Blink

I just started a new book (I must be crazy -- I have a backlog of at least a dozen books that I've started over the last six months) called Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's the guy who popularized the concept of "tipping points".

Blink is a fascinating book. In it, Gladwell investigates Western culture's tendency to trust careful, objective, and methodical investigation over more subjective flashes of intuition. It immediately grabbed my attention because I often have trouble verbalizing conclusions I draw. I've always been able to communicate better in writing than verbally, so that's part of it. But a significant part of it is simply that I don't know. Even at work, where my primary responsibility is to design software solutions, I can't always explain why I settle on a particular design. Sure I can talk about quality attributes and best practices, and how the selected design meets their criteria, but the real answer is almost always that it just feels right. That is rarely an acceptable answer to those who feel a need for evidence, and, honestly, it dissatisfies me as well.

Gladwell begins the book by telling the story of a Greek kouros statue that was being evaluated for purchase by the Getty museum back in 1983. Prominent scientists performed a thorough examination of the statue (one even publishing his process and results in a scientific journal) and promounced it authentic. There was one catch. Every art historian who saw it felt it didn't "look right." For reasons they found difficult to articulate, the statue troubled them. This worried the Getty curator, as the museum had already bought the statue based on the results of the scientific examination and a routine check of the statue's documentation. Their lawyers then dug more deeply into that documentation, and discovered discrepancies that eventually led them to objective proof that it was an Italian forgery. The art historians had been right, and the careful, scientific study had missed the aggregate "soft" evidence that the art experts had intuited but not been able to fully articulate. One had said the the statue "felt fresh." Another had complained that its fingernails were "wrong." Still another had remarked that its feet "looked modern."

We have been taught to distrust such insights, and I'm looking forward to what promises to be a very interesting treatise on learning how to change that.