Yeah, Blink was the first and last of his books I read. Nice anecdotes but it struck me as nothing more than saying "Your gut feeling is right, except when it's wrong"

More like, your intuitive jump related to areas in which you are experienced and expert, can and does give you conclusions way way quicker than it gives you justifications.

Hoving looking at a fake sculpture and instantly going 'NOPE' is not a Joe Average reaction, but draws on lots of experience. The story of gamblers giving stress reactions to unfamiliar and dangerous card games is GAMBLERS.

Your gut feeling has nothing to do with it. What are you so expert at, that you can just glance and you'll know? (as in, more than would be justified by the lack of analysis and prolonged exposure)

Being able to plausibly form hugely accelerated judgements and have them check out, is interesting. It's also plausible to me that few people build up that much expertise, to be able to do that. But for those who do… and it can be in any field, from any person… it's an interesting perspective.

Same!! I watched his TED talk on David and Goliath story and I thought he was interesting. Then I picked up Blink. 25 pages in, I realized he was full of shit.

Just finished Talking to Strangers. That's an unfair ungenerous depiction, by omission. Specifically, the punch line.

Wide spread cargo cult adoption of Kansas City's policing strategy ignored the science, explaining why few reproduced KC's successes, with all sorts of terrible consequences, resulting many senseless deaths, and destroying trust and legitmacy of policing.

Just another tale of bad policy, unintended consequences, railing against entrenched dogma.

In this case, Gladwell's quixotic suggestion is to step back, reassess, try again. Daylighting the science during this cycle of turmoil seems reasonable. Might even help.

What more could he do? What would you do?

I used to work on a government project where we were tasked with building lie detectors based off the concepts of blink (micro expressions) (and really Paul Ekman [1], where the concepts in blink came from)

After a few years at it, I came away thinking the whole thing was bullshit. Unfortunately, countless tax dollars were wasted.

[1] https://www.paulekman.com/blog/signs-of-lying/

Talking To Strangers was a choice for Zoom book club I was in during the shutdown. I was looking forward to it a little since I recognized but didn't know the name. I couldn't make my way through it and dropped out.

He has a New Yorker writing style but without having anything to say.

The only Gladwell book I have read is "Outliers". When reading it I couldn't shake the feeling that he was cherry picking his examples. It never pulled back far enough to study the phenomenon systematically and the examples he did use were scattered all across the world and decades. I ended up being fairly disappointed and have not bothered with any of his other work.

I guess I was most disappointed because it was getting absolutely stellar reviews at the time and I'm not sure why.

Blink is just an application of the Pareto distribution to what information can be gleaned from someone in what amount of time. 80% of what you’ll get, you’ll get in those first few seconds.

Ideological consistency is often a barrier to amassing personal wealth.