~flupps

You ever been in the situation where something makes you feel uneasy about a person or situation, but you stayed in it, and after being with that person or in that situation longer, you started feeling more comfortable.
Then a long time later something bad happens and you wish you would have listened to that initial reaction?
Or, when you are about to buy something - you feel strongly for one brand or one model, but do more research and the research gets you to pick something else, then later on the thing you passed on becomes a really popular item?
That’s what this book is about.
Just like the examples above, if you think, by now, that this would be interesting, get the book, don’t read more - it may ruin your judgement about this book.

So, by now you’re not interested in the book, so now I can explain what it’s about.

It’s written by Malcolm Gladwell who also wrote the book Tipping Point (I may just have to get this one later).

I picked this book up at the Heathrow airport when I realized that I had forgotten to bring the book I was supposed to read next at home.
I picked it as the last book out of a “pick 3, pay for 2″ deal, but I started reading it before any of the other books I got at the same occasion.
Orie is reading this for her English class, so since she had talked about it, and I saw it at the store I was browsing books at, and also needed a third book for my 3 for 2 deal - my snap decision was to buy it.

The book is about how your subsecond first “gut feelings” can actually be more accurate than even years of research on something - especially if you’re an expert on the area to start with.

He starts out with an example of a very old art statue that a museum is evaluating if they want to buy. They do all kinds of tests on it to make sure it’s not fake. They run tests on the surface, they do everything.
After years or tests and research they find out that the object just has to be authentic.
Later on they bring an expert into the room, and after just looking at it for a second, the expert knows it’s a fake. Can’t say why or what’s wrong, but just knows.
This book is about how a part of our brain is handling a lot of data at insane speeds in our subconscious to help us get by in day to day tasks without having to stop by and process all possible information before taking action.

I remember back when I was doing sports a lot, I was sitting down after the games trying to understand why in certain situations I was doing a cross forehand instead of a straight or why I decided to do certain things in certain parts of the match, but if I sat down and analyzed what I should have done, I came to a different conclusion - so in the next game I tried that, and it ended up worse. Why? With my experience I should be able to predict, with enough time, the best course of action for a certain situation.
The problem with this of course, is that out of the hundreds of thousand (or millions?) of times that I’d hit the ball over the net, my brain has subconsciously made statistics about what works, and without actually thinking in most situations I just reactionally hit the ball a certain way.

This processing is interesting, because it takes things into consideration that we can’t really put into words, sometimes you can realize you don’t feel comfortable about a situation or person, but can’t explain why, but your subconscious picked up on something from something in this waste amount of data that references to a bad experience or similar in the past.

The book is filled with anecdotes for example the New Coke, Aeron Chair, sports references and unfortunately some mishaps with police men during stress to show an example when this split second judgement fails when your heart rate goes too high.

The one I liked the most was a big war simulation program that was written in the US in the early years of the millenium where they simulated a battle in the middle east.
The blue side (US and allies) had access to all kinds of information systems and intelligence. For the red side they took in a retired General from the Vietnam days whos trademark was that he was always in the field and put his men in training even during the days of war - but this side was relying on less verbose systems and information.
It ended up showing that if you spend too much time analyzing, you can actually make bad decisions because you trust your external data much more than your experience data that you can’t read, but your brain can process.

A scary example of this is if you go to the Implicit Association Test website.
I will not admit to being racist or discriminating consciously in any situation, and for everyone that is like me, this page can be a harsh realization about how our subconscious process data.
It’s a pretty easy test based on a reaction test where we put things into two columns, one column is Good and one is Bad, for example. Then we’re fed words that are either positive and negative and we put them in the appropriate column.
Then we add another layer to this, so that we put either positive words and pictures of old people in one column, and negative words and pictures of young people in the same column.
Then we turn this around and put old people and negative words in the same column. The test measures your response time and in those “hidden” discriminative cases the brain process it slower to put some of those together.
Apparently I associate scientific jobs with men slightly more than Artsy jobs, I have a slight bias towards younger people than old people.
When it comes to work vs. family with men and women, I actually didn’t show bias towards any gender for being a provider versus taking care of the family, which I credit the way it’s been in Sweden while I’ve been growing up with increased minister and leader positions in companies being held by women.
It’s quite easy to trick your brain for this kind of tests, however. The book uses an example of a test where you have a racial bias - by reading newspaper articles about people of the group that you have a bias against and for that puts them in an opposite light for a long time, then do the test again, your reaction times will change.
I liked this book quite a bit, was engulfed by it for the most part of my plane trip back from India and nicely finished it up 10 minutes before the train pulled in at my home town station.