I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies, the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.
If it's a book by Malcolm Gladwell, I can't anti-recommend it enough.
All of the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read have been tripe. Unless he has radically improved his writing and grasp of nuance in the last decade (and published retractions of his earlier books), his books are dangerous anti-knowledge which will make you feel smarter but actually be dumber.
Gladwell takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising.
Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right.
When studying sculpture a tutor talked to me about people making “things that look like art”, which really stuck with me - they made objects that mimicked what they thought art should be like, but had a kind of conceptual hollowness. I think Malcolm Gladwell is similar in that he produces content that has the appearance of science, but once you start digging it doesn’t hold up. A bit like a version of “truthiness”, except that in his case it’s “scienciness”.
"Scientism" is a pretty common term for this. I.e. superficially coating arguments in a veneer of rigor and data, for the sake of riding on the epistemic prestige of empirical science.
Oh right, art elitism as counter example, great. Who gets to define what I see as art? "conceptual hollowness" - that sounds nothing but esoteric to begin with. Reminds me of the (German) "Hurz"... event (https://youtu.be/MJ7jbQJXF68).
I hate posting anything negative but sorry, this was just too much.
Oh and I admit I actually didn't dislike the third of one Gladwell's book I once read, as well as a presentation he gave somewhere about the Norden bombsight. Every single one of the HN haters of him on the other hand remain exceedingly vague and don't really have anything of substance to say, only very over-styled ways to express that they dislike them, or even the man himself.
"Remained exceedingly vague" isn't exactly fair. How much do you expect from a comment on a discussion board? If you want more specifics, ask for them! You're in attack mode here right out the gate.
He has admitted to "mak[ing] trouble" rather than believing everything he writes.[0] He acknowledges that his books are not "ends in themselves."[1] He cherry-picks supporting studies and leaves out their failure to replicate.[2] He throws around scientific terms but uses them incorrectly. [3] He offers ill-considered off-the-cuff "solutions."[3]
One reason HN comments might be "exceedingly vague" is because the specific criticisms have been laid out extensively over the past decade.
Leave aside the art metaphor if that's not to your taste, and perhaps a less metaphorical way of looking at it is that Gladwell is a storyteller, not a scientist. He creates coherent narratives, but they obey the logic of stories, not science. Other people have written detailed criticisms of his scientific writing - if you want to read them they're pretty easy to find. I genuinely think it's worth your time.
I listened to his podcast history of napalm, and found it compelling and interesting (but then I'm not a historian, so perhaps it's Murray Gell-Mann amnesia!) So I have more time for his historical work, partially because history is a kind of storytelling.
Science is not the same as history, and needs to be judged by different metrics. This is where he falls down.
Thank you for making my point. Your comment is as vague and nebulous as you say Gladwell's stories are. Neither does he claim to publish scientific papers, last time I checked those were "popular science" category books like millions of others. I'm not sure what value there is in singling out one guy, or to point out the gigantic discrepancy between a scientific paper and a popular book, especially when it's done worse than the latter and even farther from any rigor.
The vitriol, downvote-happiness and almost zealotry of "commenter movements" like anti-Javascript, or, here anti-Gladwell, to me signals that this is more a self-perpetuating fad driven by group think (trying to fit in and proof one is part of the core). If it was merely fact driven such as mine would be ignored - or not be given cause to exist in the first place. It's not like I care one iota about Gladwell, as I said, I never managed to read more than a small part of one book. What I did notice though and why I even paid any attention at all was the amazing level of effort - coupled with an equally amazing level of vagueness - some people put into this.
If one were to think logically, even if you conclude all of Gladwell's books are really really bad, you would just ignore the whole thing. That call to arms anytime anyone dares mention Gladwell - or Javascript - is scary and as far as I can see far worse than anything Gladwell may ever have written. It reminds me more of high school "cool kids" group dynamics.
Your characterisation of my arguments is not fair. I specifically said I appreciated his historical podcast, so I'm certainly not a zealot. And to remove doubt, I'm not an artist critiquing science from a point of ignorance, I have a scientific background too, indluding a masters in neuroscience. Gladwell's mischaracterisations of science are widely distributed, and I think that's why he comes up so often - if he was a relatively unknown blogger nobody would care. It's frustrating to see this kind of scienciness get so much attention when the people who do the science he writes narratives about, and whose work he piggybacks on, are much more circumspect about how widely their work generalises.
Again, I have said there are multiple critiques which go into detail about what is wrong with Gladwell's writing, so if your problem is the "nebulousness" of a comment on Hacker News (which is no place for a detailed critiqe), then I suggest you look for them if you're genuinely interested in why people have a low opinion of his science writing.
Sorry to have scared you. I don't think pointing out the scientific illiteracy and anti-knowledge in his books is far worse than the books themselves, but YMMV.
I commented on a relevant thread in the hope of saving someone else the time wasted reading them, and if I'm honest, because I'm still salty about the money and time he stole from me.
I criticise it in the same wa as if someone was expounding homeopathy or a fruit-baswd diet for cancer, or horoscope-based hiring.
Thank you for supporting my point! You demonstrate the very low level very well. Badly hidden snark akin to personal attacks instead of arguments. Exactly my point about that.. "criticism" of that author, far worse than anything I ever read or heard from him and at least an order of magnitude lower level intellectually, if not more.
Ahh! Thank you for finally articulating what has always bugged me so much about his books. I am reading along thinking, "yeah, yeah, this makes sense" and then realizing later that it actually had no depth.
This is boiler plate Gladwell critique and has been part of his reputation for a long time. Ironically I think we are due for a contrarian shift back to him being brilliant.
One day on a flight I started reading his “Blink” when 1/4th of the way I realized he is full of crap.
The realization came after I started noticing a pattern: that he would give an anecdote, or present a situation, explain it a little bit then bam! He would generalize his conclusion to a broader situation. Rinse and repeat.
What a load of junk!
I got introduced to him via his TED talks which I liked. But after reading Blink (1/4th of it), I opened by eyes and stayed away from whatever he said or did.
Good counterarguments, thank you. Some caution should be exercised when reading pop sci-like books.
The parts of the book that were meaningful to me were the summaries of other foundational studies and generalized beliefs based on lots of research. His conclusions were sometimes a bit of a stretch, but I accept a little 'dressing up' of results with additional opinion as part of writing to a broad audience
Oh God, thank you for saying this. I cannot read two pages of Malcolm Gladwell and cannot fathom his popularity. Generalizing from anecdotes in an entertaining way: that’s his whole schtick.
Or, maybe I’m an old cranky curmudgeon and should let people enjoy reading his junk science.
I've only read Outliers and David and Goliath, but I really enjoyed them and feel that they provided some tangible benefits in how I think about things.
Could you share some of the criticism against him so I could update any incorrect beliefs I may have?
My opinion flipped the other direction. Which totally surprised me.
I used to dismiss Gladwell's "insight porn" (h/t lordnacho). But now I feel like he's a pretty effective advocate, popularizer of views and policies that I agree with. Briefly, he's punching up.
Michael Lewis was the catalyst to reassessing Gladwell. I just frikkin love his Against The Rules podcast series. Briefly, he argues that we do better, both as society and individuals, with referees and coaching.
Then I listened to a handful of Gladwell interviews. A long form chat with Lewis. Book tour stops for Talking with Strangers. I thought: Huh, Gladwell doesn't sound too bad.
So I started listening to other Pushkin Industry podcasts.
I especially love historian Jill Lepore.
So I guess my TLDR is: I reevaluated Gladwell because he's now working with two people I really admire. Virtue by association.
Yeah I need to check it out. I think it's also that people (me included) are deeply fascinated by the ability the read other people and what they think.
