decision-making algorithms
While at Barnes & Noble, I found a book that caught my attention and held it mercilessly captive. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking explains and hypothesizes regarding the various patterns and formulae our human mind grasps instantaneously when coming to a conclusion. The author focuses on the ‘Blink Factor’, those decisions made right on the spot without any seeming conscious effort.
You would be hard-pressed to convince me that most human thought processes actually include legitimate assessment of the decision at hand. People are very instinctive and react often solely based on one-time provocations - it is a natural kind of response, I would suppose, but an unfortunate one. For all anyone knows, this entire blog could be generated by complex software used to simulate an individual person and his individual responses to completely ficticious events; however, upon reading this for the first time, you assumed that there was at least one human behind this website and its content. That sounds like a small assumption to make, but instinctive replies to events are all around us.
A person might lunge at first sight of his spouse’s murderer upon entering a courtroom for criminal trials; that could be a planned effort, but would likely be something drawn from our inherrent nature to take vengeance into our own hands. In a lecture hall, people are less attracted to a monotonous voice regardless of the content, even if it is of great interest to you; an outgoing presentation will always be more effective because humans unconsciously latch onto the more charismatic character. You can take Hitler to be an effective demonstration of that last event, an effective demonstration that built up steam and power before people realized the ramifications of who and what they were supporting.
Even though I am attending college to get a degree in engineering, I cannot masquerade my love for sociology and psychology and all of the sciences of the mind. But don’t assume that I prefer such starched logic all the time, I overtly confess to my storehouses of emotion. In fact, to fully try and attain logic within one’s life would cast that person into a personal social destruction.
There’s simply too much in this world for one person to make sense of.