BLINK|The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is a bravura example of the latter sort of book: he ranges through art museums, emergency rooms, police cars, and psychology laboratories following a skill he terms 'rapid cognition.'
apid cognition is the sort of snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking, faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can manage. Gladwell sets himself three tasks: to convince the reader that these snap judgments can be as good or better than reasoned conclusions, to discover where and when rapid cognition proves a poor strategy, and to examine how the rapid cognition's results can be improved. Achieving three tasks, Gladwell marshals anecdotes, statistics, and a little bit of theory to persuasively argue his case.
Gladwell's discussion of 'thin slicing' is arresting: In a psychological experiment, normal people given fifteen minutes to examine a student's college dormitory can describe the subject's personality more accurately than his or her own friends. A cardiologist named Lee Goldman developed a decision tree that, using only four factors, evaluates the likelihood of heart attacks better than trained cardiologists in the Cook County Hospital emergency room in Chicago:
For two years, data were collected, and in the end, the result wasn't even close. Goldman's rule won hands down in two directions: it was a whopping 70 percent better than the old method at recognizing patients who weren't actually having a heart attack. At the same time, it was safer. The whole point of chest pain prediction is to make sure that patients who end up having major complications are assigned right away to the coronary and intermediate units. Left to their own devices, the doctors guessed right on the most serious patients somewhere between 75 and 89 percent of the time. The algorithm guessed right more than 95 percent of the time. (pp. 135-136)

There are things that can be done to redirect our mind along lines more conducive to accurate thin slicing: we can alter our unconscious biases; we can change products' packaging to something that tests better with consumers; we can analyze numerical evidence and make decision trees; we can analyze all possible facial expressions and their shared meanings, then watch for them on videotape; and we can evade our biases by blind screening, hiding the evidence that will lead us to incorrect conclusions.

This whirlwind tour of rapid cognition, its benefits and pitfalls, has only a few pitfalls of its own. Written in a forthright and conversational style, Gladwell makes friends with his readers, but rarely challenges them. This is science writing for the broadest possible audience; people with scientific training may chafe at the substitution of anecdote for study results, and may wish that the author had gone into greater depth with any or all of his examples; others may wonder how they can broaden the reach of their own attempts at rapid cognition. Gladwell may whet their appetites but will not fully satisfy those readers. His focus is narrow, and this helps him meet his goals; perhaps this is appropriate for a book titled Blink.

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Brave New World | Aldous Huxley

Why do we read? That's as fair a question as any to extract from Huxley's famous 1932 novel, Brave New World. In the society of this book, reading becomes a kind of mythical act of rebellion, a deed charged with subversiveness and anger. And Huxley is right -- that is how totalitarian societies of our century have regarded the choice to read freely. And why do those of us in democratic societies read a book like Brave New World? Surely we have no need to worry about the alarmist issues Huxley raises! Brave New World begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. In the year of Our Ford 632, society has finally organized itself according to rational schemas: the birth process has been mechanized, and the different castes of society are conditioned from birth to accept their lot in life. There's no need for repression and persecution and all the other apparatus of a security state if the population has been biologically bent into shape since birth and chemically conditioned thereafter. The first two chapters are a fairly straightforward walkthrough of this human factory, making sure the reader understands the technical foundation of this society and setting the stage for the human drama to come. Chapter 3 continues this walkthrough and, startlingly, diverges into a section where the narrative switches ever more rapidly between different viewpoints. The main characters of the book are introduced here, in a stylistic blowout that is not repeated. The human story of Brave New World centres on Bernard Marx, a man who doesn't fit into his strictly controlled and pacified world. He is an Alpha, the highest caste in society (Epsilons being the lowest), but he is still not content. He takes Lenina, a woman who firmly believes in the status quo, for a vacation at a Reservation (for people living in a non-chemically-controlled state) in New Mexico, where they meet a young man referred to as the Savage. Marx brings back the Savage into polite society for his own reasons, and the last half of the book details the Savage's encounters with civilization. Huxley never lets up on the ruthless satire, and the ending of the book, in its unremitting bleakness, has seldom been matched (perhaps only by 1984 and The Sheep Look Up). A society modelled on Ford's assembly line has no room for the individual. The Savage is a sympathetic character, and we often identify most with him when he lashes out in despair. For example, his mother, who was stranded in the Reservation and extremely unhappy there, later dies upon her return to civilization, in circumstances which further alienate the Savage. He tries to interrupt the distribution of soma (a powerful drug with no physically harmful side effects) to a group of Deltas (Chapter XV), vainly. His choices near the end shift into the bizarre, and we get a disturbing glimpse into a mind collapsing into itself under unrelenting pressures. We begin by liking Marx, the man who brought the Savage into contact with the corrosive forces of "civilization," but he too shows his true colours when he decides to bow to the World Controller's will. And perhaps he is only to be pitied in that his choices have been so thoroughly shaped by society, in the end, much the same way as Lenina. Lenina is the pawn of the Fordian society, and some of the satire to do with her sexuality didn't quite make sense (see next paragraph) and bothered me. Her behaviour is affected by her relationship with the Savage, but she has no way of seeing outside her perspective (i.e., the perspective society assembled for her). Mustapha Mond is the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, and has read Shakespeare, just like the Savage. Bradbury uses much the same type of character in the Fire Chief in his Fahrenheit 451. I like how Mond argues -- sometimes on the Savage's level, and sometimes in the idiom of the society he oversees. For example, he exhorts the Savage at one point by saying: "'You can't play Electro-Magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy'" (194). Huxley manages to present some interesting, unique characters in a society that has set to eradicate such a thing in the name of happiness. Huxley's satire only increases in intensity as the book progresses. The metaphors of the book are all taken to the extreme, such as the assembly line: in this society, people make the sign of the "T" and say of their deity, "Our Ford." As with Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the concrete reality of the book, while a compelling story, isn't the point. Bradbury was not predicting that people will burn books, rather that they will forget them. Huxley is worried about a state of mind, one that puts happiness into a materialistic paradigm, and then uses it as a method of control, justified as what the people want. This human tendency is hardly news, but Huxley saw quite clearly how technology would change everything. A look around at our society shows no sign of World Controllers or soma in the literal sense, but the specific technologies of happiness are just as perturbing as Huxley's fictions. This overarching idea is well justified and thought provoking, but I was unsure of Huxley's point to do with sexuality, something that he tries to slot into the bigger theme. In the book, Lenina and her sexuality often stand for everything that is wrong and corrupt and vacuous about this system. Is he condemning Lenina's actions as part of the false happiness created by this brave new world? Perhaps, but the opposite of what is presented in the book, in terms of society's regard for sexuality, would be a return into the deepest, darkest Victorian era. Huxley's main point, that there is no way out of this system, distorts the character of Lenina into a figurative marker for one end of a spectrum, rather than a character in her own right. I understand that this is also part of the project of the book, much as any work of science fiction that discusses dehumanization, but I still found the role of Lenina as the grotesque to be somewhat problematic. Brave New World still works after all these years because it is so sharp and unrelenting in its satire. Huxley's career, long and varied, often gets boiled down to this one book, a book for which anyone would be proud to be remembered. This process of forgetting an author's body of work, while somewhat understandable, is frightening to contemplate -- Huxley is lucky to have something this good as the touchstone of his career. This Voyager Classics edition includes a foreword for the book that Huxley wrote in 1946. Two items to note. Huxley begins by saying that he sees many flaws in the book (this being 15 years after he had written it) but that, had he acted on his impulse to fix the problems, he may have also inadvertently altered the parts of the book that had merit. What a relief! The process of altering past works happens more often in the movies, when a filmmaker starts down the path of fixing technical problems or limitations and then mission creep sets in and soon what was charming about the original has been lost. This general tendency is proven in what Huxley says next, when he discusses in detail what he thinks of as the main flaw of Brave New World. By 1946 he regarded the book as a forced choice between insanity or lunacy, the insanity of the Fordian society or the lunacy that drives the Savage to suicide. His wish for a third way sounds like exactly that, wishful thinking, when later in the foreword he discusses how efficient totalitarian systems of the future will be. Brave New World has endured because of its canny understanding of how total the totalitarian can be, once technology has yielded full control of biology. I don't think Huxley misunderstood his own book, but rather that he was searching for some way to escape his own grim conclusions. (Challenging Destiny online )

Brief Candles | Aldous Huxley

Huxley is the writer of the acclaimed novel "Brave New World", where he examines the story of a sedated society stimulated to become a lucid utopia. "Brief Candles" is a collection of stories as opposed to a novel, and focuses less on society's operation as a whole and more on the restraints and attachments of social relationships. Miscellaneous lines often relate to a component of the human condition so accurately, you realize emotion is far from evolution. But polarizing between emotional obsessions leaves the writing feeling exhausting, flailing amongst infatuative romance and subsequent distance. Although tedious, the repeating repetroire of emotions is candidly familiar and emphatic. A tough read that is stagnant in plot development, but interesting for its perception into people more than society, contrary to BNW. ( amazon.com )

Happy Living Philosophy | Falsafah Hidup Bahagia| Ki Ageng SuryoMentaram

Ki Ageng Suryomentaram was born in Yogyakarta Palace on may 20, 1892 as a prince.
Hi is the Son of the King of theJogjakarta Palace, Hamengku BuonoVII.
He left the palace and life as a farmer at Bringin, Salatiga Indonesia.

After 1st. World War and his father death he came to bringin, a village near salatiga. with Ki Hadjar Dewantara he made a forum discussion named Sarasehan Selasa Kliwon, that discuss Sosiopolic of Indonesia.



Ki Ageng Suryomentaram gift some advice about how to life happy, how we life so humanly, accept our suffering.

Every one want get Happiness lifes, but the happiness not come by it self. it's must fight to got, one to do is "fight our self". ourself is the soures of happiness. Perception, Self-concept, our vision to others, our vision to human kind and all creature, and believing to God gift contribution sense of happiness.

To be Happy, someone must train his soul and consience. if soul and consience was trained, someone would differentiate the authentic and the not authentic, the genuine and the fake, the intrinsic and the transitory.

This Earth of Mankind,Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Danny Yee's Book Reviews

In the Buru Quartet, the four novels which begin with This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya Ananta Toer has written what should be recognised as the Indonesian War and Peace. Set in Java in the then Dutch East Indies, at the beginning of this century, its subject is nothing less than the broad sweep of Indonesian colonial history and politics. Based on a historical figure, the protagonist, Minke, is a Native Javanese, a Raden Mas or noble who has received a Western education.

The first two volumes (also published together as Awakenings) describe Minke's coming of age, caught in a conflict between cultures. In This Earth of Mankind he marries Annelies, the daughter of a Javanese concubine and a Dutch factory owner. When her father dies, she becomes the legal property of her Dutch relatives and is taken to the Netherlands, her Islamic marriage having no standing. In Child of All Nations Minke's real political awakening begins. He starts to write in Malay rather than Dutch, he follows events in Japan and China and in the Philippines, and he experiences firsthand the effects of sugar farming and the exploitation of his own people.

In Footsteps Minke moves to Betawi (Jakarta) to study at medical school, though he soon abandons that as a career. He marries a second time, to a Chinese activist, and enters into public political life, founding the first Native organisation and launching a newspaper. This is set against the background of the Dutch conquest of Bali. Minke's "memoirs" end with his exile to Ambon and the narrator in the final novel is Pangemanann, a Western educated Native who has risen in the service of the government, first to police commissioner and then to member of the Algemeene Secretariat, the advisory body to the governor. He chronicles his manipulation, surveillance, and terrorisation of the various opposition movements and leaders, Minke among them. As well as narrating the historical events down to the end of the First World War, House of Glass is a moral condemnation of colonialism from the inside.

The novels become progressively heavier with historical and political exposition as the series progresses; they will appeal most obviously to those curious about Indonesian history or the politics of colonialism. But they also retain an easy flow and a vividness which remind one that the first two were originally spoken, in a prison camp where Pramoedya was denied access to writing materials. Pramoedya's works were for many years banned in Indonesia.

Rumblings from the Underground: How Seattle Changed the Way We Think About Prosperity By Miguel Alandete

5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair with photo essay by Allan Sekula

118pp. Verso Books ISBN: 185984779X

I felt surprised and a little ashamed when I heard news reports surrounding the November 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle—reports suggesting that anarchists from my town were to blame for the violence. I live in Eugene, Oregon, home of the Pacific Northwest anarchist movement. Like me, many of Eugene’s citizens are ambivalent about the anarchists and their grievances: we’re respectful of their right to protest and yet we’re often rather distressed with their penchant for mayhem. However, the events in Seattle forced me to revisit my ambivalence. I knew that what the media was portraying couldn’t be true: the anarchists I had become familiar with could never have single-handedly carried out what was accomplished in Seattle. As it turned out, the anarchists were only a small part of the story.

The Seattle protestors were unified in their disdain for the WTO and its efforts to coerce freely elected governments to accept free trade. Free Traders, or Neo-Liberalists, seek to liberate free enterprise from any government intervention. They began to make their presence felt in the early 1970s when Milton Friedman, University of Chicago economist, dusted off Adam Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism and made more popular the notion that economic freedom from government intervention was the way to prosperity. This “free” economics stands in opposition to the theory that full employment is necessary for the success of capitalism, a theory proposed by Maynard Keynes. The Great Depression of the 1930s influenced Keynes, who thought that full employment could only be assured through government intervention. Naturally, his work heavily influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Friedman, and the Neo-Liberalists, however, disagreed. Instead, they believed that the total and free movement of capital, goods and services would be the atmosphere under which capitalism would flourish. Under this system, public expenditures for social services would be reduced. Deregulation and privatization of state-owned enterprises would be rationalized as more efficient and, therefore, more profitable. In effect, the Neo-Liberalists bemoan the common good and instead promote “individual responsibility.”

These are the goals of those who presumably believe that future generations will ultimately benefit from a free-market system unfettered by un-evolved sentiments like compassion for one’s fellow man. In fact, a free trader might argue that it is paradoxically more compassionate to be selfish; if we would just stand aside and leave them alone, they would, by virtue of their own self-interest, improve our lot.

5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond is a primer for those of us ignorant of the excesses of Neo-Liberalism and ignorant, too, of the burgeoning Internationalist backlash against it. Written by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair with photo essay by Allan Sekula, 118pp. Verso Books, 5 Days revels in the blossoming of this new movement and its shocking victory in Seattle. The work makes available the unique and vastly under-reported perspective of the direct-action street protesters of the Internationalist movement. Cockburn and St. Clair, the well-informed co-editors of the political newsletter, Counterpunch, tell the story of Seattle with fervency and poise in a style gripping and informative.

While providing insight into the makings of the Internationalist movement, Cockburn and St. Clair introduce us to its many faces. Blaming the situation in Seattle on Eugene’s anarchists was woefully inaccurate. In reality, the Internationalist movement is comprised of groups ranging from radical environmentalists to union members to French farmers. I found it fascinating that this group was so democratic in its make-up. Cockburn and St. Clair do a fine job of illuminating what unites these disparate groups into such a powerful and growing movement.

I was most moved by the protestor’s display of courage in the face of questionable police tactics, tactics that make a mockery of the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the diaries of the Seattle protest are particularly well written, propelling the reader into the maelstrom of protestors, police, and confused global capitalists in a spellbinding manner. Most importantly, the diaries provide eyewitness accounts of the direct-action protests in Seattle and later, in D.C. and L.A. The reader is compelled to confront long-held opinions about our society and the forces that shape it. This book makes it impossible to dismiss the allegations regarding the media, the police, the politicians, and the multi-national corporations who influence them, and it lays bare the myopia inherent in Neo-Liberalism

Although Cockburn and St. Clair do not mention it, Internationalism clearly draws its strength from the increasing availability of free speech and information available on the Internet. Whereas “radical” social movements have been historically hampered by the necessity of moving underground, the Internet makes it much simpler to coordinate and mobilize a growing number of people disaffected by global free trade. Prague is an example of this movement’s electronic momentum. It is difficult to imagine that Internationalism, if the freedom of information available on the World Wide Web remains free, will not eventually be quite successful. As a matter of fact, one of the demands of the Internationalist movement, Jubilee 2000, has recently made some headway.

Jubilee 2000, the grass-roots movement to force international banks to forgive crushing levels of third-world debt has had some recent success. The World Bank has agreed to consider that third-world debt be forgiven for countries reeling from the effects of decades-long poor public-health policies. Implied, of course, is the forced realization that the health and well-being of a nation’s people are ultimately more valuable than the profits to be made from their resources. This movement toward an ecological perspective of economics is the real goal of Internationalists.

Seattle is the germination of a seed planted by the likes of Eduardo Galleano, who in the wake of the CIA-backed coup of Allende’s 1973 Chilean regime, first warned us of Neo-Liberalism’s evils. Anyone blind to Neo-Liberalism’s effects in Latin America over the last 30 years need only consider recent Mexican history to see whether this notion of “compassionate self-interest” (one might even call it “compassionate conservatism”) has any value. In the first year of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), Mexican wages declined 40 to 50% while the cost of living rose by 80%. Over 20,000 small and medium-sized businesses failed and more than 1,000 state-owned enterprises were privatized.

Even the United States is not immune to the Neo-Liberalist zeal for wealth: Public utility deregulation as practiced in California earlier this winter resulted in requests for federal financial relief by California’s poorer citizenry. Most recently, deregulation has been identified as the culprit in California’s energy woes. On another front, Clinton’s handling of the welfare problem has resulted in millions of “post-welfare” women and children living well below the poverty line. These actions point to the growing trend of conservatism by the two major political parties.

Clearly, our present capitalist system has become heady or even drunk in the wake of its relatively recent “victory” over communism; to the extent that this reverie continues to be blind to the billions who do not share in its plenty, its demise looms. The great pendulum of social conscience, which forever seeks moderation, has started to tug at the coattails of Neo-Liberalist capitalism. There is irony here. And, the irony is not lost on those who are, in fact, battling capitalist extremism. The voice of moderation is gaining strength in the streets of Eugene, Oregon, and, indeed, in Seattle and beyond.

Miguel Alandete is a writer in Eugene, Oregon who works at The Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments.

A GOLDEN AGE

A GOLDEN AGE

By Tahmima Anam.

Birth of a Nation

“Exclamations of lightning”: Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971, with help from India.

About halfway through Tahmima Anam’s first novel, the story slows for a weather report, an evocation of August in the author’s native Bangladesh. The mornings seem “unbearably liquid” with humidity, and tempers worsen as “the air stopped around people’s throats, not a stir, everything still as buildings.” Then come the daily “exclamations of lightning,” and always there is “one small boy, or a very old man, or even a dog” waiting with his tongue out for the first drop of rain to fall. The description allows for a few seconds of calm in an increasingly tense plot, but it’s also a bravura set piece. It’s almost as if Anam were giving herself a test — if she were writing about Los Angeles, she’d do the Santa Ana winds — a test she passes, not least because she never uses the word “monsoon.” And from that moment on, almost everything goes right with this historical novel about the birth of a new nation.

I say “from that moment on” because this book, the first in a projected trilogy, gets off to a muddy start. Born in 1975, educated in France, Thailand, England and America and now resident in London, Anam is too young to have witnessed her country’s drive for independence; instead, she’s telling the story of her parents’ generation. When the British quit India in 1947, they cut the subcontinent in two and left a Pakistan that was itself divided. The country that now bears this name was the politically and militarily dominant west; the more densely populated east was a very different place. There, a shared Bengali culture linked Hindus and Muslims, with close ties between the Indian city of Calcutta and East Pakistan’s capital of Dhaka. In 1971, an eastern party won a parliamentary majority, but leaders in the west kept it from taking office, and the army invaded what had been its own country. That army quickly earned a reputation for atrocity — and found itself facing both a declaration of independence and an unexpectedly active resistance. After millions of refugees crossed its border, India joined the war on behalf of the new nation of Bangladesh and within weeks compelled a Pakistani surrender. But the dead were already past counting.

“A Golden Age” opens in 1959 with the words of a widow to her dead husband: “I lost our children today.” Rehana Haque, a young woman from an aristocratic but impoverished Calcutta family, has entered into an arranged marriage with a kindly businessman in Dhaka, only to see him die of a heart attack. With no money to fight her husband’s rich brother, she temporarily loses custody of her two children, who are taken far away to Lahore, in the west. After a mysterious bit of luck with an investment in real estate, Rehana is able to bring them back, but the loss has marked her. Although she builds an ordered life, she has no dreams or hopes of her own. When the civil war begins, it takes weeks for her to realize the scale of the history taking place all around her.

Her children, now in their late teens, react more decisively. Rehana’s daughter, Maya, moves to Calcutta to write about the freedom fighters for a newspaper, and Rehana’s son, Sohail, gets himself to a training camp for guerillas, eventually returning to bury a cache of arms in his mother’s garden. At the same time, Rehana’s hated brother-in-law comes to Dhaka as a member of the occupation.

Historical novels must get the history right. They must be scrupulous about details in order to make us swallow the liberties they inevitably take in representing actual people, or in putting their own invented characters close to the center of the action. In some novels, these liberties may be writ large, made mythic or fantastical, as in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” which attempts to get at a truth that lies beyond the documents. But Tahmima Anam works in a traditionally realistic style, and because of that she came near to losing me in her opening pages. When her children are sent to West Pakistan in 1959, Rehana is deemed an unfit mother, too young and feckless to teach them proper behavior. One item of evidence cited in court against her is the allegation that she has taken the children to see Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra” — which wasn’t released until 1963.

This silly mistake put me in a deeply skeptical mood. It made me ask whether “Cleopatra” would have been shown in Pakistan at all, and if so, in how censored a form? Still doubting, I later asked myself whether 17-year-old Maya would really have told her mother that all the girls at her university were having sex. Would it have been true, even in her Marxist circles? Anam deftly captures the brutality of the Pakistani Army, but could its soldiers have also been so unobservant? Would none of them have detected the digging in Rehana’s garden, especially after it became public knowledge that her son had joined the freedom fighters? Would such fighters have been able to stay in touch with one another by telegram, as Anam suggests? If a writer can’t be trusted about small things, can we trust her about large ones?

At the outset, Anam’s prose doesn’t help; in fact, some of her descriptive passages are so overwrought as to be unclear. In one scene, Rehana sees a little girl next to a blood-filled gutter, her mouth a “pale pink smudge, like the introduction of a bruise,” but Anam so tangles Rehana’s perceptions and her own omniscient narrative voice that it’s impossible to tell if the child is alive or dead.

Yet the monsoon brings relief. Once the war takes hold, Anam finds her subject in Rehana’s fierce love for her children, in the story of what she is willing to do to keep them alive. The novel’s language grows more confident, and history itself becomes an animating force. Rehana travels to Calcutta and works at a refugee camp, then returns to Dhaka at the height of the crisis. The second half of the novel acquires a taut, electric air, and I turned its pages as greedily as if it were a thriller. The start of “A Golden Age” may not be promising, but by its end this first novel has itself become a promising start.

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College. His books include “After Empire” and, as editor, “The Portable Conrad.”