Blink: Malcolm Gladwell

The author describes the main subject of his book as "thin-slicing": our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones. Gladwell draws on examples from science, advertising, sales, medicine, and popular music to reinforce his ideas. Gladwell also uses many examples of regular people's experiences with "thin-slicing."
Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes and dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes (even unconscious ones), and how they can be overloaded by too much information. Gladwell also tells us about our instinctive ability to mind read, which is how we can get to know what emotions a person is feeling just by looking at his or her face.
We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgements than they do with volumes of analysis.

Comments

Together we can

I liked the idea given by Sulakshana. Why should we all work separately and not together? After all, all of ours projects are related to climate change. We are just tackling it through different fronts. Someone is working for green building, someone in climate finance, someone in awareness etc. But my project has got best of all the worlds. So surely need the help of all you guys out there. But then the one of our Martian Mr. Raghav’s worry is very correct. What I think we should do is we should simply write about what we are doing and let the help flow in. All the things which Raghav says are true and practical. But then we have to make our project impactful. And this work cannot be done alone for sure. So we should focus our energy at not more than ten projects at a time. But surely we can pass suggestions and all to others. For example we in East Zone more precisely ICCs in and around Kolkata have 4 waste management projects so we are doing it together. I also have a waste managemen...

#injusTISS: We are all in this together

One is extremely pained when one has to hear one of your ex-faculty member crying and telling her current student "Did I invest 6 years of my life, so you can heckle me?" From the first day till the end and beyond I have never ever found any dearth of support from faculty in TISS. I have always said they were and perhaps are the best thing in TISS Hyd. I have had arguments and disagreements albeit not in public, it never got uncivil definitely not a point where either of us had to cry like that. What has happened to TISS Hyd lately? I have never found it so divided before. There have been challenges and crises which students and faculties have worked together. And Alumni has played an important role. Today some students seem to be fighting against some faculty members. Most alumni are staying shut. This is not about one or two people. This is much deeper and systemic. This is real fascism we have read and talked about. It won't come in one day out of blue but creep s...

The Placement Season

Almost an year ago it was the same time of the year when most of us were at our peak of nervousness. We were job hunting madly. It was a mad house. Class notes were replaced by job details and then by SOPs. We all did end up getting jobs though. Infact half of us got job in the very first day. Which for many turned out to be a disaster. What I learned in this whole year was we do lot of things just based on peer pressure and want to conform to the social norms. Higher package, bigger brand the better. And in all that cacophony we forget to listen to our hearts. Two years in TISS prepares us for many challenges that we would face in future, yet we decide to settle for things simpler and easier. If we put ourselves together we can achieve so much for our country and ourselves yet we fail to realise most of it in time.Yes some do realise it before other do and take that bold step. The fact that I am writing this post thousands of miles away from home in a foreign nations speaks vo...

Aman

Search This Blog