dont miss it

I just finished this book last night, and heartily recommend it. It discusses the "adaptive unconscious", and its ability to make nearly instaneous decisions on very little information (what most of us might call "instinct"). There's a lot of fascinating stuff in here.
It discusses things as seemingly diverse as the New Coke Debacle, high-speed chases (they're not dangerous soley because of the speeds involved), mind-reading (sort of), autism, an over-looked musician named Kenna, military wargames, why doctors are sued for malpractice, sub-conscious racism, antique fakery and why experts "just know".

Try this on for size:

The psychologists Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of [a test that studied the effects of pre-test thought patterns and their effect on testing], using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pre-test questionaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them all with negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half

Then there's a story (in two parts) about a massive wargame that was conducted in 2000 called "the Millenium Challenge". In it, the Massed Forces of the U.S. Military staged a "war" against a "rogue" military commander in the Persian Gulf. That "rogue" commander was Paul Van Riper, a heavily decorated Marine commander. Van Riper had standard third-world weaponry, and a command style based on on-site real-time decision-making. The U.S. had massive infrastructure, intelligence and state-of-the-art-weapons, combined with lots of strategy-planning meetings. Guess who won? So the timetable was backed up, and the exercise resumed. Sort of.

The day after the attack, I walked into the command room and saw the gentleman who was my number two giving my team a completely different set of instructions... I said, "What the hell's going on in here?" He said, "Sir I've been given guidance by the program director to give completely different directions." The second round was all scripted, and if they didnt get what they liked, they would just run it again.

Naturally, this time the U.S. forces won.

Anyway, read the book. I've never been any good at book reviews.