Books

Blink

Gang June 3rd, 2008

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
ISBN: 0316172324
Read: 2008.3 ~ 2008.5
Rating:

The author starts the book with an event around Getty’s collection of a kouros sculpture: how historians hunch the kouros sculpture might be a fake at the first sight, but all the scientific approaches fail to discover. The author then introduces the center phrase of the book, “thin-slicing”, the human ability to grasp the key of the objects in a very short period of time, and argues it is often more accurate then calculated decisions, because the calculated decision can be polluted by overflowed information and specious evident. Gladwell draw more examples ranging from arts, war-simulation, and medicine to advertising, fire-fighting, sports and speed-dating to demonstrate how we rely on this mostly unconscious ability in our day-to-day life.

Then, Gladwell explains mis-using of thin-slice could also lead to unwanted and sometimes devastating results. This is because our snap judgments are greatly influenced by superficial and biased opinions. That is why talk and good-looking guys are more likely to be elected and black people are often linked with violence symbols. The author hopes by analyzing or at least recognizing the failure can help us avoid the misjudgments.

The problem with the book is, even a lot of interesting examples are presented, the author fails to draw any conclusions on how to know if a blink of decision is good or bad and how to train ourselves to better thin-slicing and avoid mistakes. It seems the only conclusion is the snap decision can be either correct or wrong. It is better to rely on the experts and experienced persons because their decisions are more likely to be right. We gain nothing compared with what we know before reading the book.

More importantly, contradict to what the author tries to prove, I believe more information is always better than less. The only reason that more information sometime becomes misleading is because of our lacking of ability to digest the information. The war-simulation is a perfect example; the simulating team maybe loses today, by adjusting the parameters and aiming the right target, with the help more and more computing power, eventually they will be the winner. This is how Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997, and this is how our human beings advanced over tens of thousands of years.

Tags: psychology

A Beautiful Math

Gang January 5th, 2008

Author: Tom Siegfried
ISBN: 0309101921
Read: 2007.11 ~ 2008.1
Rating:

John Nash became known to many people because of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, but the movie only focused on his personal struggles and almost ignored what made him a Nobel laureate. In this book, Tom Siegfried sets out to let people know Nash’s contribution to the science world. But it seems to me that the writer just tries too hard. From Adam Smith to Freud to Maxwell, the writer wants to get everyone on board. There must be continuity in the history of human being understanding the nature and ourselves, but trying to associate the game theory to every possible science fields but only covering them inch deep just diminish the serious science into something that gives a lot of promise but fails to deliver.

The logics are often broken and sometime preposterous. At one chapter, the writer states the game theory, like thermodynamics, is to study the statistics result of human behaviors; and in a later chapter, the writer spends a big portion to explain the behaviors are so different in different cultures; and then in the next chapter, the writers seems forgets all these and starts talking about Neuoreconomics. To me, the most worth reading are some of the experimental games. Those are more interesting.

Tags: mathematics, science

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Gang August 20th, 2007

Author: Bill Bryson
ISBN: 0767908171
Read: 2007.5 ~ 2007.8
Rating:

I am really amazed by the vast amounts of human knowledge that this 560-page book covers: From pre-history to the current event; from the quark to the black hole; from the bottom the sea to the rim of the universe; from the sing-cell to our human being; the author touches almost every aspects of the natural science. What makes this book stand out is, unlike common popular science books, Bill Bryson tells the story not by the discoveries themselves but by the people who made the discoveries. It’s a fun reading experience.

Tags: anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, history, physics, science