Published in January of 2005 (so by now it’s a pretty old book at age 8!), blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is an excellent book.
I am not sure, however, how I feel about it. Much of what he calls ‘thinking without thinking’ is what I call intuition. He goes out of his way to explain why we know way more than we know. There’s a lot of sense and science in there. There’s also, seems to me, a lot of stubbornness about looking at what’s really going on.
He does give us credit for knowing way more than we think we know. I totally agree. And he talks about the problem of over thinking, of requiring too much information, on insisting on proof when we already know the answer. Again, I agree.
To me, we are so much more than these physical bodies. And the giant leaps our brain can make, tapping information from all over the universe, is evidence of that more-ness.
I love the Red Team beating the Blue Team in the war games – and the Pentagon making rules to prevent that from ever happening again. Which is, of course, the wrong direction to go when we want to encourage creativity and real progress. I always think of Captain Kirk and the Kobyashi Moru in the original Star Trek. If the rules aren’t working for you – change them. If we always play by the Blue Team’s rules, and act as though they are real – no one will ever learn anything.
But still – I am troubled and puzzled and will likely continue to mull this over. Which is certainly one mark of a good book.