Blink: Conclusion–Afterword

Celibidache was a conductor from the old school, an imperious and strong-willed man with very definite ideas about how music ought to be played—and about who ought to play music.

Conant played seven of the most difficult passages in the trombone repertoire.

The expert was effusive.

She prevailed on every charge, and she prevailed because she could mount an argument that the Munich Philharmonic could not rebut.

It seemed like a fact, because when conductors and music directors and maestros held auditions, the men always seemed to sound better than the women.

No one paid much attention to how auditions were held, because it was an article of faith that one of the things that made a music expert a music expert was that he could listen to music played under any circumstances and gauge, instantly and objectively, the quality of the performance.

They formed a union and fought for proper contracts, health benefits, and protections against arbitrary firing, and along with that came a push for fairness in hiring.

Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can’t hear it in the sound.

There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear.

The top half of Virginia is bisected by the Rappahannock River, which meanders from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the north and empties into Chesapeake Bay.

Hooker’s position was unassailable.

He had Lee in a vise: Lee had a larger army in front of him and a larger army behind him.

What’s more, he had two hot-air balloons at his disposal, which he sent up periodically to provide almost perfect aerial reconnaissance of Lee’s positions.

On paper, he had an insurmountable advantage over Lee.

He told his troops to halt, then to withdraw. He ceded his battlefield advantage.

Van Riper lives just outside Williamsburg, in Virginia, in the kind of immaculate, orderly house that one would expect of a career military man.

I suppose that I had blithely assumed that generals were people who charged around and “did” things; that they were men of action, men of the moment.

Chancellorsville came down to some ineffable, magical decision-making ability that Lee possessed and Hooker did not.

This is a question that many historians have considered. Here is Harry Hansen’s view, from his magisterial history, The Civil War...

Perhaps Hooker at last had recalled Lincoln’s admonition, “Beware of rashness.”

Perhaps at this critical juncture he missed the artificial stimulus of whiskey, which formerly had been part of his daily ration but which he had abjured on taking command.

From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But—and this is one of the lessons I tried very hard to impart in Blink—it is easy to disrupt this gift.

We live in a world saturated with information.

We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework.

But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information.

Then he had another group of people take the same test, except that this time, after giving them all of the information, he distracted them by having them do anagrams.

Dijksterhuis argues that his findings represent a fundamental principle of human cognition, and that “there is no a priori reason to assume that [it] does not generalize to other types of choices—political, managerial, or otherwise.”

One of their most prominent examples was the former Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson, the perennial all-star and one-time NBA Most Valuable Player.

How good is he at the myriad of skills and attributes that it takes to be a successful athlete?

How resilient is he in the face of adversity?

How resilient is he in the face of adversity?

I think that we would all agree that these kinds of questions are much more complicated than—and every bit as important as—simple statistical measures of performance, particularly when it comes to the rarefied world of professional sports.

Before the advent of blind auditions, the percentage of women in major symphony orchestras in the United States was less than 5 percent. Today, twenty-five years later, it’s close to 50 percent.

Orchestras are run by maestros, and maestros are powerful, brilliant, single-minded, highly entrenched men who run their organizations like their own private fiefdoms.

Orchestras are run by maestros, and maestros are powerful, brilliant, single-minded, highly entrenched men who run their organizations like their own private fiefdoms.

I suspect, at the end of long days of meetings, we would probably have thrown up our hands and said that we would just have to wait until the current generation of maestros—with their ingrained biases against women—was replaced by a younger, and hopefully more open-minded, set of conductors.

But they did—overwhelmingly and punitively—because they were subject to the kind of biases that many of us carry around in the nether regions of our brains, which affect our behavior as much as the opinions that we knowingly hold.

But they did—overwhelmingly and punitively—because they were subject to the kind of biases that many of us carry around in the nether regions of our brains, which affect our behavior as much as the opinions that we knowingly hold.

Even though many raised legitimate concerns about the practicality of the idea, or about just how much difference it would make in the end, there seemed to be little disagreement with the idea that we have to do something to reduce the shameful disparity in the way we treat people in the legal system based on the color of their skin.

It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works—and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment—it is our responsibility to act.