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Thin slicing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28book%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28book%29

• daeken 17y ago
  I'm reading Blink right now (highly recommend it -- very interesting so far), so perhaps there's more said on this later, but I'm not sure thin slicing will help here. pg says they're not very good at choosing people yet, so it's possible that they're thin slicing successfully without knowing about it (as is talked about in Blink), or that the format just isn't successful. Without a whole lot more information (which is tough to get in such a situation), I don't think you can really make a call one way or another. Regardless, it's an interesting idea.
• Robin_Message 17y ago
  Ah, bless Gladwell. You say thin slicing, I say gut instinct or intuition. I'd say Gladwell is not worth reading. He takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising. As an example, in Blink he refers to the mostly excellent work of John Gottman [1]. Gladwell's thesis is in Blink is that by "thinking without thinking", i.e. intuition, experts make better decisions. Now Gottman has developed a technique that can predict if a couple will stay together with frightening accuracy, simply by watching them argue. However, the longer he watches, the more accurate his prediction are. And it's not an instinctive thing; it's measuring expressions using a system [2]. Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System