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I just read Outliers yesterday, conveniently enough, so the chapter is fresh on my mind. While Greenspun certainly refutes a thesis quite effectively, I don't t
by Elepsis 17y ago
I just read Outliers yesterday, conveniently enough, so the chapter is fresh on my mind. While Greenspun certainly refutes a thesis quite effectively, I don't think it's actually the thesis of the chapter he's discussing.
First of all, Gladwell does not at any point claim that American or Canadian pilots are "the best" due to the power distance index--in fact, he doesn't claim that at all. If you look at the book, the U.S. has the fifth-lowest index (lower being "better" for these purposes), behind New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Ireland, and he never says anything in the chapter that even implies that American pilots are best.
Nor does he say anywhere that the power distance index is the primary cause of plane crashes. Indeed, he explicitly says that any accident is caused by 6-7 small mistakes building on one another without being caught--something that could quite possibly be caused by inexperience, as Greenspun notes--but which can be exacerbated by two people in the cockpit unable to communicate in a direct way.
So while I think the article is a useful and interesting theory about differences in rates of crashes (though it should be noted that U.S. airlines do not have an overwhelmingly better safety record than, say, major European ones [1]), it is ultimately another in a series of "hey, let me overgeneralize what Malcolm Gladwell is saying and back it up with minor factual gaffes I found in the book" articles.
[1] http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
- barnaby 17y agoI read it several months ago and had the same reaction to this article. Thank you for confirming. I don't recall that chapter being about ethnocentrism or even about how to fly planes, but rather about power dynamics, and reverence versus the "entitlement" that he talks about elsewhere in the book.
- jseliger 17y agoI was just going to post something to this effect: Greenspun is busily refuting a claim that Gladwell never makes, which is that American pilots are somehow better, or that they're better because they have more experience. In fact, IIRC, Gladwell takes pains to point out that some of the South Korea crashes had very senior pilots flying. Gladwell's larger point is that a) modern crashes are composed of a large number of crashes on planes and that b) cultural inhibition of direct communication can contribute to crashes to the extent that a more junior position feels unable to speak directly to the pilot. I have my reservations about Gladwell, as described here: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink , but the pilot chapter isn't among his weaker so far as I can tell.
- jseliger 17y agoI was just going to post something to this effect: Greenspun is busily refuting a claim that Gladwell never makes, which is that American pilots are somehow better, or that they're better because they have more experience. In fact, IIRC, Gladwell takes pains to point out that some of the South Korea crashes had very senior pilots flying. Gladwell's larger point is that a) modern crashes are composed of a large number of crashes on planes and that b) cultural inhibition of direct communication can contribute to crashes to the extent that a more junior position feels unable to speak directly to the pilot. I have my reservations about Gladwell, as described here: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink , but the pilot chapter isn't among his weaker so far as I can tell.
- pgreenspun 17y agoGladwell does not explicitly say that American pilots are the best. However, he does use the U.S. major airline safety record as the standard (to which the cited foreign carriers fail to rise). U.S. major airlines conduct most of their operations with U.S. and Canadian pilots at U.S. and Canadian airports. The error chain leading up to an accident is an old concept. The key to preventing accidents is to break the chain, which is typically best done by a pilot who has a lot of extra situational awareness. Sadly, situational awareness mostly comes with experience, so educating a 150-hour pilot about the error chain is not going to enable him or her to deal with a challenging situation as well as a 5000-hour pilot.