THE GRANDMASTER DOES NOT SEE BAD MOVES. Malcom Gladwell generalizes that (not always true) observation about abilities to spot what looks right or what looks wrong in a situation very quickly in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. For Book Review No. 43 I suggest that the subtitle misleads. The book argues that we are capable of sizing up a situation and reaching the correct conclusion with relatively little information, and that it is possible to overanalyze and get things wrong. In chess, that's called "developing sight of the board," and the frustration of overanalyzing is summed up in the Law of the Too Solid Goof and its corollaries. But that ability, which Mr Gladwell characterizes as "thin-slicing", is something that must be encouraged and cultivated. We're all capable of it, but we require practice at developing it, at observing slices that look right so as to be able to conclude that a slice doesn't look right.

There are cautionary tales for the reader to consider, including the risk of making the wrong thin slices (try classifying something as either "male" or "domestic" as in one famous psychology experiment) or of inferring that because someone looks presidential, he ought to be presidential (Warren G. Harding, meet Barack H. Obama?) or of assuming that disrupting an enemy's command-and-control infrastructure means the enemy can't fight back. (You mean Pentagon planners suffer from "victory disease?" I thought they'd learned from the rigged Japanese war games preceding Operation MI.) No spoilers to follow: check the book out from your library. I got through it in about two hours.