Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

Destroy: Blink, which is admirable only because he manages to keep up analysis at the level of Peter Sellers in Being There for a whole book.

Taken together, these literatures demonstrate the importance of unconscious cognition, but their findings are obscured rather than elucidated by Gladwell's parade of poorly understood yarns. He wants to tell stories rather than to analyze a phenomenon. He tells them well enough, if you can stand the style. (Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.)

on the fence about awarding him classic status. the finger-in-socket haircut is a resounding dud.

Destroy: The books. I agree with coleman. I think he's more skilled as a short-piece writer. It's not that the books aren't good - I enjoyed both of them quite a bit - but I find that they get really repetitive in the second half. Oh, and also destroy his comments about The Streets.

I'd say classic overall; very skilled writer, tells great stories.

(full disclosure: I may be biased - he's from my hometown, I've met him, and I worked for his father for years...)

Here's the NYTimes piece if anyone wants (get a password from www.bugmenot.com if needed)

My main problem with him is that he seems to encourage people to think sloppily. Sometimes he's right and sometimes he just seems to be telling us to look for simple, easy explanations.

I don't think it's possible to do worse than reading Wheen's terrible book.

Search: The New Yorker articles

Destroy: Any attempt at long form.

"There is irony in the book's blizzard of anecdotal details. One of Gladwell's themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information, but he revels in the irrelevant. An anecdote about food tasters begins: "One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum." The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise that hospital chairman Brendan Reilly "is a tall man with a runner's slender build."

Weather, season and state ruled out of order in a book! Immaterial! Silence in the court! Continue, your honor!

"[Gladwell] remarks of someone that when he is excited "his eyes light up and open even wider." But eyes don't light up; it is only by opening them wider that one conveys a sense of excitement. The metaphor of eyes lighting up is harmless, but one is surprised to find it being used by a writer who is at pains to explain exactly how we read intentions in facial expressions--and it is not by observing ocular flashes."

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

lol @ physical characteristics of black ppl

Weather, season and state ruled out of order in a book! Immaterial! Silence in the court! Continue, your honor!

but both of those are really hackneyed NY-er turns of phrase -- you see something like that in practically every fact piece.

also, "tries his hand at book reviewing"? posner may be pompous, but he's certainly a prolific motherfucker.

no offense intended. but hey, feel free to conflate my specific personal observation/opinion into a generalized racial condemnation if it makes you feel all righteous and superior.

http://www.slate.com/id/2166947/

unsurprisingly, sadly, richard posner and I are the people that like schoolbook and verdana.

malcolm gladwell not reporting.

The bit in Blink where Gladwell seems convinced that Fred Durst is some sort of musical visionary capable of predicting great shifting sands in genres is hilarious.

i saw malcolm gladwell speak once. he seemed a moron.

Anyone else catch his This American Life piece this past week? Hysterical.

i saw him once in the strand. i was like yo fellow curly-haired canuck.

i didn't actually say that.

Did he say, "OMG you look just like Seth Rogen."

then we both said "lol" at the same time.

Anyone else catch his This American Life piece this past week? Hysterical.

That piece was perverse and often baffling.

I thought it raised new and troubling questions about the state of American journalism.

what was the deal with the piece?

I immediately emailed that bit to my magazine editor friend, with whom I have spent many a perverse and often baffling hour poring over the tiniest nuances of every sentence.

xp He talks about how when he was a young staff writer at the Washington Post he and another journalist held contests to see who could get various phrases (like "raises new and troubling questions" and "perverse and often baffling") into the newspaper the most times within a month.

I don't know why it's so fall-off-the-chair funny to me when a Wash Post editor has to argue that a mollusk is either baffling or it is not.

I enjoyed this as well:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwell

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwell

Just finished watching this. Very enjoyable.

Do any of you know if the Fermat graffiti is still there? According to the Times its at the “Eighth Street subway station at New York University”.

I’m going to try to get a picture when I’m the city next weekend.

Actually, I goofed. I meant to link this video, on the subject of engineering hit movies and songs:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2006/10/09/predictable

should probably pick another forum for 'who's excited for the new malcolm gladwell!'

i am, anyway. i saw him lecture around the chapter on plane crashes, it was fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/books/18kaku.html?8dpc

November 18, 2008
Books of The Times
It’s True: Success Succeeds, and Advantages Can Help
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Skip to next paragraph

OUTLIERS

The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell

309 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.

Malcolm Gladwell’s two humongous best sellers, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” share a shake-and-bake recipe that helps explain their popularity. Both popularize scientific, sociological and psychological theories in a fashion that makes for lively water-cooler chatter about Big Intriguing Concepts: “The Tipping Point” promotes the notion that ideas and fads spread in much the same way as infectious diseases do, while “Blink” theorizes that gut instincts and snap judgments can be every bit as good as decisions made more methodically. Both books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the “stickiness factor” and “the Rule of 150”) to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. And both project a sort of self-help chirpiness, which implies that they are giving the reader useful new insights into the workings of everyday life.

“Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable — or dated — any particular study might be.

Citing what Robert Merton called the “Matthew Effect” (after the New Testament verse that goes, “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”), Mr. Gladwell suggests that children from wealthy or middle-class backgrounds are much more likely to succeed than those from impoverished ones. He describes a study, begun in the 1920s by a professor of psychology named Lewis Terman, that tracked a group of gifted children and found, in Mr. Gladwell’s words, that “almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves.”

In addition, Mr. Gladwell compares the failure of a man named Chris Langan — who reportedly has a genius-level IQ of 195 and who came from a poor, dysfunctional family — to capitalize on his gifts with the success enjoyed by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who “was a child with a mind very much like Chris Langan’s” but whose wealthy, privileged childhood helped give him “the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.” Why use these two men as examples? Purely, it seems, because Mr. Langan’s life story made Mr. Gladwell think of the life of Mr. Oppenheimer.

To Mr. Gladwell the stories of the Beatles and Bill Gates are also distinguished not by “their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.” The Beatles became the Beatles, he suggests, because they happened to be invited, repeatedly, to Hamburg, Germany, where they had to perform many hours an evening for many nights — practice time that enabled them to hone their craft. Mr. Gladwell does not explain why other groups, who practiced as much as the Beatles, never became one of the seminal rock groups of all time, or why groups like the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys, who didn’t play as many Hamburg shows as the Beatles, also went on to shape music history.

In much the same fashion, Mr. Gladwell suggests that Bill Gates became Bill Gates because he was lucky enough to attend a high school that “had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968” and because he had another series of opportunities to spend hours working on computer programming before dropping out of Harvard to start his own software company. Both the Beatles and Mr. Gates, Mr. Gladwell argues, exceeded or came close to what he calls “the 10,000-Hour Rule” — the number of hours of practice that a neurologist named Daniel Levitin says are likely required “to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything.” Also, says Mr. Gladwell, Mr. Gates had the good fortune to be born in 1955 — one of the optimum years to be born to take advantage of the personal computer age.

In another chapter Mr. Gladwell talks with a math professor named Alan Schoenfeld, who argues that being good at mathematics is less an innate ability than a function of persistence and doggedness. Mr. Gladwell notes that students from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan score high on country-by-country ranked math tests, and he draws a connection between national cultures that “place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work” and “the tradition of wet-rice agriculture” in those countries — labor-intensive but meaningful work, requiring lots of patience and dedication.

Mr. Gladwell similarly raises the notion that cultural traditions may play a role in plane crashes, that the 1990 crash of Avianca Flight 52 over Long Island might have had something to do with the pilots’ being Colombian. He quotes Suren Ratwatte, a veteran pilot involved in “human factors” research, saying that “no American pilot would put up with” being held up by Air Traffic Control several times on its way to New York for more than an hour if he or she were running short of fuel. And drawing on the work of the psychologist Robert Helmreich, Mr. Gladwell argues that the pilots came from a culture with “a deep and abiding respect for authority” — which suggests that the first officer was reluctant to speak up when the exhausted captain failed to do so, and that both men failed to talk forcefully to the air traffic controllers, who were tough New Yorkers, unaccustomed to the pilots’ polite language.

Writing of a transcript from the doomed flight, Mr. Gladwell says of the first officer’s failure to communicate his plight: “His plane is moments from disaster. But he cannot escape the dynamic dictated to him by his culture in which subordinates must respect the dictates of their superiors.”

Such assessments turn individuals into pawns of their cultural heritage, just as Mr. Gladwell’s emphasis on class and accidents of historical timing plays down the role of individual grit and talent to the point where he seems to be sketching a kind of theory of social predestination, determining who gets ahead and who does not — and all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories.

on stephen colbert in ten minutes or so. i love malcolm gladwell.

The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success

this happens in all of his books. god forbid the man ever had to defend a dissertation. he'd be boiled alive, I think. Clay Shirky is better at arguing a point. Fortunately, Gladwell is a fantastic essayist, even though sometimes I think he's had his gallbladder replaced by a copy of the New Yorker style guide. I just keep thinking if only John McPhee was interested in the stuff Gladwell is interested in, instead of dirt and wood.

Bill Gates example is particularly poor as an example of what Gladwell wants to illustrate. Gladwell suggests that the underlying reason for Gates's success is that he spent around or over 10,000 hours coding and developing a huge ability in this area.

But Bill Gates is more a story around the opportunism and timing that so often underlies entrepreneurship and why its so difficult to prescribe a formula for successful entrepreneurship. His success is based on his early business practice (i'm not even sure I bring myself to say 'acumen') rather than his coding ability.

this book sounds ridiculous. the reason the beatles became so popular is because they were able to play every night at a bar??

I'm gonna get beaten up for mentioning the G-word on ILX, but the excert in the Guardian Weekend this past Saturday was very interesting. It's a bit more complex than ^^^ but his argument that it is a combination of sheer dogged determination and windows of opportunity is quite convincing.

The sheer dogged determination thing... well, it kind of twists around with the idea of "talent". Obviously there is such a thing as talent, but what it takes to make that talent work is a degree of obsessive compulsiveness. I wonder if that's what accounts for the high correlation of artists and madness - that in order to practice as much as it *takes* to be really really good at something, you have to have a kind of obsessive compulsive mind, a disorder which is often bundled with other psychological problems.

Anyway,...

yeah i'm sure i'm oversimplifying his point but i kinda feel that gladwell does that too

When I saw what Gladwell looked like on the front of Saturday's Guardian it put me off reading him altogether.

I dunno, when I read "Blink" I was all "Wow, that's a fascinating insight into an industry or social sphere I have no real knowledge of" for every chapter, and then I got to the one about music, wherein Gladwell talks about how Fred Durst and the bassist from No Doubt liking an R&B artist means that said artist would clearly have gone double platinum if the record label hadn't dropped the ball, and you just go "wait... what?"

Which is I'm pretty sure how Gladwell works. He chooses his examples from fields that nobody is going to have overriding knowledge of... nobody is going to understand in depth, I dunno, how the bluegrass recording industry works, the secret to running a proficient sushi conveyor belt restaurant, and how jai alai competitors train for a big game. So Gladwell can talk as much irrelevant inaccurate bullshit as he wants, and as long as he picks illustrating examples where you're only going to have a knowledge of how he's talking out of his ass less than 5% of the time, he has himself a winner on his hands. It's carny literature of the highest order.

The thing with Gladwell is that he's really good when he's disproving a commonly held view--I definitely nod along as he works to undermine the assumption that those with great success are born with whatever genius that lets them do it--the problem, of course, is when he tries to prove the opposite. You tell me that the real achievements are due more to persistence, hard work, and opportunity than any innate, magic talent? I'm totally on board. You try to formulate a competing theory of what makes real achievement through nothing more than random anecdotes? You lost me.

Like Tombot, I think he's better in essay form, 'cause his best quality as a writer--his instinct for counterintuition--is probably the classic essayist quality.

*waves hands*

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/07/15/bowdoin-in-food-fight-with-best-selling-author/

what a bozo

arguing that Bowdoin spends money on food at the expense of financial aid

this sounds like the laziest either/or argument he could make, and he has made some really lazy ones

hell, I bet they have hot water in their student residences, when you could easily shower and wash your hands with unheated water

“Atrocious fresh fruit is a small price to pay for social justice.”

trollin

Guy's a fuckin' douchebag who could get paid writing about a word cloud made from me saying he's a fuckin' douchebag

Thanks for ruining the word "maven" for the rest of us, douchebag

I listened to the podcast about Bowdoin v. Vassalr and it's not really about food. That's one of the elements in comparing schools with widely divergent levels of financial aid and how they allocate resources.

It is by far the least awful argument I've heard him make.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3SXJMCVMAAFKK_.jpg:large

http://gladwell.com/black-like-them/

saw a link on twitter to a 20 year old gladwell piece that i actually enjoyed a lot. about the different experiences of racism of west indian immigrants and american-born black people.

https://s33.postimg.cc/5y3df14bj/4_A1_CE56_C-89_C4-47_D6-8152-9_BB24963_C88_D.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/XLmqjDx/event-poster-10720454.jpg

look at this clown car

+ Beto O'Rourke

moderated by Jim Cramer

and you missed it!

because it was canceled

hahaaaaaa

it got cancelled due to the heatwave, so let’s all take a moment to say thanks to the ongoing climate catastrophe for its service

the surprise guest is

levar burton

"i just saw padma lakshmi by the price-waterhouse yurt"

I just want to see all these people biting the heads off of bats

the placement of Miguel on the poster is a pretty good punchline

😮

That poster is the shitty speakers' festival partner to this ILX fave

https://1075koolfm.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/hqdefault.jpg

lol actually came thisclose to putting it there

in that thread

“There is a reason why, when it comes to questions of whether someone is or isn’t engaged in pedophilia, we rely on experts. As far as I know, Joe Paterno never received such training.”

— The Daily Collegian (@DailyCollegian) January 30, 2020

Count me a Gladwell non-fan, but has anyone heard the Broken Record podcast he does with Rick Rubin? Looks like some good guests, but I dread his inevitably faux naive "I'm just a guy talking to folks about music, asking dumb questions" vibe, which I imagine will be similar to Terry Gross when *she* asks dumb questions of pop musicians. "So ... tell me about playing the guitar," or some such snooze that leans hard on the guests to provide the conversational momentum.

I understand that he doesn't meet the standards of intellectual rigor that some of you hold, but I enjoy his podcasts, and the Broken Record one is great. Most of them aren't him doing the interviewing anyway. I enjoy Rick Rubin's interviewing style, and he always has good stories to tell.

They did a fun one with Ezra Koenig where they were listening to FoTB a few months before it came out.

the guy's an absolute class a cunt. It was only a few months back he was lying his arse off about US healthcare on British tv in relation to a NHS "deabate", a fucking ridiculous corporate shill for private healthcare with zero credibility doesn't require that much intellectual rigour!

Way upthread I said "the best way to think about Gladwell is as a high class lawyer or public relations agent, where you don't know who his client is, and he pretends not to have one."

The Rick Rubin episodes of BR are consistently great.

There's a third guy, too, right?

yeah but he's not around all the time - bit of an outlier

lol

I once saw him at a restaurant in NYC with a tall, blond younger model type and thought, "She must be dating him for his looks."

"She must be dating him for his looks takes."

No doubt he'll get wheeled out on the BBC to give us some evidence based factoids about how cheap our prescription drugs will be when what is left of the NHS is paying four times the price for them from one of his US big pharma pals. Very funny and charming fellow though!

most of these intellectual snake-oil salesmen are exactly the same

I can't stand Gladwell most of the time, but I wish I'd been around for that Bowdoin discussion upthread. I went there for a year and they never stopped telling us how good the food was and how lucky we were to have such nice dining halls. (It was pretty mediocre food, just fancy mediocre.) They spent outrageous amounts of money on outdoor equipment so that you could do any kind of trip you wanted, with as many people as you wanted. The freshman dorms were all suites. And yet there were very few people there on financial aid, and those that were felt hideously out of place. Almost everyone seemed to be a child of multi-millionaires or billionaires, and even my roommate, the daughter of a multi-millionaire, felt out of place because her dad owned casinos and thus was definitely New Money.) I left because I feared that if I stayed I would begin thinking of that kind of wealth and luxury as normal.

Gladwell had a whole podcast which I enjoyed where he railed against giving any money to universities that already have massive endowments .

Lily Dale, I think that kind of college is a special case, because... why would you send your kid there unless you were very, very wealthy? If your kid can get into Caltech or Chicago or Yale or whatever, you can get a much better education for that amount of money (and those schools are much richer and offer more financial aid to families that need it.) Whereas if your kid is not getting into Caltech or Chicago or Yale, they can get as-goood-as-Bowdoin education at their state university for much less. Which means it's not clear why it makes sense to send your kid there except as a kind of prestige good, or because you know other kids-of-the-rich go there. I don't see why a family of normal means, or for that matter a family in the top 10% but not top 1% of household income, would make that choice.

people go to expensive private universities so that they can work at places that only hire graduates from said schools, or to meet other people with money so they can network with them and reinforce social structures

not knocking anyone who went to them who isn't rich, but the idea that mixing in kids on scholarships to break social barriers doesn't work nearly as well as they pretend. I think the amount of support for students when it comes to smaller class sizes, individual attention, etc. might be a little better

that is to say, Lily Dale otm

So you see, Sean, if you look into the patterns of history, you’ll find…whew, that one snuck up on me, could you pass the milk?…you’ll find that age of consent laws are pretty consistently cyclical, and we’re overdue for a correction

SEAN: Let’s talk about your Gram https://t.co/MB8in2bryq

— NBA on CorncobTV (@killakow) July 16, 2021

Gladwell said some stupid shit last week (stupid even for him, I mean), and Ed Zitron took him to task for it.

"Skeletal charlatan Malcolm Gladwell... is rich and famous because he is the king of the self-mythologizing that successful people engage in every day. His success has come from telling comfortable bedtime stories for the rich, helping them find confusing and complex ways to hide how their success - like Gladwell’s - came from privilege and luck. And the push against remote work is just another way in which the rich, powerful, and successful are attempting to rewrite history and create a narrative that they’ve “earned” their outsized paychecks and power... Gladwell and his fanbase of the single least-informed executives in the world have all told themselves that their success came from being in boardrooms and saying cool stuff that makes people think. When you break down their narratives, many of these successful people were privileged and lucky - born at a time when there was less competition for jobs, or able to borrow money from their parents (see: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), or able to get into an ivy league school, or just happened to meet the right person (Wozniak and Jobs at HP). Their hard work is not irrelevant, nor is their intellect, but if they have to admit that their successes were a creation of them being in the right place at the right time and able to perform the necessary thing to progress, suddenly everything feels less satisfying."

"Gladwell is a spiritual leader for complacent executive liars. He is a totem that dimwits hold up to prove they’re intellectual, a standard-bearer for those who want the appearance of work rather than to create anything meaningful. Gladwell is only attacking remote work because he knows it will help embolden the executive sect’s ability to reap the rewards of other people’s work without having to justify their own existence. He is a religious leader roleplaying as a business author, Joel Olsteen for intellectual dullards, justifying the status quo by dressing it in the language (but not the fundamentals of) research and philosophical consideration."

he was literally shedding tears about the self-damage caused by people working from home, when you are that much owned by capital the only honourable option left is to kill yourself.

Really dislking this push to be "back in the office" "for the collaboration", oh, but you can't all be in on the same days, so all your meetings are online still. And you're in a mostly deserted office which is a million times more depressing than working from home with my cats and my partner in the same house.

Yeah, "hybrid" work seems pretty pointless and depressing, except for when I need to actually work in a lab with test equipment. However, WFH for a couple of years was not good for my health (mental and physical). I think this topic could use a little less of people deciding that what works for them should work for everyone else.

otm

I appreciate his exposé of the McDonald's french fry scandal.