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Mermaid
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Current read: Blink
« on: 2005-04-25 11:32:47 » |
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316172324?v=glance
Blink: The power of thinking without thinking
Having read Gladwell's previous excellent Tipping Point ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316172324?v=glance ), I am not impressed half way through the book. It reads like a collection of commentry on a variety of news links off the net. You know, the kind we discuss in #virus.
The concept of 'thin slicing' is worth the read so far. I shall let you guys know if anything else worthwhile turns up.
However, it did occur to me that a concerted effort to collate the various discussion we have on #virus to come up with a piece of work. Whether or not it is worthy of a publishable book is not the point. I believe that there are a lot of interesting and inter connected issues we discuss..and with a little direction and order, it can be a 'collection' of thoughts. A theme based discussion is not a bad idea. Thoughts?
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David Lucifer
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Re:Current read: Blink
« Reply #1 on: 2005-04-27 12:17:24 » |
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Quote from: Mermaid on 2005-04-25 11:32:47
However, it did occur to me that a concerted effort to collate the various discussion we have on #virus to come up with a piece of work. Whether or not it is worthy of a publishable book is not the point. I believe that there are a lot of interesting and inter connected issues we discuss..and with a little direction and order, it can be a 'collection' of thoughts. A theme based discussion is not a bad idea. Thoughts?
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I like the idea. How do you see it working? One person editing or a collaboration?
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Mermaid
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Re:Current read: Blink
« Reply #2 on: 2005-04-27 15:02:09 » |
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blink is nothing but a collection of gladwell's earlier new yorker articles...it was like re reading the print edition as a compilation..he had basically picked up all his topics..grouped those which have a common theme and printed the damn thing..
if we can have chat sessions or closed group think in the form of discussions, we can send it out to publications under a pseudo name..does that make sense? we'll test it out as articles and if all goes well, we can think of bigger and more diverse themes..
the editing has to be a collabration..we need to get members signing up for this and we need them to be committed...it shall not be public..i see no conflict with a group of people editing stuff as the criteria will be decided upon..
let us take a simple topic....i dont know..let's take "social engineering"? we need to come up with a 5000 word article based on discussions and chat sessions..the number of people involved will be limited..(also makes sense for copyright issues/authorship etc in the future)
yes?
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
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Re:Current read: Blink
« Reply #3 on: 2005-04-28 11:58:11 » |
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Hey, I happened to read a review of "Blink" today, together with one of another book.
The Moment of Truth?
by Sue M. Halpern
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older
Interesting idea this "thin-slicing"... delegating a weighed sampling of atributes to your "adaptive subconscious". The process seems to be instinctive, yet a product of experience and familiarity with certain patterns.
The review mentions a couple of interesting examples: How an expert was able to "feel" that a statue was a fake while the comprehensive analytical methods were not as successful, and how a tennis expert can "see" a double fault well before the tennis ball has hit the ground. Apparently experience has a lot to do with the ability to see patterns in these two examples.
Quoting from the review:
<quote>
One problem with the field guide approach to decision-making is that it provides too much information, allows for too many options. Call it "unbounded rationality." Call it "thick-slicing." What enables thin-slicing to work, by contrast, is not simply that it deals with a smaller universe, but that it homes in on the bits that are uniquely relevant to the problem at hand.
<end quote>
however
<quote>
Gladwell also spends a lot of time in Blink writing about the muck-ups, telling the sorry stories of ordinary people who were hamstrung by embedded prejudices that clouded their better judgment, military personnel who were wedded to inelastic chains of command that left no room for intuitive decision-making, market researchers who asked the wrong questions and therefore promoted the wrong products, and voters who chose style over substance. This last is what Gladwell calls the Warren Harding error, and it is, he says, the "dark side of rapid cognition."
<end quote>
So, how do you get lucky and pick a relevant "thin-slice" of attributes? You just know... or you don't... or you learn. The first example in the review is about how brand recognition by people off the street outperformed the analyses of market experts. This case is more complicated because it was the surveyor who did the "thin-slicing" on behalf of the people, and asked them a relevant question. The surveyor assumed that brand recognition was a dominant factor -- the wisdom of the masses, self-fulfilling prophecies, you figure it.
And here we come to the second book reviewed:
<quote>
Experience matters. It lays down tracks in the brain, cognitive templates against which new information is compared. Herbert Simon called this pattern recognition and observed that it was one of the most common and efficient ways that we make sense of the world. In his latest book, The Wisdom Paradox, the neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg observes that exposure to similar, new things creates neural networks in the brain that attract each other and accumulate, networks that in some circumstances are expressed as expertise and in others as intuition (or both). The networks accrue with age—Goldberg ventures to call the result of this accumulation wisdom—and are, therefore, unavailable to young people. They enable the brain to recognize not only information that has been encountered before, but what may be encountered in the future, and to rapidly apprehend connections between what is and what was and what will be.
"Intuition is often understood as an antithesis to analytic decision-making, as something inherently nonanalytic or preanalytic," Goldberg writes.
But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized.... It is the product of analytic processes being condensed to such a degree that its internal structure may elude even the person benefiting from it.... The intuitive decision-making of an expert bypasses orderly, logical steps precisely because it is a condensation of extensive use of such orderly logical steps in the past.
It is not only experience and the passing of time that open the province of intuition—of pattern recognition and condensed decision-making—to people as they age, it is also biology. It's how we've evolved. The left hemisphere– right hemisphere duality of our brains that was once seen—through studies of adults with brain damage—primarily as a division between language functions (left brain) and visual-spatial reasoning (right brain) is now known to encompass something much broader: a distinction between processing what's new and what's not. "The right hemisphere is the novelty hemisphere, the daring hemisphere, the explorer of the unknown and the uncharted," writes Goldberg. "The left hemisphere is the repository of compressed knowledge, of stable pattern-recognition devices that enable the organism to deal efficiently and effectively with familiar situations."
<end quote>
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David Lucifer
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Re:Current read: Blink
« Reply #4 on: 2005-05-12 11:01:13 » |
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In the Blink of an Eye:
Why Messrs. Spock, Holmes, and Data Were Wrong
a book review by Michael Shermer
Anyone who does a lot of public speaking knows there are certain questions that inevitably arise from the audience in a Q&A. In my case, lecturing on pseudoscience and the paranormal, I am almost always asked: What is my position on the afterlife? (“I’m for it”), have I ever encountered a mystery that science cannot explain? (“Paris Hilton”), and have I ever been skeptical of something that turned out to be real? For this final question I have a serious answer: intuition.
As a skeptical scientist, I have always treated with disdain the notion that one can intuit a truth about reality. Scientists should employ the logic of Mr. Spock, the deductive reasoning of Mr. Holmes, and the rational calculus of Mr. Data. Hunches, guesses, insights, feelings, and intuitions lead to misdirection and error. Thinking things through rationally and systematically is the royal road to reality.
Well, I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to thinking than meets the experimental eye, and Malcolm Gladwell has penned an absolutely delightful summary of all the important research in the study of intuition. His title, Blink, is apt, for we humans have a remarkable—and heretofore unproven—capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.
Gladwell begins with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forged Kouros, a sculpture of a youth allegedly carved in 6th-century B.C. Greece. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests. For example, one of the art experts—Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—later recalled that the first word that popped into his mind when he saw the Kouros was “fresh.” Although he could not say precisely what about the statue was fresh, it was a general feeling he had about it. “I had dug in Sicily where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’t come out looking like that. The Kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best café au lait from Starbucks.”
What is happening here is nonrational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. (This may also mean that student evaluations are actually based on first impressions rather than extensive analysis.) The same effect—called “thin slicing”—can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried “speed dating,” a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple “dates” in one evening lasts only six minutes. Thin slicing is intuitive thinking, “thinking without thinking” as Gladwell puts it. That’s not quite right, however, as I suspect it is more of a subtle, unconscious (or subconscious) form of thinking that we just don’t know that much about as yet. We are collecting data about a person or situation, and that data is being analyzed somewhere in the brain. How precisely that is being done remains a mystery.
Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive “feel” in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour. Contempt for one’s spouse, for example, is a powerful predictor of a doomed marriage, and rolling one’s eyes when one’s spouse is speaking, is a proxy for contempt. A lot can be read in the blink of an eye.
We are especially good at snap judgments when it comes to human relations, because we evolved as a social primate species living in small tribes in which social relations were extremely important. We needed (and still need) to know whom we can trust and whom we cannot trust; in the prehistoric world of our Paleolithic environment we had only our wits and intuitions, the “sense” or “feeling” we had for someone’s trustworthiness, to rely on. The social calculus was not the slow and systematic logic of analysis; it was (and is) the subtle and fast feeling of a felt emotion. That “feeling” is the expression of an internal computation whose consequences are important.
This explains the interesting results of an experiment conducted by the psychologist Samuel Gosling. He rated 80 subjects on the “Big Five” personality scale (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience). He found a high correlation with similar ratings of the subjects done by their best friends — no surprise. But then he sent total strangers into the dorm rooms of the subjects and gave them 15 minutes to answer questions about the person who lived there. The strangers were not as good as the best friends in evaluating extraversion and agreeableness, but on conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience, the strangers knew the subjects better than their best friends!
Some of the research findings on what might be called “the blink effect,” so well encapsulated by Gladwell, are startling. The best predictor of whether a physician will be sued for malpractice is not the doctor’s training, credentials, or track record, but a subjective evaluation by observers of short clips of conversation between doctor and patient. Physicians who seem warm and empathetic—traits that can be sensed in a blink—are less likely to be sued by their patients, regardless of the number of errors they commit. As one lawyer explained it, “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.’”
Unfortunately, in what Gladwell calls “the dark side of blink,” we sometimes make snap assessments of people based on inappropriate criteria, such as their gender or race. Research with the Implicit Association Test has shown that we form connections between things faster when there is already an association, such as between female and laundry, home, kitchen, housework, and babies; and between male and professional, merchant, capitalist, corporation, and entrepreneur. Even more sinister are the associations of African-American or European-American with such adjectives as hurt, evil, glorious, and wonderful. “It turns out that over 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations,” Gladwell explains, “meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete the test when they are required to link good things with black people than when they are required to link bad things with black people.”
Gladwell took the test and was rated as having “moderate automatic preference for whites”; “but then again, I’m half black,” he points out. Meaning what? “What it means,” he concludes, “is that our attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have conscious attitudes. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” The IAT, on the other hand, measures “our racial attitudes on an unconscious level—the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think. We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good.”
Blink is packed with examples of such intuitive processes, a thoughtful and thought-provoking look into both the light tunnel and the dark well of our minds. But I wish to praise it on another plane as well.
There are, roughly speaking, three levels of science writing in our culture: (1) technical (peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and university press books written by and for professional scientists); (2) popular professional (essays and articles in popular magazines and trade press books written by scientists for both scientists and moderately informed general readers — Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond come to mind); (3) popular general (essays, articles, and books by journalists and science writers for completely uninformed readers).
We live in the Age of Science, and all three levels are vital for the dispersal of scientific knowledge to an educated democracy. Sadly, too many professional scientists think level one is the only legitimate form of science writing, and that anything else is simply “dumbing down.” For his presentation of science to hundreds of millions of people, the astronomer Carl Sagan was slammed by his peers, denied tenure at Harvard, and rejected by the National Academy of Science. Yet he never stopped producing peer-reviewed articles, averaging one a month for his entire career.
Gladwell is presenting science at level three, where it is most needed, and where good writing is most vital. He has the ability to synthesize a large body of scientific data into a highly readable, page-turning narrative, and to convert the raw numbers of research and statistics into meaningful facts for our personal lives. I thought he did this brilliantly with The Tipping Point, and I think he does it even better in Blink. For this feat all of us in the scientific community should be grateful, because the craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science.
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