To illustrate the metaphor, I spent two pages describing a paper published by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer a few years ago in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. That part of the book is concerned with the notion of “desirable difficulty,” a term that I think is a wonderful metaphor for the ways in which some dyslexics have adapted to their disability. The first striking thing about all three of Chabris’ reviews of David and Goliath is how much attention he pays to a study that I mention at the beginning of my chapter on dyslexia. As Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Although many readers of the were surely drawn to an almost magical view of expert intuition, Gladwell himself does not hold that position.” Kahneman understood my book.

Blink was a narrative about rapid cognition, and the thing about narratives is that they often begin in one place and end in another. But then it slowly challenged that position, walking the reader through ideas about racism and unconscious bias and the fragility of snap judgments before ending with the devastating story of the shooting of Amadou Diallo-in which the gut instincts and snap judgments of a group of inexperienced police officers led directly to the tragic death of an innocent man. It began with a celebration of the situations in which rapid cognition works well. It was a book about the power of snap judgments-for both good and ill. Blink, I pointed out, said no such thing. I decided to write to one of the authors. Blink, they wrote, was a celebration of the accuracy of snap judgments-a ringing endorsement of intuition over considered judgment-and this, to their mind, was a problem. It was written by two academics, and it talked, in passing, about my second book, Blink. Some years ago I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Blink david and goliath