Ethnicsands
All-American
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2011
- Messages
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Great discussion.Great answer. I’ll try to partially rebut my own point by saying, for all those words … ****, I don’t know. lol. But, there’s debate as to whether it’s unlearned or just the ability to process mounds of information quickly. I can say that because no one knows. I mentioned Gladwell … he has a book “Blink” that touches on “thin-slicing” the “unlearned” IT ( though he never goes all in and says it‘s “unlearned”), he’s then critiqued by actual scientists …
In Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye (Simon and Schuster, 2006), Michael LeGault argues that "Blinklike" judgments are not a substitute for critical thinking. He criticizes Gladwell for propagating unscientific notions:
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow which speaks to rationality's advantages over intuition, says:
In an article titled "Understanding Unconscious Intelligence and Intuition: Blink and Beyond", Lois Isenman agrees with Gladwell that the unconscious mind has a surprising knack for 'thinking without thinking' but argues that its ability to integrate many pieces of information simultaneously provides a much more inclusive explanation than thin-slicing. She writes:
I think the criticism of gladwell is mostly misplaced jealousy by ‘experts’ who lack his commercial instincts or writing talent. Kahneman is right that gladwell himself doesn’t claim what people blame him for. And the idea he’s doing a disservice by discussing these ideas openly is crazy. I enjoy his books, but I know they’re pop lit, not academic tomes.
I personally think there are multiple factors in play in this and as usual it’s not all thin slice or holistic. There are a lot of signals we pick up but don’t learn to talk about, and gladwell understands how the mind can grasp them but not necessarily explain them. He also understands, correctly, that logical analysis almost inevitably is built on excluding some variables and signals, and so can miss important inputs. I thought his discussion of the difference between panicking and choking was good in this respect.
But in any case, there is a growing body of science around personality, and much of it is an effort to quantify and define what some people can intuit - which people will run through a wall, which kids will fold up and quit. The DOD does research on this, too. If you can’t tolerate error, you need the special forces training programs to rule out those who can’t make it through. But in most endeavors, just being better than others at making predictions is worth a lot.