اللي بيقرا النوع ده من الكتب يدرك جيدا المقصود بالpop psychology... و مياخدش الكلام اللي في الكتاب علي انه حقائق علمية مثبتة...

الكاتب بيسوق طبعا دراسات تدعم كلامه... بس هو بيسوقها بالذات للهدف ده: عشان تدعم كلامه... و ده لوحده لا يعني انها صحيحة او دقيقة...

المهم الكتاب ده لافت للنظر بالفعل... بيتكلم عن الsnap judgements... ازاي عقلنا بيعرف حاجات معينة من غير ما احنا نعرفها... اللي ممكن نسميه الحدس... و امتي مناسب نستخدم الحدس ده و امتي ممكن الحدس يلبسنا في الحيطة...
الرسالة الرئيسية في الكتاب من وجهة نظري ان الحدس ده سلاح ذو حدين... زي ما تبقي مربي كلب شرس... هيخدمك كتير و ممكن ينقذ حياتك... بس مهم جدا انك تربيه كويس عشان متلاقيهوش في يوم بيعضك انت... تدريب الحدس ده محتاج نوع من الintrospection ... و الاهم محتاج بيئة صحية و ثرية مثيرة للتأمل و فيها ناس experts تتعلم منهم... عشان مهم جدا تعرف ان اللي مصاحب علي علوكة و اشرف كخة مش هيطلع طيار!

جالب بود که چطور از علم برای توضیح این مساله استفاده کرده بود. البته مقداری که از علم استفاده کرده بود کمی کم بود و برای رفرانس علمی نیاز بود که کمی تحقیقات بیشتر صورت بگیره. و اینکه زیاد هم نمیشه روی این موضوع تاکید کرد که افرادی که قضاوت های لحظه ای انجام میدن افرادی هستن که دانش عمیق زیادی دارن یا تجربه یا مهرت خاصی در یک زمینه خاص دارن. خواندنش سریع بود و کمی نگاه علمی به چیزی که بهش تصمیم گیری بر اساس حس ششم میگیم، انداخت.


We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.

From page 265: “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” (So true! What good is all the world’s info at our fingertips if we don’t have the wisdom necessary to properly execute it?)