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

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