6 ms·

The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

71 points by astrec 18y ago

theoneill 18y ago
I've learned a lot more from reading Gladwell than Orlowski. In fact, I can't think of anything I've learned from reading Orlowski.
Alex3917 18y ago
This article is kind of amusing, but it's clear the author didn't actually read Gladwell's newest book. While in general I think it'd be fair to describe Gladwell's writing as intellectual comfort food, Outliers is pretty good. The last chapter on KIPP was pretty dubious, but not in a way that detracted from the thesis.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  It was a lot better than I thought it'd be, and certainly better than Blink, but Gladwell seems to have this habit of using multiple anecdotes as data, which really bugs me. It's especially dangerous because he shifts between using empirical analysis to anecdotal-based logic. I hope he doesn't turn in to Seth Godin.
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    When Gladwell uses anecdotes he's not using them as data, but rather to give the facts an emotional valence.
    - fallentimes 18y ago
      But then he jumps to conclusions based on them and so do his readers. A counter viewpoint: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  I think The Register can be hilarious. I found that about a 6 out of 10, 1 being "oh my god that's so bad my ears are bleeding!" and 10 being "oh my god I laughed up a lung!". It just wasn't funny and like hell I'm reading like 6 printed pages worth of mildly amusing drivel. Gladwell undoubtedly isn't the greatest scientific writer, he just points out that we have to think about things more than we do. The message I got was that on one hand organizations like the military don't act fast enough, while police officers are encouraged to think so fast that they stop reevaluating the situation.
- trominos 18y ago
  Dunno about that. I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and that violinists who have a chance to become virtuosos have uniformly practiced about 10000 hours, while the merely "good" ones have practiced about 8000 hours and the bad ones have practiced 4000 hours. (Incidentally, I don't really believe the second one -- because it implies that all kinds "effortful practice" are exactly as efficient as one another.) I'm not saying that there weren't others, just that I can't remember them. I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes, though, and certainly I think anecdotes (and boilerplate) made up at least 80% of those first seven chapters. Plus his anecdotes kind of sucked. The Beatles prove the 10000 hour rule? Okay, I guess. Bill Joy? I don't really think so. Bill Gates? Hell no.
  - andreyf 18y ago
    I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information... I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes... Which is precisely why authors use "statistically irrelevant" anecdotes. Because they help you emotionally connect to the material and remember it better.
dcminter 18y ago
Hmm. I can spot an Orlowski article from the title these days; he's made something of a career of detracting from popular organisations (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) and persons. I dislike the approach partly from a distaste for the tabloid savaging of the successful but mostly because it seems to lead to rather thin regurgitations of existing critiques. I believe that is the case with this article.
- DenisM 18y ago
  Orlowski is the sole reason I unsubscribed from the Register. I hope he will not be frequent here.
axod 18y ago
It deserves an upmod simply for using the excellent word "plebs".
- ksvs 18y ago
  It's an amusing word, but a bad sign when one uses it.
  - axod 18y ago
    Agreed... It's a dull sunday - made me chuckle.
sharkfish 18y ago
I hate rants with misspellings. One I found was "breaktaking". I'm sure he meant "breathtaking". Get an editor, you twat.
- sharkfish 18y ago
  I see I'm being modded down by programmers who also can't spell.
  - allenbrunson 18y ago
    No, you are being modded down for being crude. That kind of thing might be common on other forums, but not here.
    - iamdave 18y ago
      Sometimes it takes an (admittedly erroneous) crude approach just to bring what should be an overt point to fruition. While this wasn't one of them, there are certainly times. And on that point, that's the feeling I get when I read this article. The writer is trying to be direct and ride the fence of "condemnation by realization" but only comes off as wrongly crude. While I haven't read any of Gladwell's book, I've seen him speak and he's got his wits about him regarding these things. Let's put it into perspective: how many of us can effectively lecture on the things he does?
      - unalone 18y ago
        I don't think it's a very good article, but I agree with its premise. Gladwell is not scientifically rigid. His books are interesting and make me think, but I would not take any statistic he gave me as anything other than an interesting fiction. He's too selective about data.
    - sharkfish 18y ago
      OMG you guys are idiots. I used the word "twat". Go ahead, take away the rest of my karma. My e-penis is going to shrink! OMG!!!! I'm a girl by the way. LOL. Again you guys are nancies. Total nancies. LOL. I continue laughing: http://crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=42993 http://crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=42993 P.S. Are you idiots RELIGIOUS, too? LOL.
charlesju 18y ago
I think it's so easy to critique someone's piece of work. But quite frankly, it's pretty petty and childish to openly bash an author with such an article. If people like what he's saying, if people find that Malcolm resonates with their perception of reality, then all the better. It should be a personal choice as to what we find interesting and not interesting, rather than some omnipotent pundit at the "Register" dictating it to us. I think that the author of the article is just jealous that he cannot personally derive anything of interest to say without belittling a colleague.
petercooper 18y ago
Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps idea and an interest in social sciences to flow. Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and "idea spreaders" do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries. They are the lubricant of science, programming, design, management strategies, creativity, or whatever their respective niche is. They give us ideas that are easily digested but then force us to consider our own positions and ideas on their ground. This is valuable in itself.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  "Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.
  - robg 18y ago
    I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that. But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me. I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. The difficulty is predicting ahead of time whether they will.
    - Alex3917 18y ago
      "I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that." Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc. If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.
bootload 18y ago
"... For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell couldn't have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own ..." Don't let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. Well that's the way 'theregister' likes to tell it. The ideas behind the "6 degrees of separation" are measurable and form a new type of science, not surprisingly called Network theory. The ideas behind them instead of being debunked are strengthening. In '99, "Duncan Watts" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts and "Steven Strogatz" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz wrote a paper submitted to Nature working on the "Small World theory" problem called "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks" . Their results tend to support the idea that there is a measurable, finite, minimum number of links in a network between nodes and that clustering of node links does occur. The idea applied to various other natural networks (Actors in Hollywood, neural networks in the brain, Transmission lines across the US) also support the conclusions. "... a scale-free network is a network whose degree distribution follows a power law ..." Then consider "Albert-László Barabási" ~ http://www.nd.edu/~sciwww/Faculty/barabasi.html http://www.nd.edu/~sciwww/Faculty/barabasi.html who who picked up the Watts-Strogatz work ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model and came up with the idea of "Scale free networks" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_networks which gives probably the most important insight into how networks cluster, Hubs. I don't just believe the ideas of Watts, Strogatz and Barabási because of who they are but what their experiments reveal.
tlrobinson 18y ago
Orlowski isn't the only one jumping on the "let's hate on Gladwell" bandwagon: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2008/11/naked.html http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2008/11/naked.html
nazgulnarsil 18y ago
this thread is a perfect example of why these "dumb dumb" people are insanely popular. they make statements simple enough to polarize people. as soon as you hear their latest tidbit you instantly know whether you agree or disagree. This is one of the secrets of politics.
TrevorJ 18y ago
I'm not sure this article rises to a level sufficient enough to label it as "journalism"

71 points by astrec 18y ago

I've learned a lot more from reading Gladwell than Orlowski. In fact, I can't think of anything I've learned from reading Orlowski.

Alex3917 18y ago

This article is kind of amusing, but it's clear the author didn't actually read Gladwell's newest book. While in general I think it'd be fair to describe Gladwell's writing as intellectual comfort food, Outliers is pretty good. The last chapter on KIPP was pretty dubious, but not in a way that detracted from the thesis.

fallentimes 18y ago
It was a lot better than I thought it'd be, and certainly better than Blink, but Gladwell seems to have this habit of using multiple anecdotes as data, which really bugs me. It's especially dangerous because he shifts between using empirical analysis to anecdotal-based logic. I hope he doesn't turn in to Seth Godin.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  When Gladwell uses anecdotes he's not using them as data, but rather to give the facts an emotional valence.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    But then he jumps to conclusions based on them and so do his readers. A counter viewpoint: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...
electromagnetic 18y ago
I think The Register can be hilarious. I found that about a 6 out of 10, 1 being "oh my god that's so bad my ears are bleeding!" and 10 being "oh my god I laughed up a lung!". It just wasn't funny and like hell I'm reading like 6 printed pages worth of mildly amusing drivel. Gladwell undoubtedly isn't the greatest scientific writer, he just points out that we have to think about things more than we do. The message I got was that on one hand organizations like the military don't act fast enough, while police officers are encouraged to think so fast that they stop reevaluating the situation.
trominos 18y ago
Dunno about that. I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and that violinists who have a chance to become virtuosos have uniformly practiced about 10000 hours, while the merely "good" ones have practiced about 8000 hours and the bad ones have practiced 4000 hours. (Incidentally, I don't really believe the second one -- because it implies that all kinds "effortful practice" are exactly as efficient as one another.) I'm not saying that there weren't others, just that I can't remember them. I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes, though, and certainly I think anecdotes (and boilerplate) made up at least 80% of those first seven chapters. Plus his anecdotes kind of sucked. The Beatles prove the 10000 hour rule? Okay, I guess. Bill Joy? I don't really think so. Bill Gates? Hell no.
- andreyf 18y ago
  I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information... I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes... Which is precisely why authors use "statistically irrelevant" anecdotes. Because they help you emotionally connect to the material and remember it better.

dcminter 18y ago

Hmm. I can spot an Orlowski article from the title these days; he's made something of a career of detracting from popular organisations (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) and persons. I dislike the approach partly from a distaste for the tabloid savaging of the successful but mostly because it seems to lead to rather thin regurgitations of existing critiques. I believe that is the case with this article.

DenisM 18y ago
Orlowski is the sole reason I unsubscribed from the Register. I hope he will not be frequent here.

axod 18y ago

It deserves an upmod simply for using the excellent word "plebs".

ksvs 18y ago
It's an amusing word, but a bad sign when one uses it.
- axod 18y ago
  Agreed... It's a dull sunday - made me chuckle.

sharkfish 18y ago

I hate rants with misspellings. One I found was "breaktaking". I'm sure he meant "breathtaking". Get an editor, you twat.

sharkfish 18y ago
I see I'm being modded down by programmers who also can't spell.
- allenbrunson 18y ago
  No, you are being modded down for being crude. That kind of thing might be common on other forums, but not here.
  - iamdave 18y ago
    Sometimes it takes an (admittedly erroneous) crude approach just to bring what should be an overt point to fruition. While this wasn't one of them, there are certainly times. And on that point, that's the feeling I get when I read this article. The writer is trying to be direct and ride the fence of "condemnation by realization" but only comes off as wrongly crude. While I haven't read any of Gladwell's book, I've seen him speak and he's got his wits about him regarding these things. Let's put it into perspective: how many of us can effectively lecture on the things he does?
    - unalone 18y ago
      I don't think it's a very good article, but I agree with its premise. Gladwell is not scientifically rigid. His books are interesting and make me think, but I would not take any statistic he gave me as anything other than an interesting fiction. He's too selective about data.
  - sharkfish 18y ago
    OMG you guys are idiots. I used the word "twat". Go ahead, take away the rest of my karma. My e-penis is going to shrink! OMG!!!! I'm a girl by the way. LOL. Again you guys are nancies. Total nancies. LOL. I continue laughing: http://crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=42993 http://crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=42993 P.S. Are you idiots RELIGIOUS, too? LOL.

charlesju 18y ago

I think it's so easy to critique someone's piece of work. But quite frankly, it's pretty petty and childish to openly bash an author with such an article. If people like what he's saying, if people find that Malcolm resonates with their perception of reality, then all the better. It should be a personal choice as to what we find interesting and not interesting, rather than some omnipotent pundit at the "Register" dictating it to us. I think that the author of the article is just jealous that he cannot personally derive anything of interest to say without belittling a colleague.

petercooper 18y ago

Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps idea and an interest in social sciences to flow. Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and "idea spreaders" do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries. They are the lubricant of science, programming, design, management strategies, creativity, or whatever their respective niche is. They give us ideas that are easily digested but then force us to consider our own positions and ideas on their ground. This is valuable in itself.

Alex3917 18y ago
"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.
- robg 18y ago
  I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that. But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me. I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. The difficulty is predicting ahead of time whether they will.
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    "I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that." Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc. If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.

bootload 18y ago

"... For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell couldn't have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own ..." Don't let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. Well that's the way 'theregister' likes to tell it. The ideas behind the "6 degrees of separation" are measurable and form a new type of science, not surprisingly called Network theory. The ideas behind them instead of being debunked are strengthening. In '99, "Duncan Watts" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts and "Steven Strogatz" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz wrote a paper submitted to Nature working on the "Small World theory" problem called "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks" . Their results tend to support the idea that there is a measurable, finite, minimum number of links in a network between nodes and that clustering of node links does occur. The idea applied to various other natural networks (Actors in Hollywood, neural networks in the brain, Transmission lines across the US) also support the conclusions. "... a scale-free network is a network whose degree distribution follows a power law ..." Then consider "Albert-László Barabási" ~ http://www.nd.edu/~sciwww/Faculty/barabasi.html http://www.nd.edu/~sciwww/Faculty/barabasi.html who who picked up the Watts-Strogatz work ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model and came up with the idea of "Scale free networks" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_networks which gives probably the most important insight into how networks cluster, Hubs. I don't just believe the ideas of Watts, Strogatz and Barabási because of who they are but what their experiments reveal.

tlrobinson 18y ago

Orlowski isn't the only one jumping on the "let's hate on Gladwell" bandwagon: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2008/11/naked.html http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2008/11/naked.html

nazgulnarsil 18y ago

this thread is a perfect example of why these "dumb dumb" people are insanely popular. they make statements simple enough to polarize people. as soon as you hear their latest tidbit you instantly know whether you agree or disagree. This is one of the secrets of politics.

TrevorJ 18y ago

I'm not sure this article rises to a level sufficient enough to label it as "journalism"