A few days ago, I began to read the novel Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. So far, it has been enlightening. As with any psychologically spun book, there are parts I’ve pondered before and others I’ve failed to.
Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature – which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous.
In the introduction to the book, he described an experiment where four decks of cards, two red and two black, were chosen from. Yeah, a top card from each. Players learned, consciously, after maybe eighty cards, that the red decks, though payoffs were good, were mas o menos awful. The losses offset the gains by a wide margin. The blue decks were more moderate in gain/loss, but the former gradually came out on top.
It took the subjects approximately eighty cards to realize this… consciously. However, intuitively, they began favouring the blue decks only after ten cards.
The book is about exploring semi-immediate unconscious (or, should we say *pre-conscious?) decision making.
As I am in Ruidoso at the moment with my parents, I thought I’d try to explore the idea during my bouts with the gambling machines. Yeah, today (and yesterday), I have only participated in amusement with automatons. I’ll get to the blackjack possibly this afternoon or zítra.
Clammy hands were to tell me when to stop one machine and migrate to another. Now, I understand that these games are pseudo-random, so the pre-consciousness cannot gauge in the same manner that it might an actual card game, but what the hell, eh?
In the past, I have had an intuition about slots that led to magnificent success. In Hobbs, approximately a week ago, I played the Bombay machine and felt a tittilation even though I had not won anything substantial. Call it superstition or just plain stupidity, but within twenty minutes, my grease dripping fingers clutched over one thousand grubby dollars.
I have not been successful on the slots in Ruidoso.
My hands, at this very moment, are becoming clammy thinking about it. Usually, money is not a source of stress for me. It may be emotional transference from my parents. They are perpetually stressed. They feed off of it. That is another story, one that has surely been told at various other places in this journal. (I laughingly call it a journal).
We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.
Job interviews directly relate to the point made here. Another experiment detailed in the book described impressions from close friends of twenty or so college students contrasted with impression from strangers allowed to visit each of the students’ dorm rooms for fifteen minutes.
As the avid reader may have guessed, the latter group did very well at assessing certain aspects of the students’ personalities.
I believe that if Steve from Stonecrop had been allowed to root through my room in Brighton for fifteen minutes instead of interviewing me personally, I’d have never got the job. Close encounters for which we prepare never reflect a great swath of our personalities. Most of those creeping, oozing, flatulent aspects are locked soundly away in a box underneath our hypothetical beds.
I turned out to be a cantankerous cunt in my work. Oh, I did good work, yes, but I questioned most everything the management tossed my way. The entirety of my employed life has been similar, as was my school days. The fact that the hierarchical organization of Stonecrop was rife with stupidities is neither here nor there, Miss Pan-theistic.
I am quite sure that Steve would have rooted around in my privates instead of bellowing at me for thirty minutes about the structure of the company and the application of which they were so proud, he wouldn’t have considered me as a candidate. Oh! My smile is charming! My room in Brighton, however, was not.
Relating directly to the quote above - most IT companies give new employees a three month probation period. This is the time and effort to see whether a new employee fits. Gladwell argues that rooting through someone’s privates would be just as effective and prevent the random tossing about of the company’s dinero.
I’m not complaining about the method they used, however, as some of that dinero which floated about on the apathetic air will secure me diggs in Logroňo.
For a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.
I could pour through my journals for hours, days, months and decades to validate the next claim, but my intuition tells me that I’ve only had three relationships in my lifetime which fit this criteria.
- Kierstinn
- (Blonde) Dana
- (Brunette) Dana
I left all three of them for other women. See! I am a masochist. The women who cut into these relationships, finally shearing them from my life, were insecure, sadistic and inflexible.
One portion of Blink describes a marriage. The couple were invited into a lab for to have a fifteen minute chat in front of a camera. The conversation mostly concerned their dog. The husband did not want the dog. The wife did. The husband related reasons, but always backed down. He’d go on and validate the wife, but she’d never do it back for him. She was inflexible.
The ratio of negative to positive in my relationships other than the three mentioned was far more than the pithy number one.
