Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

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

I'm waiting for him to appear on stage right now.

he's a fine speaker but seems to be like a hired gun for motivational business ponderances. are you at one of those?

they've been advertising his london shows in popbitch for a couple of months now

He's doing a short UK tour to promote the paperback of 'Outliers'. He was excellent - he spoke for an hour about the civil war, specifically the overconfidence of General Hooker before the battle of Chancellorsville, and from there via psychology experiments, card tricks, heart surgery and Gallipoli obliquely to the financial crisis. You know the kind of thing - basically an extra chapter from any of his books. He's simply a fantastic storyteller and a fine, if unshowy, performer - and in a funny way you feel kind of slightly short-changed as a result, because it's totally gripping and therefore over in a flash. He should maybe do a ten-minute encore, just to diffuse his own impact a bit! It was great, though, and I'm delighted I made the effort.

There was a decent turn-out, which pleased me because hed hired quite a big theatre and i was sceptical as to how many people would want to see something like that. I feel somehow personally responsible if my hometown doesn't turn out when good people make the effort to come. I was quite embarrassed last time I was at that theatre, for some Russian Opera, and attendance was sparse - but I needn't've worried tonight, it was pretty full on the low levels.

We got our book signed afterwards, and he seemed a bit shy, which isn't what I was expecting and a little bit strange after a masterful display of public speaking.

This afternoon I listened to his TED Talk (free podcast through iTunes) and liked it a lot.

malcolm gladwell can be annoying, but not anywhere as annoying as "max gladwell"

I finished The Tipping Point last night (I know, I'm a bit late to the best seller list), and I had real problems with it. It strikes me as a particularly useless sort of writing. I hate the way he makes pat statements about human behavior. "From this anecdote, we learn that this process works this way." Oh really? Does it now? You may want to look into that.

It's the same problem I have with evolutionary biology. You can't apply basic rules of natural selection to the human brain and say "Well now we've figured out why men behave like jerks" or some such, because not only is the brain the most complicated THING in the entire known universe, it is also self-aware, ludicrously adaptive, constantly self-correcting. And indeed over and over throughout the book, he tells stories (interesting stories, to be sure) of people conducting experiments and learning something that they weren't ever looking to learn. And then of course Gladwell says, without a hint of irony, "And that's how we learned this new solid fact, which just so happens to fit my narrative." He's not interested in looking deeper, he's interested in his own book. Which requires, by the very nature of the subject, that he make some huge assumptions. A scientist would call these assumptions "hypotheses" and test them (in this case, likely to no satisfactory conclusion), but he is not a scientist, and not even a journalist.

He is a bullshitter. Coincidentally, because someone started a thread here about colorful words having to do with "shit", I pulled out Harry Frankfurt's little book On Bullshit last night and thumbed through it. His definition fits Gladwell like a glove. Gladwell is not a liar, because a liar believes he knows what the truth is, and acts in opposition to it. In this way, he respects at least that the truth is of consequence. Gladwell does not seem to care whether or not what he says is true, as long as it fits into the story he's making up about human behavior. Most of his hard facts are true, names and dates, studies conducted and their findings, but they are still bullshit because it does not MATTER to him whether they are true. They are used in service of his own motive, quite apart from truth or genuine curiosity.

His motive? I think he wants to sound smart and impressive. (Hey, don't bullshit a bullshitter.) The book is party conversation. Don't read it unless you think Malcolm Gladwell is cute and you think you might want to date him.

I know, I know, tl;dr

It's the same problem I have with evolutionary biology.

psychology, obv. Evolutionary biology is fine by me.

you could have just said this

He is a bullshitter.

I have had a lot of caffeine.

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.

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, May 12, 2009 2:50 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

So the desire to avoid a "win-at-all-costs" mentality is a "bogus sportsmanship ground"?

I've looked in vain for a Gladwell substitute, and there really isn't anyone writing in the same vein who doesn't bullshit and isn't boring (especially a lot of the source material Gladwell uses -- the one for his latest book is fantastically boring.) I mean, there's Oliver Sacks, but I get the sense he deploys narrative BS, too. Also, that movie Awakenings was shit.

I'm convinced that there is no entertaining way to write about these subjects without the lubricant of BS, just like documentaries are often edited and cut deceptively to heighten drama and arcs that might not really be there.

re: 'the desire to avoid a "win-at-all-costs" mentality is a "bogus sportsmanship ground"?'
It's bogus because the Goliaths are complaining about this tactic because they started losing because of it, I'm guessing. That's the chronology suggested by the article. Maybe it's BS.

I've looked in vain for a Gladwell substitute, and there really isn't anyone writing in the same vein who doesn't bullshit and isn't boring (

well yeah the reason hes got this niche is bcuz hes basically doing somewhat reductive/somewhat useful distilling of the kinds of discussions happening in academic journals et al

"So the desire to avoid a "win-at-all-costs" mentality is a "bogus sportsmanship ground"?"

Using a full court press /= win at all costs anyway. Sending your boyfriend to kneecap your rival with a tire-iron is "win-at-all-costs". The press is part of the game.

I've looked in vain for a Gladwell substitute, and there really isn't anyone writing in the same vein who doesn't bullshit and isn't boring (especially a lot of the source material Gladwell uses -- the one for his latest book is fantastically boring.) I mean, there's Oliver Sacks, but I get the sense he deploys narrative BS, too. Also, that movie Awakenings was shit.

I'm convinced that there is no entertaining way to write about these subjects without the lubricant of BS, just like documentaries are often edited and cut deceptively to heighten drama and arcs that might not really be there.

re: 'the desire to avoid a "win-at-all-costs" mentality is a "bogus sportsmanship ground"?'
It's bogus because the Goliaths are complaining about this tactic because they started losing because of it, I'm guessing. That's the chronology suggested by the article. Maybe it's BS.

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, July 14, 2009 5:02 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so you'd like oliver sacks' writing more if a movie made 20 years ago was better?

I wouldn't deny hardly any of what you say, but I'd say a lot depends on how important you think that is. Personally I don't think they are important, because what I'm looking for from him is: i) a plausible argument, and ii) great storytelling. The flaws don't matter because I kind of know I'm getting an unrigorous work and I'm pretty confident that I can see through it - I don't take it all that seriously and I can take what I need from it and enjoy the ride. If I want a scientific study of this stuff, I could read a sociology journal, but I'm not going to do that because primarily I want to be entertained. Could a single work do both? In theory yes, but I suspect the detail and footnotes needed to make such a work bombproof would seriously inhibit readability for the layman. When I'm a layman, I'll take the pop version every time, and let the experts do the dismantling.

I'd take issue with him being a bullshitter, however. To me that's someone trying to hoodwink me, using all sorts of irrelevancies to intimidate me into according him and his views more deference than they deserve. Gladwell isn't that to me, he's honest about his value and I feel like I can engage with it on my terms. Noam Chomsky, that's a bullshitter.

I like Chomsky.

Gladwell is the world's most prominent dilettante.