Reddit reviews Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink discussed the effectiveness of intuition in areas where you are informed. This is distinctly different from the gut decisions that Colbert ridicules. In essence experts do exist, and a lot of what makes them experts is that they do not need to revisit a much of their training when making judgments because much of their discretion begins to come naturally.

This does not mean that we do not all imagine that we are skilled in more areas than we actually are. In fact, as the original posting states it is a misrepresentation typical of Hollywood to imply that people don't make horrible decisions in relationships when they fail to reflect.

This one?

blink has a couple chapters on this.

Alright I hope you get this. Sounds like you are a lot like I was growing up. I would read a book a week and listen to two. haha. these were books i had to grow into a lot of times. so don't get discouraged. some of these are tough but they'll help you in the long run. promise.

anyways.. here's my list.

Foreign Policy

-Dying to Win- Science and strategy behind suicide terrorism

-Imperial Hubris- good book by a CIA vet on what to expect because of US foreign policy

-Blowback- Same type of book as above, but better.

-The Looming Tower- a good history and account for Sept 11






Economics and Money

-Freakonomics- Ever wonder about he economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers? This book is fantastic.

-Outliers- Gladwell is a master of minute detail. This book helps you focus on the future.

-Blink-Great book on intuitive judgement

-The Age of Uncertainty- the best book I've ever read on the fight between Capitalism and Communism

Biology and Science

-Why Do Men Have Nipples- a general Q&A book. Good for info you can use at a party or to impress somebody. really random stuff.

-A Short History of Nearly Everything- Humorous take on some heavy heavy science. Easier to read than people think.

-The Ancestors Tale- It was hard picking just one Dawkins book, so I gave you two.

-The Greatest Show on Earth- Dawkins is the world-standard for books on biology and evolution in layman's terms.

Good Novels

-1984-Hopefully no explanation needed

-A Brave New World- a different type of dystopian universe compared to 1984. read both back to back.

-The Brothers Karamazov- My favorite piece of Russian Literature. It made me think more than any other book on this list honestly. I can't recommend it enough.

-Catch-22- There are so many layers to this book. So much symbolism, so much allusion. You must pay attention to get the full affect of this book. Great satire. Masterfully written.

-Alas Babylon- Yet another dystopian novel. This time about what would happen after a world wide nuclear war.

-Slaughterhouse-5 Vonnegut is a badass. And that's really all there is to know. I read this book in one day. It was that good. Satire on WW2.

Philosophy

-Sophies World- Good intro to a lot of basic principles of the major philosophers

-Beyond Good and Evil- Nietzche can get REALLY depressing because he is a nihilist but this book is extremely quotable and will give fresh perspective on a lot of things.

-Atlas Shrugged- Ayn Rand's masthead. Its a novel, but its also a commentary on her precious objectivism.


So there you have it. My short list of books to read. I can get deeper into certain subjects if you want me to. Just PM me.

It's true! I've been reading about this phenomenon in a book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. It's pretty cool stuff. Our subconscious often knows or picks up on much more than we do, and it sometimes takes a while for that to migrate to the conscious mind- if it ever does at all. Sometimes it just manifests as a feeling or intuitive sense with seemingly no explanation. But there is an explanation, and it is super-cool science.

I agree with you that people can get along, even when they're different.

The bias that undermines this relationship is nearly invisible, and that is that people do, in fact, judge books by their cover, as well as people. Alternately, this can be described as the "snap judgement".

Is this a bad thing? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" talks pretty extensively about the snap judgement, and where it's good and where it's bad. I think most racism boils down to the interaction of the snap judgement and the fact that everyone wants someone on the totem pole who is lower than they are. There's probably a name for that bias, too, but hell if I know what it is.

Speaking only from my personal experience, the people I know that are carrying the biggest prejudices (which is to say, those who have the strongest link between appearance and actions, for better and for worse) have been discriminated against the least. As an important second point, among those people that I know, how they actually treat those people is a completely unrelated variable from their prejudice, which is merely a useful placeholder for content until actual content arrives. This is unclear, I apologize, but the problem is not the prejudice, it is the willingness (or rather, the unwillingness) to adapt from the prejudiced pre-image generated upon meeting to the real image, which cannot be formed without getting to know the person.

This suggests to me that the snap judgement is a distinct phenomenon from the "I'm-better-than-someone" desire, and specifically that racism, which is categorically the idea that people of different races are different in more ways than their skin color, is a distinct animal, separate from the idea that my race is better than yours, which would be more accurately described as ethno-centrism.

Anyway, racism isn't going anywhere. All the political correctness movement is going to do is push it underground and out of sight where it will, like a fungus, proliferate and eventually bear fruit above-ground. I would rather people be as racist as they want, so that, like wearers of the symbol of gullibility (not what you were looking for? Try this one instead, you judgmental bastard), they can be easily and readily identified.

A much worse outcome is what we have today, with a very real modern version of double-speak taking shape in the form of political speech. You're not pro- or anti-abortion, you're pro-life or pro-choice. You can't support a good, functioning government; you can only be a Democrat or a Republican. You're not anti-black, you just think that 17-year-old black kid looked really suspicious. And then your city's police department agreed with you. Et cetera.

tl;dr - One time, OK, see, one time Randy Beaman's aunt was sitting on the ... on the front porch and she, and she was in her bare feet, and she felt a lick and she thought it was her dog ... licking her feet but it wasn't; it was this crazy guy that did that a lot. 'K, bye.

It's a phenomenon called thin-slicing. It's talked about in great detail in Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Words of wisdom. Thank you. Ever read Blink?

I am reading Blink right now. It is a book about instant, subconscious, split-second, "gut feel" decisions and processes of the mind. It has a chapter on how police officers make split-second decisions and how, in light of wrongful/accidental shootings of innocent civilians, officers corrected this by training their gut-feel instinct to avoid over-reacting or becoming "temporarily autistic" in the heat of the moment, i.e., unable to read the minds of other people and reason about their mental state, intentions, etc. From your experience, were you trained to think in this way?

EDIT: There is also a chapter in the book about the same sort of principles being applied in the military, but I am asking if it is something you hear about in basic training, that is, about the importance of psychological readiness at the most basic instinctual level. Not sure why I got downvoted, I mean no disrespect.

I would suggest that you read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It's an interesting discourse on the psychology behind exactly what you're talking about. And, wouldn't you know it, there's actual science behind why gut feelings actually work. It's called thin-slicing.

http://www.amazon.com/Blink-The-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316172324

This book tends to imply otherwise about gut feelings.

Malcolm Gladwell would agree with you. In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking he says that the big decisions are the ones that you should make with your intuitive mind but the small ones are the ones that you should actually think about. This goes against what our society tells us about decisions. The reason for this is that much of our thinking is done precociously and we can't actually think logically about so many factors so the processing is done outside of our consciousness and we just get the the decision as an action. Some more simple tasks we need to think about - I can't remember why exactly. Great book though.