Malcolm Gladwell gave an interesting afternoon keynote at SXSW today. Many others have already published extensive notes, including Matt May, Liz Lawly, Scott Benish, Tony, and Nancy White.

My two point summary of Gladwell:

• Snap decisions play a much greater role than you’d think.
• More information does not make for better snap decisions.

I can’t help but think there is some connection between the importance of and our ability to make snap judgements and Jeff Hawkins’ claims in On Intelligence for the primary importance of auto-associative memory and prediction recall (as opposed to computation). A brain that works as Hawkins describes should be fantastic at making snap decisions and a brain should do lots of whatever it excels at.

I’m only halfway through On Intelligence (excellent so far) and haven’t looked at Gladwell’s Blink at all.