And the Malcolm Gladwell wagon rolls on... the hair, the one-word book title, the pithy pitch. A player, no doubt. But it still seems like the most banal, dinner-party version of the Third Culture to me. Though I liked this line in his interview with the website of the US sports channel ESPN, on how the instinctuality of great sports players gives them problems in being managers:
That's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players -- or non-athletes -- tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. [Note to UK readers: recognise Bobby Moore? Or Billy McNeill?] It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.
Not carefully enough for Thomas Homer-Dixon, fellow complexity theorist and author of the Ingeunity Gap. In what is quite a catty review all round - Gladwell galls the heart of many an ideas-trader - Homer-Dixon makes this tough point:
A lot of people are going to thin-slice this book. In other words, they’re going to blink at Blink. They'll read the first few pages,and they won't get to Gladwell’s acknowledgment, muddled though it is and far later in the book, that human fast cognition is an astonishingly powerful ability that can also be astonishingly dangerous if it's undisciplined, misused, or badly trained. In our infoglutted world, we're all under huge pressure to move quickly, to multitask, and to increase our information throughput. So we're all looking for excuses to thin slice, and we're all looking for excuses to avoid the hard work that makes thin-slicing effective...
Within a few weeks, Blink will be part of the Zeitgeist. Blink will Buzz. And its wide influence will subtly allow people to rationalize prejudice, stereotyping, and the premature closure of reflection and thought. Simple storytelling sometimes comes with a high price.
Recent Comments