the venerable blighty, that silver-haired fox of a cynical gentleman, wrote a post on it's not happening about malcolm gladwell's blink. because i steal from everywhere without compunction, i've transposed the comment i left on that entry into an apsi entry -
i'm a gladwell defender, not that he, very nearly the best-selling nonfiction writer out there, needs one--but i like him as a writer. he's great at creating a juxtaposition, then teasing out the common narrative threads; he doesn't waste space and nary a sentence is over-written; and i've found both books and a majority of his new yorker pieces a pleasure to read. while i won't disagree that the gladwell-as-the-pt-barnum-of-science-journalism analogy could be made, i'm not sure it makes a useful point.
what blink has done is fundamentally enhance my thinking in a couple of ways. in the 2y since reading it, one premise that's proved a boon is the superficial point of the book: that our instictive reaction to something can be superior to a reasoned, balanced reaction. more specifically, that a snap decision can be balanced and actually is wired so it can pull from a robust set of data points. what's proved continually pleasing to my mind, and even affected the way i conceive of my own creative and intellectual ambitions, is the malleability of this pre-awareness-level of thinking: evolutionarily, we developed the ability to pattern match eons before language made the scene. pattern matching, or "have i seen this before," is one of our oldest and most-fine-tuned cognitive abilities. and naturally, we get better at it as we go along--as we see more things and witness more events.
i like gladwell's bit about the tennis pro who could predict a forthcoming double fault before the player had even released his toss: he had no idea why he was right all the time, why he could make those predictions. this guy has decades of immersive expertise in the world of tennis, and those years of attention and work have resulted in this matrix of detail; and thanks to all that data, he can decide something with an efficacy that exceeds his ability to explain the decision. isn't that just so interesting? i mean, yeah, it's a great anecdote, but what it implies is, in some ways, counterintuitive. if you want to be an expert at something, focus on the details. but not so you can write a paper and not have to look up the sources. obssess about the details so that your pattern matching gets better. practice piano and the harmonies will become more complex, the linkages between notes self-evident. read and think about all the novels so that your native sense for story develops a resonance point that gets more and more true. write everyday so that the distance between your voice and the keys will depreciate to nothing. it'll feel as though your eye for detail has become almost effortlessly attentive, crisp. and on one side that's true. but on the other side is the larger truth: detail and meaning coincide in fairly direct proportion; add detail to your mental grid so you can better and more immediately discern the whole. detail is there to help create meaning,
6 comments:
All good points. I maintain, though, that Gladwell's enthusiasm gets the better of him and that the reader is almost certainly left with an overestimation of his or her own facility with snap judgments. Almost nobody reaches the level of expertise that the tennis coach or the art historians in his book achieve, and it's well known that we all believe ourselves to be smarter, better and more attractive than we really are. Liberated by Gladwell's proclamation of emancipation from reason, this turns us into mistake factories, constantly repeating the mantra "Well, it felt right at the time..."
I did appreciate his discussion of training and practice and their effects on police work and other situations in which snap judgments are routine and unavoidable; I think if Blink had focused on this I wouldn't have had anything negative to say about it. Reading too much into too little data, or - worse - overgeneralizing - is the bane of popular science writing, and I think Blink stepped over that edge.
In retrospect, my initial post should have read: As a professional science book reviewer, I could tell right away that this one had problems.
you are both gay. as in to blave.
dalton, no one is as gay as you.
Blight (whom I've never met), I agree in principle and in Perfectworld, but here in Mudworld, I'd rather have folks in a lather about BLINK than about THE SECRET. Are we not already mistake factories? And I'll take "it felt right at the time" any day over "it was God's will" or even more frightening, refusal to take any responsibility whatsoever as seems to be the modus operandi of everyone born after 1980 as led by Cap'n G-Dubya. I would have preferred more examination of a negative side of the split second as unknowingly fueled by unfounded stereotype (actually, more in depth examination of EVERYTHING), but I'll take it as it is, salt shaker in hand.
mark, i'm on your team. priming and polishing your bat in the dugout, though sneaking longing glances over at mr. blighty's stock.
thanks lotta, for backup. rizzle. but i still am not sure of stuff. sir blight wrote, "As a professional science book reviewer, I could tell right away that this one had problems." that's a great and succinct way to put it; and though i want to respond in kind, i don't know if i'm inferring rightly or wrongly. i've a question for you, blight, if you're not sick of me. it sounds as though said problems were those of a reviewer, to some extent: i read the book and was concerned only with the connection between me and it; i gave not a thought to the possible delusions it might seed in the hasty little head of an oprah's member. prior to now, my only evaluation of blink, in scientific terms, is that the data gladwell uses are good.
I've got no problem with Gladwell's data, though much of his book is based on anecdote. I think he leads his readers to overgeneralize, and I think that overgeneralization serves his book sales. He's got a pretty sweet gig, really: simplifying and cheerleading for big, semi-controversial, semi-edgy issues and letting folks like us take over the nuts and bolts of marketing. Hence the half-apt Barnum analogy.
I agree without reservation that Blink is better than The Secret.
thanks. i’ve found gladwell’s science to be solid but not flawless, and from a properly skeptical viewpoint the anecdotal oozes into all else — but it’s narrative, and in the end an inseparable part of what makes the story fluid, the ideas compelling. perhaps a good way to put my stance is to say, at the moment, i’m with you in theory but not practice: i did not (to my knowledge) over-generalize as i read blink; you didn’t either. what’s left is to hypothesize another less discriminating reader, and i hesitate to do so.
Post a Comment