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"rhetoric to deceive" He asks questions with many possible answers. He leads to one specific answer. He picks his favorite and dresses it up. the difference w
by jfoutz 5y ago
"rhetoric to deceive"
He asks questions with many possible answers. He leads to one specific answer. He picks his favorite and dresses it up.
the difference would be, he knew for a fact that Bob murdered Alice. Saw it with his own eyes. He doesn't write books about how Bob couldn't possibly have killed Alice, it must have been Charlie.
He picks a favorite, says that's a good answer - rhetoric. I don't think he's leading people to an answer he believes to be wrong. He's not lying.
- Ericson2314 5y agoThe book review cites much concrete evidence --- done by actual scholars doing the tedious work of digging through "boring" archives --- undermining Gladwell's conclusions. Yes, there are many conclusions to draw about these sorts of things, but getting facts wrong and omitting other information does not for a valid interpretation make. He's a sophist storyteller.
- groby_b 5y agoYou don't get to claim an unproven alternate science just because it's a good story unless you're in the Fiction aisle. Gladwell would like to be in the non-fiction aisle, and he really utterly fails there. He's "not lying" only in the sense that he spouts completely uninformed opinion. He knows that he does that, because it's not like he hasn't been told repeatedly. He continues anyways. At that point, the line to flim-flam becomes tenuously thin.