Gladwell is a wonderfully gifted writer who has a fantastic talent for weaving engaging narratives. Unfortunately, when it comes to science, this is NOT a good

Gladwell is a wonderfully gifted writer who has a fantastic talent for weaving engaging narratives. Unfortunately, when it comes to science, this is NOT a good thing. Scientific discoveries don't follow narratives: narratives are things we impose post-facto to make it easier to tell an engaging story. For example, the 10,000 hour rule makes for a nice story about effort, and Gladwell brings up a lot of examples: of course, if you look at the meta analysis, it turns out that it's completely wrong: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not... The problem with having a nice narrative is that it's too tempting to fit facts into your story for the sake of having a clean, linear narrative. If you were to write an honest book about the latest findings in social psychology, it would spend several chapters discussing statistical power and meta analysis, it would be incredibly cautious, and it would be full of results which are contradictory. The only thing worse than social psychology in this regard is business school books. The numbers are even smaller, the tendency to pursue narratives even bigger, and the professors get paid a lot more.