Hopeful, helpful, enlightening

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell's books, and I enjoyed this one. Truth is, though, it was losing my interest; much of this read like an interesting but overlong Buzzfeed article. (Not that there's much wrong with that.) However, the last two chapters were worth the price of reading the rest. If you're feeling TL;DR, just read the last two chapters.

The thesis of the book is that we often know things in an instant without knowing how we know. Secondarily, we do a bad job of interrogating these intuitions, and trying to explain or explicate them leads us farther from the truth, not nearer.

Pretty good. Useful.

But there's also a great deal in here that's more expected, like how our flashes of insight are often wrong and lead to problems. The key, it seems, is learning when we can trust ourselves to make snap judgments--a narrow range of things--and knowing all the other times when it will lead us into error.

That's what's great about chapters six and seven. It talks specifically about countering our intuitions, or unconscious reactions, when they're likely to be wrong.

Chapter six is about the kind of thinking error that leads cops to view POC with undue suspicion, subject suspects to unnecessary violence, and employ deadly force when it wasn't called for. What I found most interesting in this discussion of research and examples was the way human stereotyping can be accounted for using proper police technique, reducing or eliminating these kinds of errors. In other words, we don't have to just throw our hands up and say that policing is difficult and dangerous and shit happens; we can demand proper training and proper technique to help prevent tragedies.

And chapter seven is about the difficulty symphony orchestras have had removing gender bias in decisions like hiring and pay. I didn't realize how misogynistic orchestras were; I though women had been integral to them for decades. Nope. Turns out, until they started evaluating musicians from behind a curtain, it was nearly impossible for women to break through, especially if they played trombone or French horn or other "masculine" instruments. Once they started using blind auditions, things changed. Women who had been dismissed as average by directors and others who should have known better proved to be exceptional when gender bias was accounted for. (It took additional fighting and unionization, though, to keep up the momentum.)

Interesting, enlightening, helpful, hopeful, stimulating--that's how I saw the end of the book. Parts of it didn't impress me, but all of it was instructive, much of it was entertaining, and some of it was must-read good.

Worth taking a look.

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