Originally Posted by tnscouter
Originally Posted by ShaunRyan
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. Just finished The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Gladwell book when you're finished.

His book Outliers was brutal. My kids had to read it for school. It is not a book I would normally read since I could smell from a mile away the pop culture b.s. it contained, but I read all the books my kids read for school so I persisted. Sure enough the book did not disappoint.

It was a contrived parsing of anecdotal bits and pieces attempting to support his flimsy claims. My kids who read it saw through the thin veneer of wannabe scholarship immediately. I think Gladwell's true strength is fleecing the pockets of the psuedo-intellectuals who laugh at the New Yorker cartoons they don't understand and look down on the plebs they disdain.

Sorry to rip on Gladwell. Hopefully Blink is better. But my son was just raging about that book and the author the other day and what now gets passed off as scholarship. That book and its reception really bothered him and occasionally he just erupts with vitriol for that guy . . .

Yeah, there's a not-so-thin veneer of the current fashionable correctness but he does go beyond it to some extent. The cases he presents are no doubt cherry-picked so by no means an exhaustive study, but the subject of the unconscious mind interests me. I'm listening to this one on library audio while working so if it's all blow and no show at least I haven't wasted other valuable time or any of my money.

I'm about 1/3 through it and so far I'd say, if you can look past the spin, the case he's making is correct; many if not most of the decisions and judgements people make are very much influenced by the subconscious mind. Sometimes that's a good thing--vital in fact--and sometimes it's not so good.

Mark Manson's consciousness car analogy is much more straightforward and useful IMO.

Not that most people who read either book will ever actually try to exercise their conscious mind in order to put it in the driver's seat. Embracing confirmation bias and bellowing into echo chambers seems to be much more popular among the unwashed masses and pseudo-intellectuals alike.

Haul ass, haul ass! - Pappy