Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

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.

But yeah, he runs roughshod over the scientific method, he's made millions selling his ideas to gullible business types, and he looks like a total tool, so I understand the resistance.

but dont you find that he'll take some commonly held assumption (that has a lot of flaws) and replace it wiht his own assumption (that has a lot of flaws)?

ok i've just re-read where you said when he comes up w/ the competing theories then yr lost. i agree.

xpost Yes, exactly. That's sort of what I was trying to say; I like the first part of your sentence, not so much the second.

I got fed up with him at his last New Yorker piece. It was about "genius" which is a really annoying subject to begin with. I think it went something like this:

1. There are two kinds of geniuses, early bloomers and late bloomer.
2. Early bloomer geniuses are early.
3. Late bloomer geniuses are late.
4. As a case in point of the latter, take this contemporary writer (that you've never heard of) who got good reviews. He is obviously a genius because he got reviews. He is a late bloomer. But his wife was supporting him while he wrote. Hence late bloomer geniuses need someone to support them.

LOL that latebloomer genius piece gave me hope

dont forget that he also had another late genius to compare him to. this is standard gladwell - 2 anecdotal examples are usually enough to prove a point.

Oh right, Renoir or something.

I tracked down the source material for Gladwell's "genius" book and tried to read through it. It is likely more rigorous and exhaustive than Gladwell's book, and as a necessary consequence, pretty boring. If anyone here can synthesize such material in a more compelling way than Gladwell, I invite you to do so.

re: record execs dropping the ball -- was Gladwell wrong to imply that record execs routinely drop the ball? or was it that Fred Durst and bassist from No Doubt have some finely honed tastemakers inside them? Given the choice between a random record exec and Fred Durst, wouldn't you hold your nose and go with Fred?

think the point of the kenna chapter in blink really was less "fred durst and U2's manager are musical oracles" and more about the way that kenna flopped when he got subjected to the focus group. listening to songs and then being asked to rate them is not the way that most people listen to music, hence it's a bogus way of evaluating a song's quality.

i just finished reading 'blink' after picking up a cheap copy at the local bookstore. i enjoyed it but i'm hardly going to hold it up as the gospel truth or anything; if this is what people have been doing then i guess i can understand the loathing.

Search: http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html

Destroy: all book-length work

The 90s stuff before he was all SUPASTAR is fab - see The Sports Taboo, the bits on khakis and coolhunting, and most of the stuff that got spun into The Tipping Point

i just finished reading 'blink' after picking up a cheap copy at the local bookstore. i enjoyed it but i'm hardly going to hold it up as the gospel truth or anything; if this is what people have been doing then i guess i can understand the loathing.

yeah. i think part of his kick is just to freewheel and theorise in an interesting way. it's the job of the writer to push whatever conclusions he's drawing to the greatest extent, to prove that they're even true to some degree, and a book about how once in a while maybe you should trust your instincts wouldn't be as interesting or encouraging a read. picking up a theme and wedging it into certain situations, so as to let it play on people's minds a little, is totally valid.

Hmmm.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/11/outliers.html

that's a great link Don!
Here's a reductive, sucky one to restore balance:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/the_new_gladwell.php

With his last book, Gladwell sought to eliminate the focus group; with this one, he wants to eradicate poverty.

As I’ve said before, it’s no coincidence that this turn coincides with an anti-Gladwell backlash.

yeah exactly kakutani just has an axe to grind about gladwell's politics and the rest is window dressing about "writing" and "arguing"

I can't express how soul-wrenching it is for me to say: kakutani otm

oh and this

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/18.html

which is great but actually not about gladwell per se

i am maintaining my practice of not reading gladwell books, but the new article about teaching is pretty good. (nb: i'm biased bcz i used to be an education reporter and found value-added analysis of teacher performance pretty fascinating but was hard-pressed to get many other people to share my fascination. i guess gladwell's ability to be fascinated by such things is what i like about him.)

haha I was just bitching about that on the FOOTBALL WRITING thread on ilnfl

he should've left out the quarterback drafting junk really and I'd probably have found it somewhat enlightening

tipsy you should check out yglesias' latest post on finnish school accountability

i liked what he said about teaching but could not quite figure out why that was combined with the football stuff.

I mean putting it under the broad heading of "talent" was a little redic -- not quite sure why a comparison between the relatively available "talent" it takes to be a good teacher and the 1-in-a-million combination of super talent and things falling into place properly for a star quarterback have to do with each other.

Sorry, didn't mean for the scare quotes around "talent" as a question of the talent it takes to be a teacher -- just meant that a good teacher is not the kind of unlikelihood that a star quarterback represents.

gladwell's articles are generally good-to-great; his books are FAIL

because one of them is difficult and the other one is also difficult. it seems appropriate that he ends the whole thing by giving up on any kind of real conclusion/upshot and just goes "and then he threw a terrible interception under pressure the end" which reads mostly as a metaphor for gladwell trying to write the thing under deadline

because brett favre never does that

what?

He should go ahead and write a book called Rich Glad, Poor Glad

yeah the football stuff i didn't feel like he got much of a handle on. but the education stuff was good. part of the problem as he acknowledges is that in pro football quarterbacks you're talking about such a tiny, tiny population that generalizations beyond the obvious -- must be able to throw and take a hit -- get very tough. but teachers are a huge population, and there are things you can learn about which ones work and which ones don't.

my major gripe, education-wise, is his assertion that you're better off in a "bad" school with a "good" teacher than vice versa, which buys into the pretense that the only thing that matters in school is what happens in the individual classroom.

and hey, that yglesias post is interesting. thx.

But he misses the more obvious point that the success of a quarterback is also open to many variables beyond the quarterback's raw ability. Not to mention that this:

"In pro football quarterbacks you're talking about such a tiny, tiny population that generalizations beyond the obvious -- must be able to throw and take a hit -- get very tough"

ought to be more than a caveat -- it should negate the purpose for writing the article at all.

actually thinking about it I'd be willing to bet actual cash dollars that the quarterback material was stuff that got left on the cutting room floor when he put success together and got crammed into the teacher piece to fill inches

"shit the nyer wants how many words oh dammit don't they know I'm on tour"

ha. it's true that when he said "schools have a quarterback problem," it set off my tom-friedmanism cute-phrase alarms.

throws picks under pressure and tombot yr scenario is 100% guaranteed accurate

next he will tell us about why it's hard to pick a stock

i thought james surowiecki already did.

http://pics.livejournal.com/lucylou/pic/000gp1he

Recent NYer article on Davids vs. Goliath (focusing mostly on full court press) is really good.

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/05/malcolm_gladwell_is_no_charles.php

Not sure scienceblog guy is demonstrating much more b-ball knowledge than Gladwell does.

Just read the Ron Popeil article linked to upthread ("the pitchmen"). When you read it (he just loves Popeil, you can tell) you just suddenly understand that Gladwell's writing is basically a teflon-coated onion slicer ... in words.

But that doesn't make it bad ... He just loves to pitch those onion slicers.

Isn't *underdog wins by using unconventional tactics and catching the other party off guard* kind of a cliche at this point? I do have to credit him for making these things sound like fresh ideas though -- putting the teflon coating on the onion slicer, as it were.

was just going to come here to say how terrible that basketball article was!!

Did anyone watch Dallas attempt the full court press on Billups last night? They must have tried three or four times. If you’re wondering: Denver broke the press and scored on each attempt. LOL

'Isn't *underdog wins by using unconventional tactics and catching the other party off guard* kind of a cliche at this point?'

I think the take-home point Gladwell is trying to convey isn't unconventional tactics are awesome, but rather supreme effort + rulebreaking trumps ability, but few people are willing to put in the effort, and Goliaths are loathe to let someone continue to break the unspoken rules. The article is actually kind of depressing in that the two game-playing David examples are essentially shunned back into conventional play, or out of the game altogether, which is pretty novel for usually cheerful Gladwell.

Also, Gladwell is writing primarily about the world of 12 year-old girls basketball, where I gather this kind of aggressive play is still effective, but discouraged on bogus sportsmanship grounds.

It can actually be a pretty effective strategy for an underdog at just about any level assuming that the opposing team doesn't have the personnel to break the press (which is a major caveat admittedly once you get to the college level anyway and practically a foregone conclusion at the professional.) But yeah I don't think the piece is so much about the press (except when it is) as much as it is about underdog's failing to use or choosing not to use or being forced from using the best strategies whenever possible to help them beat the overdog.

Basketball Prospectus has a good discussion of the piece:

http://www.basketballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=253

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.