This is a book about the first moments of any encounter. It explains the amazing ability of the subconscious mind to infer a wealth of information from even the thinest slice of experience. Experts can spot a fake statue within seconds of seeing it, predict the success of a marriage by watching a couple chat, or identify a bird after a sighting of only a few seconds at great distance. We can all tell if we like someone in the first few minutes of talking with them, and we can tell what a person is thinking by looking at their face.
Gladwell explains that our snap judgments are very powerful and surprisingly accurate – often more accurate than a reasoned decision. He then gets into they ways our subconscious can get it wrong, and the danger of acting on snap judgments of the wrong kind.
This was a very satisfying read. A lot of research has gone into the book, and it is presented in a compelling way which interweaves talk about different studies to get the point across most effectively. Whatever profession you’re in, this book has the potential to change your way of thinking about your work, and to get you using a better combination of reason and instinct.
This book relates very directly to my AI research. I believe that any AI system operating in a complex environment, being that it would have limited computing power, would need a subsystem which filtered the incoming sensations (data), essentially blanking out certain information. Only in this way could the system keep up with processing the data as it came in. I have wondered if the loss of such information would be damning to the systems ability to make good decisions. But I feel the conclusions put forward in this book give hope to the possibility that it would not.
This book also made me think about the vast difference, and occasional similarities, between conscious and subconscious thought. Currently the most successful AI tackles problems which humans would apply conscious thought to, like diagnosing a disease or playing chess. AI has had less success with problems humans use subconscious thought to solve, like identifying an object or walking across a room. The gap between the two areas is vast, with chess AI performing at super-human level and the most expensive mars explorer having less intelligence than an insect. But, though vastly different, the two areas also seem to have something in common.
In the book, Gladwell talks about an algorithm devised by a doctor for triaging patients complaining of chest pain. Just as I thought he was about to conclude that no simple algorithm could take the place of a subjective examination by a nurse, he concluded the exact opposite: that the algorithm could outperform the nurses even though it took only a handful of factors into account. It turns out that the intuition of the nurses was not required, and that (by analysing years’ of data) their entire decision making process could be distilled into a simple algorithm that takes four true or false inputs and produces an output of “high-risk”, “medium-risk” or “low-risk”.
We usually think of instinctive activities like walking and seeing as involving a very fast flow of incoming data (compared with conscious thoughts which deals with a few elements at a time). But I think the story about this algorithm reiterates that we don’t need most of this data and that we are best to carefully throw away the irrelevant information and let only the relevant information reach the “decision making machine”. This makes subconscious tasks seem a lot more like conscious ones.
Tags: blink, malcolm gladwell