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.

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

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.

Gladwell bullshits about bullshitting.

Although that Moth story is hilarious, if you listen to him deliver it.

"so you'd like oliver sacks' writing more if a movie made 20 years ago was better?"
The movie felt icky and exploitive, and that ickiness retroactively tainted the book. It is a dark, malevolent prism!

If Moneyball the movie portrays Billy Beane as a slobbering OCD savant, I might just like the book a bit less.
Oh yeah wasn't Michael Lewis unmasked as a BSer w/r/t Iceland or something?

xp Yeah but it not being true takes all the wind out of it.

Gladwell's articles always come off to me like "I just finished reading about fishing, which if you think about it, is one of the few single-minded pursuits, so I asked a neurologist about indirect concentration and its connection to tasks, which Maori tribesmen are actually really good at.."

It's all about finding something novel, or something that is so completely un-novel that you wouldn't normally use it as a data point, and then conjecturing around that while throwing in some cushy quotes.

yeah it's probably like reading a goddamn 300 page book composed of ilx posts

Gladwell's books could use more animated GIFs.

"I like Chomsky."

what's his funnest book? I've been meaning to read some but they all look pretty dry.

http://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Reader-Noam/dp/0394751736

Steven Pinker:

Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

^That link reads like an Arts and Letters Daily blurb!

hard to argue with though.
i find gladwell entertaining but hard to take seriously, he's always looking for some neat simple solution.

exactly

Ultimate nerd battle: Steven Pinker vs. Malcolm Gladwell.

The original New Yorker article actually spelled "eigenvalue" correctly:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IgonValue2.png

i was wondering abt that! thought it was weird the fact checkers wouldnt have caught it

Yeah, it suggests that for the book, Gladwell just put in his pre-copyedited draft. But why?

How do we know the misspelling originated in Gladwell's draft? Couldn't it have been inserted into the book version by some over-eager spell-check program or sloppy proofreader?

it's wrong on his website

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

Oh, well, I guess that's pretty damning then. Or would be if anyone really cared whether or not Gladwell knows what an "eigenvalue" is.

http://velvetpenguin.blog.friendster.com/files/egon.jpg
Maybe he means egon value

I still think this is the essential Gladwell profile:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-13/the-love-guru/

Gladwell's response to Pinker:

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/11/pinker-on-what-the-dog-saw.html

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell

Interesting, grumpy essay in the latest New Yorker about why social-media "activism" is a pisspoor substitute for real, risk-inviting activism. More like a long newspaper column than his usual research-heavy pieces - the closest you can get to a rant while still meeting New Yorker style guide, I'd say. But hard to argue with. Just a shame he didn't mention the fucking twibbon - the acme of meaningless protest.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Have we covered this on another thread? Apologies if so.

why social-media "activism" is a pisspoor substitute for real, risk-inviting activism

has anyone ever said any different? i didnt even bother reading this article because i couldnt really understand why it had been written

i like this piece bcuz usually i see him advocating in 'chill out, bros' kinda rhetoric & it was nice to see him a lil :-( tense

Hey, I met Lois "Six Degrees" Weisberg last night.

The Tweaker
Steve Jobs and the nature of innovation.
by Malcolm Gladwell

Didn't he just write a piece on basically that (Xerox and PARC) a couple of months ago?

The Tweaker
Steve Jobs and the nature of innovation (meth amphetamine).
by Malcolm Gladwell

imagine he pulled a few all nighters to get that piece out the door asap

piece is an extended metaphor comparing SJ to other guys who stayed up all night in their garage perfecting a new product

http://www.applegazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/jobs82.jpg

where is all my shit

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/bank-of-america-hired-malcolm-gladwell.html

Steven Pinker writes that Gladwell is a writer of "many gifts... He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves."[46]

an intriguing amalgamation of david brooks and xhuxk eddy

gladwell is all lolz until he writes abt something you know http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/getting_steve_jobs_wrong

mark ames gunnin for u

http://shameproject.com/

...and yasha levine, who is another exiled alum i think

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-into-the-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist.html

didn't know any of this!

s.h.a.m.e. on u malcolm gladwell

theres some good stuff in there, itd be cool if they didnt use so much breathless conspiracy type logic all over the place tho, also a lil more context as far as how wide spread these types of behavior are

never read a gladwell tome myself; it's revealing enough to know that he was marinated in the same rightwing PR bootcamps that produced much more downmarket fox/radio/regnery types

gladwell is generally k a dubious character imho (although the s.h.a.m.e. people could def take some pointers from him as far as the efficiency of his prose) but im a lil bit skeptical of the guilt by association narrative they present here, couldnt you just as easily tell a young struggling writer attempts to break into industry story, and its not like they present a comprehensive biography of his formative journalism years so we can judge what % corrupt his upbringing was, also as far as his crimes in his present day media superstar manifestation there are like two sentences shown as proof of his utter debasement, i mean maybe theres more idk, i tend to think of his transgression as being more in the 'lightweight contrarian' tradition

it's a great piece if you're already predisposed to disliking gladwell, but i can't imagine it convincing any of his legion of fans

i dislike him, but i didnt think it was great, tho it did have some interesting facts

not only does he have an aesthetic style and fanbase that rankle me, but here's a bunch of evidence that show he's legit a bad human being!

1. he associates w/bill simmons

2. he wants our children to smoke cigarettes

The only MG book I've read was What the Dog Saw. It was obvious to me that he was not a reporter so much as an advocate, who began each piece with an pre-established thesis and proceeded to argue that this thesis was essentially the 'correct' way of thinking about the subject. Which is fine, in that the facts he gives most likely are genuine facts and they do support his conclusion, but you can be very certain that whatever he is presenting to you is carefully filtered to support his point of view and his rhetoric will enforce a tone of certainty that probably is not justified.

So, 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.

That's a nice way of reducing it, but when you get to that point, why even read what he writes?

Also re: guilt by association, the dude wrote a scare article where he advocates for people using a deadly product to save a government program. Imagine Swift writing A Modest Proposal with a straight face while on the dole of a human-meat-grinder company. How is his worst crime being a contrarian? Something serious needs to be missing in you to be able to write shit like that.

when you get to that point, why even read what he writes?

You'll notice I only ever read the one book. After that, I stopped. I prefer a reporter who trusts me enough to make up my own mind, when presented with the relevent facts. Gladwell doesn't. He stacks the deck in favor of one conclusion.

maybe the big problem with malcolm gladwell is that even if you like or are impressed by something you read in malcolm gladwell, when you try to tell anyone else about it all you can do is helplessly repeat what malcolm gladwell said and what malcolm gladwell said it meant, because like aimless says nothing else has been provided; there is not a lot of room to move or to grow your own ideas or to have fun engaging w/ him as a public intellectual and there is a chilly clarity to his pictures of things and an absence of contradiction that is suspicious regardless of who pays his bills. then because malcolm gladwell is so super popular you end up w/ this nightmare society where everyone's standing around in bars saying things malcolm gladwell thinks to each other. that's how you really know he's a propagandist.

Yeah, it's that aspect that annoyed me the most about his writing (without being able to put a finger on it) and I could rarely make it through anything he's written. Maybe people like being told what to think... independent thought is hard and leads people to the meaninglessness of life which can be scary. On a side note, I would love to meet Gladwell at a party just so I could flick a burning cigarette in his afro and watch it erupt in foul-smelling flames.

"the notorious National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization with ties to the tobacco industry and bankrolled by the biggest names in right-wing corporate propaganda funding"

Seriously? I can see why some people don't like Gladwell but that article is 95% hyperventilation: "OMG he quoted a research study in an article and that same research study was later found in the cabinet of a Philip Morris executive!"

Something serious needs to be missing in you to be able to write shit like that.

― Spectrum, Thursday, June 7, 2012 12:42 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:0

even if you like or are impressed by something you read in malcolm gladwell, when you try to tell anyone else about it all you can do is helplessly repeat what malcolm gladwell said and what malcolm gladwell said it meant

I don't think this is true at all -- one thing that's good about Gladwell (and other writers of roughly the same type like jonah lehrer, atul gawande, etc.) is that a lot of their pieces are driven not by "here's something a cabdriver said to me and what I think it means" but by academic research, which means that you can look at the papers yourself, and compare what they say with what Gladwell says they say. The actual research usually has tons of interesting stuff in it, only one little piece of which was used by Gladwell. I sort of think of that as Gladwell's purpose; he's not there to say "this is how it is," he's there to say "you don't just have to scratch your chin and call it as you see it, there are actually people around the world trying to answer interesting questions empirically and I'm here to give you a guide to some small part of that work."

Also re: guilt by association, the dude wrote a scare article where he advocates for people using a deadly product to save a government program.

Seems to me he wrote an article that's been written a thousand times in other contexts, which is to say that our ever-increasing ability to prolong life creates gigantic public financial expense. Those articles aren't saying "Kill Granny," they're saying "We have to take increasing lifespan into account when making fiscal plans." It's not exactly false that states drastically underestimated how much money they were going to need to fund pensions.

That's not in the article, and doesn't even make sense w/i the logic of the subject ... cessation of a life-shortening activity is what would cause the burden, not the additional extension of peoples lives in addition to the cessation. but w/e, I just like bashing dopey snake oil salesmen and their odd followers.

here's the article

That article says exactly what I said it said, right down to every single quote being a variation on "obviously we should keep working extremely hard to prevent smoking even though it costs money to do so."

I hope you don't really believe that.

Nevermind, a little switch-up ... thought you were referring to "ever-increasing ability to prolong life", which is usually about health advances as opposed to something like smoking. Second half of new comment, well yeah, that's what it's saying, but what's the effect of the article? It seems to take out one element of a cost-benefit analysis re: quitting smoking, and the way it's framed, that eliminated benefit is center stage as opposed to the benefits.

A frame is chosen consciously. It could have been benefit of quitting, harm of quitting, benefit of quitting. Much sunnier than harm of quitting, benefit of quitting, harm of quitting. This is totally hamfisted time killing shit, btw.

I agree with you (re timekillingness) and will only say that yeah, I really do believe what I say; I am a pretty hardcore anti-smoker and I found nothing to object to in that article. I certainly don't see it as the kind of thing tobacco companies would relish -- their spin has always been "our product isn't that likely to kill you and anyway IT SHOULD BE YOUR CHOICE," not "Our lethal product kills millions of Americans and passes the savings along to you!"

In the same way that a political campaign tries a variety of attacks on its opponent, in the hope that each attack will split off a few extra voters who were not touched by earlier appeals, any argument that tends to portray smoking as having benefits or quitting as having drawbacks will be welcomed by tobacco companies, even if they don't officially say it themselves. Political campaigns also use proxies for most of their less attractive attacks.

i am pretty pro malcolm gladwell but uhmmmmmm http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2012/10/video-malcolm-gladwell-on-the-civil-rights-movement.html

i wonder how photography figures into his theory of strong connections in revolutions

why would someone be pro gladwell? is it that you appreciate the artistry and manipulation of his storytelling?

Because his prose is good and he tends to report on interesting social science research with reasonably good fidelity to the source material. Isn't that enough? It already puts him in the top 5% of widely syndicated writers.

were that true then yes

i stand by that claim

"Why Come Black Guys Score Touchdown and White Man Kick The Field Goals" by Malcolm Gladwell

Lol

http://askakorean.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html

i feel like my defense of malcolm gladwell in this thread is tainted by my parenthetical defense of jonah lehrer

gladwell repsonds

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-reponse-to.html

haha i was rereading those slightly overheated exposes upthread and this excerpt from philip morris' list of "third-party messengers" made me lol:

Milton Friedman
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

Mike Fumento
Syndicated Journalist

John Fund
Editorial Page Writer
The Wall Street Journal

Penn Gillette
magician

ask a korean responds to gladwell's response

http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/my-thoughts-on-gladwells-response.html

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/david-and-goliath/ece560b4f11c7268bfa7b6258f6627fcd3110765/

Whatever you may think about Malcolm Gladwell, Yasha Levine is much worse.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/how-i-rediscovered-faith

Malcolm Gladwell's medical thriller project has reached a major tipping point: Fox has given The Cure a pilot order.

The official logline: "A provocative character-driven medical thriller about a young, impulsive African American neurologist who decides to take the law into her own hands in the cause of tackling a deadly disease."

I happen to have a neurologist right here.

"I read your script. You know nothing of my work. How you ever got to write a medical thriller is totally amazing."

https://theawl.com/what-if-these-ted-talks-were-horribly-unspeakably-wrong-c4b94e2c4824#.b0qkka6ag

“Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.”
Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk on Ragu’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce is the ultimate in TED’s inspirational contrarianism. There isn’t just one type of spaghetti sauce; there are hundreds. What you think you know about the most mundane thing isn’t really true; it’s the complete opposite. And the reality will amaze you.
His ability to spin that yarn is quite fascinating once you realize that this talk is really just about how there are different types of spaghetti sauce, something anybody with the most basic familiarity with Italian cooking might comprehend. It’s not about how marketing companies desperately try to pander to consumers in any way they can because they have no understanding of what connotes a good product. It’s about how Ragu uses horizontal segmentation to underscore how adept the marketing world is at grasping these concepts and then turning them into products like Ragu Zesty. Pure genius.
Gladwell’s marketing mysticism may not be on the same diabolical level as injecting massive amounts of sulfuric gas into the sky, but his prophetic insight into the nature of condiments particularly irks me because I vividly remember reading his New Yorker story on mustard, spaghetti sauce and ketchup that this talk was based on. In it, he details how Heinz perfected their recipe to the point that no other brand can compete. Their recipe of high fructose corn syrup and tomato paste is the best possible ketchup. Somehow tomato sauce can have an infinite spectrum of flavor but ketchup, which is pretty much just tomato sauce, has a platonic ideal. How can this be?

wait but that makes total sense. if there's many flavors of spaghetti sauce that makes it hard to say that one is better than another bc maybe they just appeal to different tastes. but if there's really only one kind of ketchup it should be easier to figure out which ones is the most ideal acc to respondents. i mean the whole thing is dumb as fuck but not bc of this partic quibble.

Well, that seems a little circular. Anyway it wasn't the main thing I was posting it for.

So basically his formula is (1) take commonsense thing that everyone already knows (2) make it sound like it actually goes against the "conventional wisdom," (3) extrapolate overbroadly from the phenomenon (4) assign pseudoscientific terms to thing (5) audience now feels both that it is smart and that it has learned something

any particular recent example?

I just got really irritated by his drawn out This American Life bit on the underhanded freethrow.

Like why do you think more people don't shoot that way? Manly pride, duh. But he takes about 15 minutes to get there, and goes through this not entirely relevant detour on how people think behavior in crowds is due to "mob mentality" but it's actually due to people having "thresholds" (based on some sociologist's work) for how many other people need to do something before you feel ok doing it. In the very end of the bit, we finally get to the obvious point that players don't shoot underhanded because it's embarrassing to do it, and this is tied in, perhaps dubiously, to the idea of the "threshhold" -- Rick Barry had a "low threshhold" (i.e. didn't care what other people thought), whereas most players have "high threshholds" (i.e. they feel like sissies if they shoot underhanded, but I guess presumably would shoot underhanded if everyone else did it?).

rereading thread: still think philip morris' 90s contact sheet for disseminating "third-party messages" about counterintuitive cigarette facts (also feat. gladwell) is the lolest

Milton Friedman
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

Mike Fumento
Syndicated Journalist

John Fund
Editorial Page Writer
The Wall Street Journal

Penn Gillette
magician

and reviewing the original document i also liked this one:

Ed Crane
President
Cato Institute
(note: expertise in liberty, freedom)

xp that piece was insanely stupid... he keeps setting it up for some big reveal but nope it's just more Captain Obvious bullshit for like 30 minutes.

I don't think he's very accustomed to having people disagree with him either. Last night on Bill Simmons' new show, Mark Cuban pretty well cleaned his clock regarding public financing of sports arenas. I think Cuban's wrong but Gladwell didn't seem to have anything more than a tiny handful of talking points to push back against him.

My Gladwell tipping point (to coin a phrase) came with his way back when New Yorker piece on pit bulls and why they are so disproportionately feared. iirc he doesn't make a distinction between dog bites and, I dunno, fatally getting your throat ripped out by a notoriously strong dog often bred to be aggressive. I want to say he also, in pursuit of a big picture, ignores or discards stats that pit bulls are overwhelmingly the most dangerous dog breed, in terms of attacks and fatalities. But, you know, it makes you think.

*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.

Good analysis of why Gladwell is such a hack:
https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/

tracks with this comment in the recent guardian interview - he just doesn't give a shit:

His books may be wildly popular, but critics have been saying the same things about Gladwell for 25 years: that he relies too heavily on cherrypicked anecdotes, that his arguments are simplistic or obvious or both. “It’s been a long time since I’ve taken those comments seriously, if I ever did. A review is one person’s opinion,” Gladwell says.

This WaPo review is pretty relentless:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/10/01/malcolm-gladwell-revenge-tipping-point-review/

Nevertheless, critics should find new solace in the revised theory of social change on offer in “Revenge”: Gladwell is no disease we are resigned to suffer through. We are the ones responsible for the Malcolm Gladwell contagion that surrounds us — and that means we can work to stop its spread.

yeah written by the same guy who wrote the newsletter I linked

Ha, I didn't even realize that was the same guy from your link. Dear Culture/Ghost/substack/whatever platform that is: maybe try showing the name of the author of the published piece? A byline or something?

You're asking the specific writer to put his name to the forefront. Ghost is a blog/publishing framework that a lot of people are using in a way similar to substack. If you click on the link to the landing page, culture is... W. David Marx's newsletter.

From that Ghost link this bit stopped me from going further.

"I've read The Tipping Point three times. It's a fun book."

it is fun, it's also complete fluff

there's a reason people kept recommending it, and if you don't think critically about the anecdotes that are supposed to lead toward his pre-picked conclusions the surface level insights are very "hmm, makes u think" although not very deeply

Gladwell is the Jordan Peterson of the NPR set. An intellectually bankrupt grifter who’s a degree enough smarter than his audience that he can keep them fooled.

Gladwell seems like a relic of that era of slatepitch journalism that was more about "provoking thought" and "challenging assumptions" than getting anything right. Of course that stuff is still popular in some quarters.

there's definitely a germ of the type of thought that commentators in the more "rational" liberal space like to ascribe as a right-wing mindset. it's not magical thinking per se, it's the tendency to accept or create narratives that confirm your own biases. things being true in spirit, not in fact, etc. you might call it a vibes-based ontology

absolutely not limited to the right wing, although gladwell has been more than happy to act like his arguments are rationalizations based on anecdotal facts and so-called common sense in support of power

Gladwell is the Jordan Peterson of the NPR set. An intellectually bankrupt grifter who’s a degree enough smarter than his audience that he can keep them fooled.

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante), Thursday, October 3, 2024 8:27 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

big talk coming from a hardcore dilettante

In half-hearted Gladwellian defense of Gladwell, I feel like the Freakanomics duo has aged much worse than Gladwell by bringing the imprimatur of a certified expert into the mix -- the criticism that Gladwell is an unrigorous gadfly and is just spitballing works in his favor.

Gladwell's five-hour audiobook interviewing Paul Simon is good. Of course he has a thesis: that growing up in Queens influences his approach to music genres.

Funny timing with today's purple (which I got first, but after a mistake): [Hidden text. Tap to view].

Gladwell is the Jordan Peterson of the NPR set. An intellectually bankrupt grifter who’s a degree enough smarter than his audience that he can keep them fooled.

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante), Thursday, October 3, 2024 8:27 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

big talk coming from a hardcore dilettante

^ignore Connections prefix there… didn’t clear draft before posting!

If you click on the link to the landing page, culture is... W. David Marx's newsletter.

Aha! I had no idea.

My wife said a lot of her co-workers were recommending the Tom Petty "Wildflowers" episode with Rick Rubin on that music podcast Gladwell (inexplicably?) co-hosts. I thought it was specific enough a recommendation (why that episode? why now?) that even though I don't care that much about what Rubin has to say, let alone Gladwell, I gave it a listen. I made it as far as Gladwell talking about "I Won't Back Down" becoming a sporting event anthem because of the driving production or something similarly dumb, and Rubin calmly responds that it's probably popular at sporting events mostly because it's called "I Won't Back Down" and the chorus goes "I won't back down."

ok, thanks for listening that far because that anecdote's hilarious

lmao

serious lolz here

Good essay...
https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/

So after thinking about Gladwell for months, I finally cracked why his books read as they do: His entire writing process is in bad faith. This becomes very clear in listening to him when on the defensive. Nonfiction writers all face criticisms, and the normal human response is to stand by one's own words, perhaps with some clarification or counter-argument. (And when wrong, to admit it.) When Gladwell faces critique, he immediately leans into a laundry list of excuses for why he can't possibly be expected to get it right.

...

Then, finally, in that very same Times interview, Gladwell provides the Rosetta Stone for understanding him: “I hold ideas very loosely, and I think it’s important for people who write about ideas to remind their readers to hold their ideas loosely.” Gladwell writes like someone who doesn't care about being correct because he doesn't care about being correct! His spitballs are truly spitballs, and he doesn't care where they land. This explains why he doesn’t spend any time bolstering or battle-testing his theories, because it's like souping up the engine of a rental car you're about to drive off a cliff

this guy sucks

"Author and essayist Malcolm Gladwell has claimed he was previously 'cowed' into accepting transgender women in women’s sports, declaring on a podcast this week that trans women 'have no place' competing against their cisgender peers."
https://www.them.us/story/malcolm-gladwell-trans-athletes-sports

what a 2020 he had

Once celebrated for his since-debunked '"10,000 hour rule' of skill mastery, the 63-year-old Gladwell has become a more controversial figure over time. In early 2020, Gladwell opined that Penn State should restore a statue of Joe Paterno, the football coach who was dismissed for concealing sexual abuse allegations made against former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Later that same year, Gladwell joined more than 150 other writers — including J.K. Rowling and Andrew Sullivan — in signing a widely derided open letter in Harper’s magazine to decry “illiberalism” and “intolerance of opposing views” (i.e., so-called “cancel culture”). That December, Gladwell also declared that he “couldn’t find any intellectual justification” for The New Yorker’s firing of Jeffrey Toobin, who was found to have masturbated on a Zoom video call between co-workers and staff at the radio station WNYC.

10,000 Hours of Toobin’

Andrew Sullivan, that’s a name I blessedly haven’t read in a long time.

this dude was totally on Epstein’s plane, right?

He totally was: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jeffrey-epstein-high-society-contacts.html

You need to spend 10,000 hours on Epstein's plane to gain true expertise on the subject.

I always get this dickhead mixed up with Steven Pinker, who also is on the list of VIP Lolita Express passengers!

I could absolutely see Gladwell “well, actually…” all over age of consent laws and when a woman is biologically ready to mate and so on and so forth.