Blinking

I don’t know how or why, but for some reason, I decided to buy the book Blink by Malcom Gladwell. Gladwell’s other book, Outliers was mentioned to me in a conversation with one of my friends. She said that although it was an enjoyable read, all of the science was “popular science” and could not be taken seriously. A part of me likes popular science. I like seeing science being chopped up into bite-sized pieces. They can fit cryptography, string theory, cloning, you-name-it into a little side column. It’s like a bagel-bite, but with science instead of pizza. And so, while perusing around at Target, I picked up the book.

I’ve only read 2 chapters of Blink but I already have a feeling I won’t enjoy it. In summary, the book is about hunches and intuition and it’s goals are to:

1. “convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately,”
2. teach us to “trust our instincts and when we should be wary of them,”
3. and “convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.”

One little bit of awkwardness of the book. It seems almost like a self-help guide and the author often tends to casually address the reader. There are a lot of “you“‘s and “we“‘s, but for some reason, the way he uses “we” doesn’t really feel inclusive. Instead, it feels like the “we” he speaks about is the elite group of beings (of which he belongs to) that are able to blink, and decide. (I think of Charlie from the show Numbers). This book is a guide for you to be on a similar level of awesomeness.

Thus far, the book has been painful for several reasons, though I think most of them stem from the fact that I’ve studied computer science. As mentioned before, he takes on elitist-tone. He will ask the reader how they would run a particular experiment, propose a possible solution (claiming it is the most obvious one he would have come up with), and then casually mention that some esteemed researches in Switzerland “did just that.” I know the story-telling is for rhetorical reasons, but does it have to be so self-admiring?

Gladwell also seems fascinated by the power of heuristics and prediction (both of which get exploited like crazy in engineering). Your unconscious mind works in the background, absorbing and processing millions of signals from the world; way more than your conscious mind could ever sort through. From this, we get a hunch, a feeling we can’t articulate into words. And as the title of the book suggests, the hunch hits us within the blink of an eye. Yet, his examples sometimes require a painstaking process where scientists pick apart a video, second by second. He says that since they only have to analyze 1 minute rather than the full 15 minute conversation, something special is amidst. This is not a blink to me by any definition. All this story tells me is that a local analysis gives a good enough approximation of the whole.

I’m not sure if Gladwell has ever looked into computer science, or in particular, robotics because it feels like they have been doing this forever. I actually know very little about robotics but I do know that they solve similar problems. For example, a robotic car has thousands of sensors. It has cameras, laser beams, sensors in the tires, speedometers, temperature gauges, gas tank level, GPS position, etc. It has a fraction of the second to determine its current state (“Am I about to hit a tree?”) and another fraction to determine what it needs to do (“Oh shit, hit the breaks!”). One of the techniques employed in robotics is called principal component analysis (PCA). What it allows for is solutions to be produced iteratively, where the most critical parts get provided first.

I think that Blink would have been much better told from this view. Not mystifying the notion of intuition but rather explaining how it is a natural consequence. And surely, it is not that mystical, because you see examples of “hunches” being exploited all over in engineering. I don’t think he should be telling people to sometimes trust it, and sometimes not trust it. Great, when do I do which? Good luck coming up with an answer that isn’t something like “practice” or “experience” because if so, I’d feel like this book teaches you nothing. I think with PCA, at least, you can say something about the convergence of its solutions. I guess my message would be to trust mathematics, over popular science.

To be fair, I’ve only read 2 chapters so this judgment comes pre-maturely. Ironic, that I’ve got a bad hunch with this book though. Do I trust it? The next chapter is about how Warren Harding became president despite being a terrible candidate for the job. Pretty sure this one will be that chapter on when not to trust your gut.