Malcom Gladwell Reaction

I enjoyed reading all of Gladwell’s points he made in this article. Coming from the same author of the book Blink, I found it interesting that the theme of this article was similar to the book. The similarities revolved around the main point of both were essentially the same- that sometimes human senses and intuition can prove to be more accurate and valid than a technical, more factual way of explaining truth. We see this in the article with the example of mammography and hand testing; and in the book, the example of professional art dealers deeming ancient works as either an original or a copy, by either first impression and feel, versus extensive research and records.

While digesting the material, I continued to contemplate how Western culture sort of seeps into this mentality of technology and science pervading as rational and factual. Last semester, I took an international development class and my professor made a point that will always stick with me. She told us that Western ideas around science seem to look down upon spirituality and beliefs that are not rooted in provable, technical science. Though, she said that our form of ‘provable science’ is merely our own form of religion. Our god-technology!  This thought, coming from a figure that represented academia and facts for someone like myself, was astounding. Was I now at church, or college?

My brain connected this thought to this article, because it is kind of proof of how we put our faith in these technologies, even if they aren’t necessarily above our intelligence. A nurse explaining, “It feels like cancer” would not be taken as serious as “The machine readings showed cancer”. Relating this to college kids, we all take Facebook photos as truth. This is a less technical example, but I still think it works to make the same point. We flip through the photos posted in an online newsfeed, and we tend to take photos as truth. They’re all smiling… so they must have had a wonderful time! They have so much fun! We assume a fact is attached to a photograph; we consider photos ‘proof’. But, it’s not. It is an image. And images aren't necessarily representative of truth.

          That is not to say that these technologies are bad, but we do need to learn to trust ourselves in a way that recognizes machines as only part of the puzzle. We need to come to terms that we still have limitations, and start to understand that discomfort that comes with uncertainty, and not having all the answers all of the time. Human interpretation is required in conjunction with the technology we have (which we ourselves have created, remember). In order for these technologies to be used appropriately, we need to recognize this and trust ourselves.