And did you lose your father when you were a young man? Just like George Washington! And Barack Obama! And just look at Lance Armstrong! Oh, wait…. The long and the short of it is that his data and the way he interprets it is practically meaningless. What Gladwell provides is a frozen-dinner template on which other, lazier business gurus can base their own half-baked models, in which inspirational stories stand in for analysis and counterintuitive narratives can convince a willing and eager audience of aspirants that they are winning when they are in fact losing.
Great article. Shameful these even qualify as books. Its like reading a Psychology Today magazine. Gladwell use of anecdotal evidence drives me crazy. Really no data to support view points. Great article Mr Dawes. Really did I just read that?? Uuuuuuuuum cuz yo, I make fresh rhymes daily….. Reaally, think just blink and I make a million rhymes…. DAMN …. I get paiD…. Gladwell I owe u….. There is a hierarchy to what people often think of as truth.
I see it as provocative entertainment. Much the same way I watch a Michael Moore documentary. Your email address will not be published. Comment for robots Please empty this comment field to prove you're human. For free. Adjusted for circumstance and our own experience, assuming the truthfulness of others is simply a necessity for social beings.
One unfortunate side effect, which Gladwell considers at great length, is that we are correspondingly ill-equipped to detect liars. Lucky for us, most people tell the truth most of the time. Our faulty built-in lie detectors seem a small price to pay for what is otherwise an indispensable social lubricant.
But his appropriation of the phrase does show that his attitude to social science remains unquestioning. When he encounters a study published in a journal with a complicated name, he defaults to swallowing it whole. At times he approaches self-parody. Just follow the footnotes. Interesting, sort of, if true! But how would such a calculation be made? What kind of poet wants to be confused with Mad Men? Wallace Stevens wrote sublime poetry, but I think the BLS would still prefer to classify him as a vice president of an insurance company.
She decided there were 36—not 35, not 37, but 36—major poets, ranging from the well-known and era-defining William Wordsworth to the obscure and improbably named John Bampfylde. Of the 36 poets, two committed suicide. Jamison reckoned that two out of 36, proportionally, is five times the suicide rate for the general population.
This is thin soup. One wonders whether Gladwell bothered to trace the statistic back to its source. Many people who spend a lot of time writing poetry are eccentric; the elevated suicide rate feels true, intuitively. Read: Beyond the pros and cons of redshirting. The data, taken uncritically, served to buttress anecdotes that were intended to dramatize some general truth about the human animal. Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What's he really saying?
Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he's saying that hold so much appeal? Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it's reassuringly predictable.
The most famous book Tipping Point , takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won't draw anything more profound from this than "we're all connected" - gee! A good book to write would be about how how epidemiology became so debased so quickly: it's now merely a computer modeling factory for producing health scares, or in the case of British foot-and-mouth disease, catastrophic policy responses that cost billions of pounds.
For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell could have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own - but he probably wouldn't have liked the conclusion. The next book, Blink published in , asks in his own words - "What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?
And the message of the new one? Genius takes hard work. Again, it's something bleedingly obvious, but which leaves deeper questions unanswered. Take two geniuses: George Best and Tesla. What did they offer? Why do we admire them so much? There's obviously much more to each of them than perspiration - but we don't find out, and the book is as flattening and reductive as the others.
Perhaps it's Gladwell's stunning oratory that draws the crowds? Perhaps he's such a magnetic performer, that you go for the ride, not the destination? But when we see a example of the Master at Work - the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.
Bear with me - it also sheds some light on the other half of the Gladwell puzzle - the adulation, which begins to look quite creepy. Here's an excerpt of the master strolling the stage at Ted - a presentation called Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce. Gladwell blathers at great length about an obscure market researcher called Howard Moskowitz.
On his own website, Howie calls himself "a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics ". Yet Gladwell describes Moskowitz' market testing of varieties of soup as if he was an unsung genius of the 20th century. All this takes up 15 minutes, but it's so repetitious and predictable, it seems to take about three times as long. So much for the dazzling oratory Guardian leader writers admire. From this Gladwell draws four lessons.
Firstly, people don't know what they want - or can't express it. And need marketing geniuses to figure this out. Funny, that.
Secondly, Gladwell then asserts that horizontal segmentation "democratizes taste". This is a very grand claim. It needs us to assume that there was very little diversity before - or that if it existed, producers and distributors didn't offer it. Yet step into an old sweet shop, an Italian deli, or a traditional pub serving Scotch malts, and incredible diversity abounds: these are very old recipes too.
You could equally explain consumer diversity because we enjoy greatly increased trade and affluence, combined with the new and cheaper technologies of production, all of which mean that things that were once exotic and exclusive are now available cheaply to us plebs.
The Deli and malts examples suggest that where less-perishable goods could be brought to market in diversity, they were.
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