BLINK 360:

Malcolm Gladwell Blinks At Racial Realities (Steve Sailer, January 30, 2005, V-Dare)

Blink's individual anecdotes are interesting and well-written. But taken as a whole, the book is a mish-mash of contradictions. Gladwell strongly encourages you to rely upon your snap judgments … except when you shouldn't.

* For example, Gladwell cites a study showing that college students can tell how good a class is just by watching two seconds of videotape of the professor lecturing … with the sound off!

* On the other hand, Gladwell endorses another study showing that experienced emergency room physicians should not use their intuition when deciding whether patients complaining of chest pains are suffering a heart attack. Instead, they should follow a rigid algorithm that had been laboriously worked out by statistical analysis of thousands of cases.

* On the other other hand, the Getty Museum in LA should not have relied on the painstaking scientific analyses that supported the authenticity of an ancient-looking statue for which the museum paid $9 million. No, they should have relied instead on the instant snap judgment of various art critics who thought it looked phony—as, indeed, it turned out to be.

* On the other other other hand ... well, I could go on all day quoting contradictory anecdotes from Blink.

Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.

But as far as I can tell, his book boils to two messages:

* Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right.

* And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.

Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race, which is quite often in Blink.

Darwinism depends on rather extravagant reactions to the most minor physical differences within a species. How could racial differences not provoke them? And if every difference is divergence, then why wouldn't & shouldn't we be hostile to the different?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2005 6:41 AM