5 Idea of "thin slicing" explained in examples, just in the way a good business book should be written

Why less information is better when you have a quick yet critical decision to make?

Because, it turns out, our gut feelings and our intuitions have an amazing ability to choose correct answer without having a full picture.

But we tend to get imprisoned by the desire to know more and more, which gives us false sense of confidence and distracts our intuitions from the right choise. We can get tied down by too much of information.

“Thin slicing” is the key!

Examples:
- pentagon blue team lost to rouge commander's red team in a war simulation game, because a rouge commander had to improvise and make quick unordinary decisions, while the blue team spent time analyzing huge amount of data and discussing optimal strategy

- heart attack estimation quality among doctors happend to be extremely low (30-75%) because they tend to take too many factors into account (age, diabetes, symptoms, blood pressure etc.), while simple decision tree based on 3 outperformed all the doctors with staggering 95% accuracy!

- experts (food tasters for example) develop ability to understand and explain their instinctive reactions in rational terms, while regular people don't really know in advance how would they like or dislike something until they actually try

- thin slicing may have a negative effect as well: police killing innocent people because of adrenalin rush => narrow mind making wrong conclusions etc.