Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking > Status Update

“When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated - when we have to juggle many different variables - then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.”

“What I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

“Judgement matters: it is what separates winners from losers.”

Blink is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.
Lee’s “ability to sense Hooker’s indecision, to act on the spur of the moment, to conjure up a battle plan they would take Hooker by surprise - his ability…to move quickly and instinctively on the field of battle - was so critical that it is what made it possible for him to defeat an army twice the size of his.”

“A commander does not need to know the barometric pressure or the winds or even the temperature. He needs to know the forecast. If you get too caught up in the production of information, you drown in the data.”

“…to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of ‘smart’?”

“As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker’s ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score then a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student or is it because …