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Thank you for the insight - I haven't read Blink, I've just come across this online and in discussions with friends.

The author of the article I linked paints the anecdote you've cited as Gladwell's "research". I had thought it was more exhaustive than that.

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Gladwell is an entertainment writer who picks facts and writes interesting stories.

None of them should be taken as factual; he cherry picks and often writers stories well after the source material has been disproven.

For example, Gottman's marriage research in blink that could predict divorce with extreme success was an overfit model without a validation set that didn't generalize well.

Yeah this is a very idiosyncratic pet peeve of mine. Wikipedia's pepsi taste test article also cites Blink with the same sense of authority.

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