Saturday, December 03, 2005
Blink: Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is a short but slightly disturbing book. I finished it off within a day and a half during the Thanksgiving break (while I was jetlagged, homesick and missing Anshu). It starts off innocuously enough, describing about how experts can identify a fake sculpture with just a glance. But the sections that are most disturbing are related to racial preferences and "implicit association" (black people = bad, white people = good) and our inherent biases. The biases seem quite believable, but I just finished taking an Implicit Association Test and it seems a bit bogus - it's more of a test of how we click keys rather than anything deeper.
Overall, read the book if you want to get a few insights into how the experts think we make decisions these days.
