Malcom Gladwell gave a very engaging talk on snap judgements (“rapid cognition”) from his latest book, Blink. Gladwell is incredibly articulate, and could probably talk about his shopping list and still keep the audience’s interest (at this point, I’ll again have to bring up how shitty the room-selections were in general, and for the keynotes in particular — it just wasn’t a physically big enough space to fit people in. You practically needed to get seats 30 minutes early just to get a seat).
Gladwell has a series of great anecdotes which he used to illustrate his points, some of which were quite fascinating (Orchestra selection, emergency room heart-attack diagnoses). If you get a chance to hear him talk, it’s worth while.
That being said, an interesting coffee shop follow-up conversation post-keynote was on the decline of pop science. While I’m not involved enough in the social sciences research to come down on either side, apparently there’s quite a bit of ill-will from that community (or at least, members of) on how Gladwell’s “research” comes off (or is passed off) as research, in the scientific sense of the word.
A (possibly completely inaccurate) observation I made is that in cosmology, biology, etc, “pop” science is frequently written by scientists and grounded by the scientific community (think Sagan, Hawkins, Greene), while in the social sciences, this seems to be less the case. I’m not sure if this is even true though, much less why this might be the case.
Anyway, despite the misgivings people might have, the discussion of our judgement behavior (if only because it flies against convention, and is obviously underestimated) can only be a good thing. Also, I’m flying through the book now. It’s as engaging as his speaking and brings up specific points I definitely want to follow up on.