Judge Posner on “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”

Richard Poser is incredibly prolific. Not only is he a judge on the Seventh Circuit, is he also a lecturer at University of Chicago Law School, and he writes voaciously. Here’s his review of the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Posner destroys the author of this book. He writes:

As Exhibit A for the superiority of intuitive to articulate thinking, Gladwell offers the case of a purported ancient Greek statue that was offered to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Months of careful study by a geologist (to determine the age of the statue) and by the museum’s lawyers (to trace the statue’s provenance) convinced the museum that it was genuine. But when historians of ancient art looked at it, they experienced an “intuitive revulsion,” and indeed it was eventually proved to be a fake.

The example is actually a bad one for Gladwell’s point, though it is a good illustration of the weakness of this book, which is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, rich in “human interest” particulars but poor in analysis. There is irony in the book’s blizzard of anecdotal details. One of Gladwell’s themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information, but he revels in the irrelevant. An anecdote about food tasters begins: “One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum.” The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise that hospital chairman Brendan Reilly “is a tall man with a runner’s slender build.” Or that “inside, JFCOM [Joint Forces Command] looks like a very ordinary office building…. The business of JFCOM, however, is anything but ordinary.” These are typical examples of Gladwell’s style, which is bland and padded with clich

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