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Does anyone know if Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a good book?
http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316172324
Amazon.com Review
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
I liked it. The promotional material and summaries of it don't do justice to the content, I think, though. The book has many examples of how people who are experts at things can make good snap judgments in their domains of expertise, but it is not about how any normal person can make great decisions without thinking about them.
Also, Malcolm Gladwell could write a cookbook and make it the most entertaining thing you'll read all year.
Jon Finkel is probably the world's best Magic player. However, he is not good at explaining how to make correct decisions when playing; to him, the right play is simply obvious, and he doesn't even notice all the wrong ones. His skill is almost entirely unconscious.
Reminds me of Marion Tinsley, the greatest checkers player ever. He lost 7 games out of thousands in his 45 year career of playing for the World Championship, two of them to the program that would eventually go on to solve checkers. (That excludes his early years studying the game.) He was arguably the most dominant master of any game, ever. He, too, couldn't explain his skill.
Do they still have World Championships in checkers now the game is understood to be a somewhat more complex tic-tac-toe variant?
I believe so, though I've heard the first few moves are now randomized, as only perfect play, rather than all board positions, is solved.
Of course, every perfect-information deterministic game is "a somewhat more complex tic-tac-toe variant" from the perspective of sufficient computing power.
Yeah, sure. And I have a program that gives constant time random access to all primes less than 3^^^^3 from the perspective of sufficient computing power.
Ahh, good idea.
No, only the ones that are a tie.