Taegan Goddard has picked up details of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, and it sounds wonderful. It’s about how quickly taken decisions can often be better than ones that are carefully weighed and considered:
| Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing ‘a rogue military commander’ in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. |
Sounds like an ideal companion volume to The Wisdom of Crowds.
The Washington Post has a wonderfully written elegy to the slide projector, which is effectively no more. My favourite passage:
| Decades from now, science will conclude that nobody ever learned anything from a PowerPoint presentation, that it was, in fact, actually worse for the brain than slide shows. That juries missed crucial evidence because of the prosecution’s determination to use PowerPoint during closing arguments. That productivity in the American workplace, especially in middle management, hit an all-time low because of PowerPoint, and that employees forced to watch PowerPoint considered suicide at a rate previously unseen. |