Blink: I missed it (the point, that is)

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. You might not be aware of Gladwell, or his international bestseller. If that is the case, I am somewhat envious of you. Because reading Mr Gladwell's work is a bit like watching an Adam Sandler movie: mildly diverting when you start out, increasingly frustrating as you go on, before leaving you enraged and bitter that you wasted your time on such an annoying piece of shit.

The alarm bells should have started ringing when I read the short biography of Gladwell in the book. He is described as an "intellectual adventurer." I think you can roughly translate that from publisher's doublespeak into the more accurate description of "total tool". All he has managed to do is find obscure facts and link them together using a deeply unconvincing, ill researched and ultimately illogical theory. In that respect he is not unlike Richard Littlejohn, albeit far less offensive.

For those not in the know, Gladwell's central argument is that what you automatically process when you first view or are exposed to something contains a great deal of useful information. To put it another way, "first impressions count". Gladwell cites a number of largely irrelevant examples of how people have been able to harness that first impression into something useful.

Unfortunately for Gladwell's argument, there is also a fuck of a lot that first impressions don't help with. Basically, for every example of someone using first impressions (or "thin slicing", as he calls it - not doubt to hide the facile nature of his theory) to their benefit or for the benefit of others, there is another example of someone truly fucking up using "thin slicing".

Perhaps the best example of someone truly screwing up is Amadou Diallo. He panicked when he was approached by four armed NYC policemen, and fled, despite having done nothing wrong. The police fucked up, saw him as a threat. They thought he pulled a gun on them - actually, he was trying to take out his ID - and they shot at him. 41 times - hitting him 19 times. Needless clarification, perhaps, but Diallo died. And the police officers concerned were put on trial. An appalling, tragic fuck up. That happened because the officers concerned trusted their first impressions when in a hysterical situation that spiralled out of control in just seconds. The situation made those officers "temporarily autistic", according to Gladwell's book - a staggeringly offensive claim, I'd argue, to autistic people, who are not generally known for shooting people 19 times.

Of course, even in the US, the police can't go around shooting people randomly. Action had to be taken. And so Gladwell praises situations where police officers "mind read." Yep, that's right, "mind reading." Fuck me, Mal, old boy, but to try to cure temporary autism, or however you try to classify mindless, adrenaline fuelled panic, with mind reading in highly dangerous situations involving armed police is staggeringly stupid. Do you know Sir Ian Blair, Malcolm? 'Cos I reckon you would get on very well with that slack-jawed moron extremely well.

The police have adopted a slightly different approach to Gladwell's mind reading, you'll be pleased to read. They are experimenting with sending officers out solo, rather than in pairs. A solo officer will take more time to think about what to do next, will take fewer risks and be less aggressive. Ultimately because they will take the time to think, and will rely less on the gut instincts and first impressions so beloved of Gladwell in his half baked work.

So, to summarise, to minimise the risk of innocent people being shot at over 40 times because police officers panic, the police seem to be doing the opposite of what Gladwell suggests. And such is the idiocy of our "intellectual adventurer" (or "fucking twat", if you will) that he actually illustrates this in his fucking book. A moron. A moron of staggering proportions.

The tag line (and since when did intellectual works require a tag line, for fuck's sake?) for Gladwell's book is "The Power of Thinking without Thinking." It seems to apply to the process of how Gladwell actually managed to come up with his theory, as well as to the content of the book. Gladwell didn't seem to think whether his theories actually made sense before he published them. But why let common sense impact on a potentially lucrative pseudo-theory?