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March 25, 2005

Blink, a timely read


Ok, so everyone else is reading Blink too, but there is a good reason. It is an interesting, and timely book. Tipping Point was one of the incentives for me to invest in Cloudmark who is applying smart mob technology to the spam problem. Blink is about thin slicing. Making decisions in an instant. Some call it instinct. Many people think instinct is just nature and it can't be developed or learned. Wrongo. Every input you have goes into your ability to have good instinct. If you spend alot of time thinking about internet security (as I do), hopefully your instinct on seeing a new company will be better than someone who doesn't spend alot of time thinking about it. Gladwell doesn't just use business examples to talk about things in the blink of an eye. He leans on John Gottman's ability to thin slice marriages, a professional gambler's ability to "feel the deck", the Implicit Association Test, and Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System for reading people's faces. The facial stuff is the most interesting to me. The fact that trained researchers can watch tapes of people with the dialog off and tell if they are lying, nervous, telling the truth, etc. My favorite part was when he described Clinton's face. It is the "I got my hand in the cookie jar, but you will love me anyway" face. EXACTLY. He had many things stuck in places they shouldn't have been, but had such a friendly happy face that most people (not me) forgave him. Amazing what you can do with a face. When we realize that, there are two ways to make it actionable. First, you could be more aware of your own facial contortions and try to manage them. On the flip side, you can pay more attention to your reactions to other people's facial expressions. Do you react in the predicted way when Clinton smiles? Is he manipulating your reaction and feelings at a very deep level? What do actors do? They act and get the audience to have feelings and reactions. Be ware of how you are being sold.

So I liked Blink. It was a good read and had a few tidbits that will stay with me. Not sure there will be alot of daily actionable items out of it though. Therefore I give it a 4 of 5 stars. Worth your time, but not necessary.

Posted by Martin at March 25, 2005 9:31 AM

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I read Blink a while ago from an advanced copy I purloined from a friend. I liked it too, though I agree that the actionable content isn’t very high. Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of semiotics, associate of William James, disgraced philosopher, and all-round genius, is altogether different. Blink with more Think. He gives plenty more to go on. His work was lost for decades in the Harvard library and his contribution in many fields has only recently come to light.

He invented the term abduction, being a third form of inference (in addition to Induction and deduction). Induction is inferring the general from the specific; and deduction the specific from the general. Abduction, however, is the spontaneous generation of a hypothesis which is then to be tested by further observation. Like, Karl Popper, whose work may or may not derive from Peirce (the jury is still out), he claimed that this is the true methodology of science. It is abduction that is practised by Sherlock Holmes (there is a good book edited by Umberto Eco, “The sign of three”, that compares Holmes with Peirce). Peirce said "There is a more familiar name for it than abduction, for it is neither more nor less than guessing."

Of further interest may be Timothy D Wilson’s “Strangers to Ourselves – Discovering the Adaptive Conscious” which rounds up current science on the subject.

Blink is abduction at work.

Posted by: rustle Author Profile Page at March 25, 2005 4:57 PM

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