5 ms·

Can you elaborate on the bullshit part from the interview? I'm curious. I read the book (Imagine) and I enjoyed it. It wasn't particularly deep, but I didn't ca

by diego 14y ago

Can you elaborate on the bullshit part from the interview? I'm curious. I read the book (Imagine) and I enjoyed it. It wasn't particularly deep, but I didn't catch anything that wasn't consistent with what I already knew about the topic.

gruseom 14y ago
It seems I can't answer your question without ranting. Sorry about that. I was referring to what Lehrer said about Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone". His narrative about Dylan's biography and his creative process was totally off – not consistent with what even a casual fan like myself has picked up over the years. It wasn't just a little odd here and there, it was screamingly wrong. The idea that Dylan got stuck between "Bringing it all back home" (March 1965) and "Highway 61 Revisited" (Aug 1965) is laughable – that was the middle of the greatest creative rampage of his career, his annus mirabilis. Everybody knows that that manic phase peaked in "Blonde on Blonde" (1966) and the crash happened afterward. Lehrer's fairy tale about how Dylan was going to quit music (!) but it turned out he just needed to take a little rest and then, boom, a creative outpouring and out came "Like a Rolling Stone", was silly. Dylan had been pouring out material in that way for years. Lehrer's thing about how there had been only two kinds of pop song and Dylan finally put them together in "Like a Rolling Stone" is cringeworthy, the kind of thing you would tolerate in a precocious adolescent until you could take him off to one side and tell him to knock it off and learn something. Then there were howlers like claiming that while writing the song Dylan coined the term "juiced" to mean "drunk". That was as ignorant as Gladwell's "igon values" but worse, since it indicates a readiness to make shit up to fit your narrative. My point is that these things weren't just wrong, they were obvious concoctions. And someone who would bullshit that much about one thing would clearly bullshit about anything. If he hadn't fabricated quotes and plagiarized, that would still be the case. And it's not like people didn't call him on it, even before he got caught on the no-nos [1]. What bugs me, and I'm almost done, is that Lehrer's editors and patrons were quite happy for him to propagate this kind of thing. Not in a "sure it's crap but we need material" way, but in a "take a look at this! he's a wunderkind!" way. Had he not gotten grandiosely sloppy, he'd not only still be doing it, he'd still be widely praised for doing it. He'd be in that elite group of repeat guests on Fresh Air, maybe even the super-elite who are allowed to say "thank you" when Terry says "Welcome back to Fresh Air". So to me this was a little like a criminal who eventually got busted on a technicality. [1] http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bob-dylan-jonah-lehrer-creativity http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bo.... To say something positive: yay to Isaac Chotiner for being the one who nailed this stuff on its essential crappiness rather than its accidental transgressions. Plus he wrote a good piece about P.G. Wodehouse: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-escapist/308989/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-esca..., so I'm going to watch for him in the future. Perhaps the New Yorker could hire him :)
- tptacek 14y ago
  Worth noting here that the original New Yorker article Gladwell wrote had "eigenvalue", not "igon value"; the incorrect spelling occurred in a reprint of the same article. Not dispositive, of course!
  - wglb 14y ago
    However. After having read Glieck's Chaos years ago, I thought I would pick up "Tipping Point" at the library. Before I got to the door, checking through a few pages, I realized I would be physically unable to read the book, because it was just wrong. In the way that trying to reason about free body diagrams without having any math is going to be wrong. Or to do eigenvalues without understanding arithmetic in the complex plane. Let alone igon values.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I don't find this eigenvalue controversy all that interesting. Gladwell also wrote a long New Yorker article about ketchup and the market for different ketchups. I doubt Gladwell could, given the ingredients and a good kitchen, make a passable ketchup. I still like the article. If anything, the eigen/igon thing just tells me that unlike many popsci writers, Gladwell is at least out there talking to people and trying to report. Bear in mind that Gladwell makes no pretense to actually being a scientist (unlike Lehrer). He's a journalist by training. I am given to understand from a great conversation I had earlier this week that it is not necessarily reasonable to assume that physicists have mastered linear algebra. So, in that spirit, it is not reasonable to expect journalists to understand linear algebra simply to report on quantitative finance.
      - wglb 14y ago
        I do agree that he is one of the great storytellers of our time. As was Jerzy Kosiński. (Who was a plagerist and didn't actually write his own books.) The problem to me is more one of leading an audience to where the conclusions sound nice, but are either dubious, or, as in the case of Tipping Point, far short of the beauty of more informed explanation.

by diego 14y ago

gruseom 14y ago

It seems I can't answer your question without ranting. Sorry about that. I was referring to what Lehrer said about Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone". His narrative about Dylan's biography and his creative process was totally off – not consistent with what even a casual fan like myself has picked up over the years. It wasn't just a little odd here and there, it was screamingly wrong. The idea that Dylan got stuck between "Bringing it all back home" (March 1965) and "Highway 61 Revisited" (Aug 1965) is laughable – that was the middle of the greatest creative rampage of his career, his annus mirabilis. Everybody knows that that manic phase peaked in "Blonde on Blonde" (1966) and the crash happened afterward. Lehrer's fairy tale about how Dylan was going to quit music (!) but it turned out he just needed to take a little rest and then, boom, a creative outpouring and out came "Like a Rolling Stone", was silly. Dylan had been pouring out material in that way for years. Lehrer's thing about how there had been only two kinds of pop song and Dylan finally put them together in "Like a Rolling Stone" is cringeworthy, the kind of thing you would tolerate in a precocious adolescent until you could take him off to one side and tell him to knock it off and learn something. Then there were howlers like claiming that while writing the song Dylan coined the term "juiced" to mean "drunk". That was as ignorant as Gladwell's "igon values" but worse, since it indicates a readiness to make shit up to fit your narrative. My point is that these things weren't just wrong, they were obvious concoctions. And someone who would bullshit that much about one thing would clearly bullshit about anything. If he hadn't fabricated quotes and plagiarized, that would still be the case. And it's not like people didn't call him on it, even before he got caught on the no-nos [1]. What bugs me, and I'm almost done, is that Lehrer's editors and patrons were quite happy for him to propagate this kind of thing. Not in a "sure it's crap but we need material" way, but in a "take a look at this! he's a wunderkind!" way. Had he not gotten grandiosely sloppy, he'd not only still be doing it, he'd still be widely praised for doing it. He'd be in that elite group of repeat guests on Fresh Air, maybe even the super-elite who are allowed to say "thank you" when Terry says "Welcome back to Fresh Air". So to me this was a little like a criminal who eventually got busted on a technicality. [1] http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bob-dylan-jonah-lehrer-creativity http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bo.... To say something positive: yay to Isaac Chotiner for being the one who nailed this stuff on its essential crappiness rather than its accidental transgressions. Plus he wrote a good piece about P.G. Wodehouse: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-escapist/308989/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-esca..., so I'm going to watch for him in the future. Perhaps the New Yorker could hire him :)

tptacek 14y ago
Worth noting here that the original New Yorker article Gladwell wrote had "eigenvalue", not "igon value"; the incorrect spelling occurred in a reprint of the same article. Not dispositive, of course!
- wglb 14y ago
  However. After having read Glieck's Chaos years ago, I thought I would pick up "Tipping Point" at the library. Before I got to the door, checking through a few pages, I realized I would be physically unable to read the book, because it was just wrong. In the way that trying to reason about free body diagrams without having any math is going to be wrong. Or to do eigenvalues without understanding arithmetic in the complex plane. Let alone igon values.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    I don't find this eigenvalue controversy all that interesting. Gladwell also wrote a long New Yorker article about ketchup and the market for different ketchups. I doubt Gladwell could, given the ingredients and a good kitchen, make a passable ketchup. I still like the article. If anything, the eigen/igon thing just tells me that unlike many popsci writers, Gladwell is at least out there talking to people and trying to report. Bear in mind that Gladwell makes no pretense to actually being a scientist (unlike Lehrer). He's a journalist by training. I am given to understand from a great conversation I had earlier this week that it is not necessarily reasonable to assume that physicists have mastered linear algebra. So, in that spirit, it is not reasonable to expect journalists to understand linear algebra simply to report on quantitative finance.
    - wglb 14y ago
      I do agree that he is one of the great storytellers of our time. As was Jerzy Kosiński. (Who was a plagerist and didn't actually write his own books.) The problem to me is more one of leading an audience to where the conclusions sound nice, but are either dubious, or, as in the case of Tipping Point, far short of the beauty of more informed explanation.