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To some extent you're right and I see your point, but this is also a false dichotomy. Gladwell can be whatever he wants to be. He may be rooted in science, but

To some extent you're right and I see your point, but this is also a false dichotomy. Gladwell can be whatever he wants to be. He may be rooted in science, but let's be honest, 10,000 is a fairly arbitrary number. If the world couldn't figure out that 10,000 hours wasn't scientific, we may have a larger problem. I'm more mentally exhausted by the endlessness of pure contrarianism on the Internet. It gets worse and worse with each year and I'm losing my enjoyment of social communities.

Alex3917 10y ago
> I'm more mentally exhausted by the endlessness of pure contrarianism on the Internet. This is because 'skeptic' content is by far the most cost effective to produce. You're piggy backing off someone else's fame, and the only demand you're making of your readers is that they not read the original source material for themselves, which isn't exactly a difficult sell.
argonaut 10y ago
I think that perspective of exhaustion with contrarianism is part of the problem. There an excellent quote, which is "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." It is really really easy for someone to write some BS (online or in print). Books and newspapers do it routinely. Blogs do it every day. And of course people on online forums do it every second. Unless you just write "You're wrong," it usually takes a lot more effort, volume, and words to refute the BS. So yes, it is often intellectually easier for people to be contrarian, but only because there is so much BS out there to refute. And it still takes more effort and volume to do so.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Sadly, I've found myself doing this https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ more often than I would like.
eyelidlessness 10y ago
> I'm more mentally exhausted by the endlessness of pure contrarianism on the Internet. It gets worse and worse with each year and I'm losing my enjoyment of social communities. Let me be the first to say I agree. And I'm a contrarian! It just can't be possible that every discrepancy deserves the effort to refute and correct, and we're biologically trained to approximate as a matter of priority. It took me 9987 hours to learn that.

Alex3917 10y ago

> I'm more mentally exhausted by the endlessness of pure contrarianism on the Internet. This is because 'skeptic' content is by far the most cost effective to produce. You're piggy backing off someone else's fame, and the only demand you're making of your readers is that they not read the original source material for themselves, which isn't exactly a difficult sell.

argonaut 10y ago

I think that perspective of exhaustion with contrarianism is part of the problem. There an excellent quote, which is "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." It is really really easy for someone to write some BS (online or in print). Books and newspapers do it routinely. Blogs do it every day. And of course people on online forums do it every second. Unless you just write "You're wrong," it usually takes a lot more effort, volume, and words to refute the BS. So yes, it is often intellectually easier for people to be contrarian, but only because there is so much BS out there to refute. And it still takes more effort and volume to do so.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Sadly, I've found myself doing this https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ more often than I would like.

eyelidlessness 10y ago

> I'm more mentally exhausted by the endlessness of pure contrarianism on the Internet. It gets worse and worse with each year and I'm losing my enjoyment of social communities. Let me be the first to say I agree. And I'm a contrarian! It just can't be possible that every discrepancy deserves the effort to refute and correct, and we're biologically trained to approximate as a matter of priority. It took me 9987 hours to learn that.