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Entertaining writing, maybe, but certainly not good/education writing. And certainly not good research. Side note: He may have solid research, but it doesn't c

• kenjackson 16y ago
  And to be frank, most research isn't "good research" either. With that said, much of what he's doing is constructing a framework and then building into it. This is actually similar to what is done in a lot of social science research. And Gladwell, often does it much better, even from a purely academic perspective. The main issue is that millions of people read and scrutinize Gladwell. No one reads "A Critique of 12th Century Eastern European Poetry and the Relationship to Subsurface Climate Volatility".
• kurtosis 16y ago
  Perhaps the sad fact is that being entertaining and being accurate are conflicting goals. Who wants to listen to a complex explanation for why the "fifteen minutes of videotaped conversation" method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman )for predicting the likelihood of divorce is flawed due to overfitting issues (see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/03/shooting_down_b.html http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010... for details) Gladwell doesn't let complex facts get in the way of a good story.
• statictype 16y ago
  It's not meant to be research. If it were, wouldn't it be published in an academic journal?