Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Who is the doctor?

I've been reading this book 'Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking' by Malcolm Gladwell very slowly... about ten pages per day. Why ten pages per day? Believe me, you don't want to know. ^^;; Anyway to sum it up, the books talks about snap judgements, how effective it can be sometimes compared to serious hours of decision making and yet of cause it's not 100% always the best move as well. Sorry if this bores you right now but I'm getting there.

There is also one chapter, Chapter Three to be precise where it talks about the Warren Harding Error: Why we fall for tall, dark and handsome men. ^^;; Rest assured this is not a lovey-dovey chapter. Instead, it goes to say that most of us have a fix state of mind which is very much influenced by society and how we are brought up, etc. To cut it short, an example given was that most of us confidently say we are not racist nor are we a gender discriminating individual. However, our fixed state of mind gives us an impression of what should be what and what should not. I.E: associating the word "domestic" with the name "Bob", the word "Merchant" with the name "Sally" or even the "black" as "good" and "white" as "bad". All these are proven through experiments according to the book. While reading this, I was doubtful. The inner me was like, 'I don't think so. That's not very true.' You'll probably think so too. I mean we know that black is not necessary means bad right?

Change of topic. I've also been spending the last few days playing around with blogspot's templetes. I want a change but it takes time understanding what's going on inside the coding. -.-;; I have given up a few times already and after awhile feel the urge for the change again and went exploring again. This time it's slightly fruitful. Let's hope I get somewhere this time. ^_^

Why the sudden change of topic? Actually it's just there as a distraction. Back to the book shall we? Well, today I reached page 120 and there was this given situation for readers to consider.

A man and his son are in a serious car accident.
The farther is killed, and the son is rushed to the
emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks
at the child and gasped, "This child is my son!"
Who is the doctor?


And so I paused a while and thought about it. 'Eh?' First, I was doubtful with what I read, so I read it again 'A man and his son' not 'A man and a boy'. Okay, there's a catch somewhere I thought and went as far as thinking the doctor was the grandfather and 'his son' is the 'father' that died in the accident. Okay, maybe it's just me being weird to think till grandpa *shrugs* but I just made an automatic assumption that doctors are always men! I soooo... wanted to bang my head against the wall because they aren't always so and of course the doctor was the boy's mother.


T___T Hiyashi is a female and no, I do not have gender discrimination.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow hey, I got tricked too! -.-" I assumed the doctor's a male also and thought the son's parents must be gays..

Jovin Wong said...

You are now being rewarded as "The Most loyal Reader".

ps: I should have guess the first thing that crosses your mind is them being gay. DOTs+2.