>The only issue is that Gladwell’s account doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. As a piece of writing, The Bomber Mafia is engaging. As a work of history, it borders on reckless. Setting aside the numerous errors of fact and interpretation, Gladwell consistently cherry-picks from the historical record. Wittingly or not, he omits or downplays evidence that undermines the very premise of the book.
Sub out history for science in the above paragraph and it is the same criticism that Gladwell has been receiving for literally decades. The guy is a good writer and storyteller but he seemingly prioritizes good writing and story over telling the most honest story. That isn't an unusual trait among pop-non-fiction writers. The reason they become popular is what they write is interesting and it is easier to make things interesting if you are a little loose with the truth.
Came here to say exactly that! Years ago he was a springboard for me to read further on various topics, each time leading me to conclude he doesn't give a shit about presenting the truth if it gets in the way of his story. :(
I honestly have no clue how his books are so popular
They’re like for a person who wants to appear like they read and have interesting though but it’s just a few anecdotes and a complete waste of time frankly
You've answered your own question. Actual wisdom is difficult to attain and often times difficult to further express in spoken or written language (ie. "tacit knowledge", if you believe such a thing exists I suppose). The kind of wisdom you DO attain may not be socially acceptable, either. But, you still want to have the appearance in front of your friends, colleagues and potential "partners" that you are somehow wise. So you turn to statistics, and damn lies that follow.
ba doom cha! God, as a musician and fan of Ericsson's actual work, that one drives me bloody bananas. Ericsson's own book "Peak" is worth reading. One must assume the motivation to write some for lay people was at least partly out of frustration at hearing his academic work mis-quoted so damn much because of Outliers. It would make me CRAZY.
“As I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things” - Malcolm Gladwell
In other word readers like enjoyable stories. But I think these things are important especially because readers are indifferent to them, otherwise it’s too easy and tempting to slip into fiction, which of course will make the book more enjoyable. Writing fiction marketed as non-fiction is a proven commercial recipe, but it’s dishonest to say the least.
Excellent quote. Critics say the same thing when explaining the popularity of novels like The Da Vinci Code. I wonder if general readers really don't approach non-fiction any more critically than they approach fiction.
I’d separate those two. The Da Vinci code is not supposed to represent a factual telling of reality; it’s a fictional novel. You might not like it as a piece of high art, but most of us understand the difference between art and pop literature. Heck, most of us consume and like “guilty pleasure” media, I actually rather enjoyed Angels & Demons by the same author.
Malcolm Gladwell is purporting to communicate factual reality. If he discards good arguments and evidence to entertain, then he is doing a real measurable harm in a way that Dan Brown is not.
> The Da Vinci code is not supposed to represent a factual telling of reality
It was published with a preface titled "FACT" claiming that all the secret societies and rituals and documents in the novel were historically accurate. That was the book's whole schtick.
The author specifically claimed that certain parts of the book - he listed exactly which parts - were documented historical truth. Isn't that "purporting to communicate factual reality"?
If some people thought that a fictional book sold as such contained true things, then they are gullible fools likely to fall for anything. I wouldn’t read too much into that.
You're welcome to think so, but that doesn't change the fact that Dan Brown was unambiguously purporting to communicate factual reality.
More so that Gladwell, in fact - I don't think any of Gladwell's books ever had a "the following parts of this book are historical fact" preface! (though a few of them could arguably have used one...)
Why would they? This person is claiming to be a metaexpert relaying what experts are saying. If somone doesn't have research skills or even know the structure of academia then they're probably very used to having to trust people. I'm wondering if they even have the skills to check anything if they wanted to: somone tried to support a bullshit etymology for an Arabic word by citing some pseudoscience website to me. That to them is just as credible as wiktionary or anything else.
Considering his history being on speed dial for the tobacco industry when they wanted damage control, I'm not sure it's so innocuous as just wanting to tell an interesting story.
I’m not sure if that’s really a problem though. I read The Tipping Point and, yes, he isn’t always historically accurate but the point isn’t really the history in the first place. It’s about whatever big idea he’s taking about. If his largely fictional account of history teaches me the big idea, then I don’t really see the big deal.
Furthermore, he is extremely receptive to criticism and never presents himself as the one true source of fact.
> The guy is a good writer and storyteller but he seemingly prioritizes good writing and story over telling the most honest story. That isn't an unusual trait among pop-non-fiction writers.
It’s not fair at all to cast Malcolm Gladwell as typical of pop nonfiction writers—there are tons of great and serious writers in the genre. It’s truly a shame that Malcolm Gladwell, an utter hack, has been consistently publishing garbage for decades and that he has such a wide audience.
Despite the undeniably pattern of problematic framings (particularly how Gladwell invites readers to feel that they now have the answers as opposed to the scientific mindset of now feeling that they have so many more questions), I don't think "utter hack" is fair.
Gladwell is not only a superb storyteller, he's sincerely interested in learning himself, has intriguing ideas… it's sloppy (almost in a Gladwellian manner) to be angry about the problems with his approach and then just insist that the conclusion is that his stuff is just garbage and he's just a hack.
I'm not going to disagree with the merits of your point, but I do want to provide clarification that I think there is a gap between "not unusual" and "typical". I think the former means it isn't rare while the later means it applies to most people. To make up a number, if this applied to 20% of people it would be both "not unusual" and "not typical".
Lol. I see his critics did exactly that. The whole anti-ten-thousand-hours people cherry picks borderline arguments and ignores overall correctness of his general point.
I think the whole ten-thousand-hours is doing exactly that, it presents some cherry-picked facts and ignores giving substantial evidence. The main point of the book is quite obvious before Gladwell wrapped it into pop science: hard work does pay off one way or another but the extent of his generalization is ... pop science
There was a good freakonomics podcast episode on this where they interviewed both Gladwell and the original author. The person who did the original study basically said Gladwell was not representing his research accurately.
If you read the author the original work, Gladwell got 80% right, 20% deviation on non-essential issues. Of course a pop science book can be said not representing the original research "accurately". I think the author focused more on the difference because there is Gladwell's book received too many backlashes.
""He's [Ericsson] a hard practice guy, and I'm a soft practice guy." Gladwell claims that talent is important with an intentional dedication to practice and having a support system is vital to produce superior outcomes. It is not all about methodical effort as Ericsson claims."
That's not "pretty different views". That's agree on all the basics but having a different sense of how much talent matters.
How about this? (The sentence you left out directly before that quote)
"Malcolm Gladwell's point-of-view about deliberate practice is different from Ericsson's view."
"Hard Practice" vs "Soft Practice" is the center of the argument, it is the point of contention. No one is going to argue that practice isn't important, they are going to argue how you should practice and how much it matters compared to other factors. They disagree on both of these points, so no, they don't agree.
> "Hard Practice" vs "Soft Practice" is the center of the argument, it is the point of contention.
If you focus on the difference, yes, it is the major difference between them. But if you focus on the main point (the overwhelming importance of 10 year of deliberate practice for one to become a top expert in a field), it is non-essential. There is no concrete empirical answer to how much exactly talent matters, even now.
Where I see people get 10k hours wrong is they think it *guarantees* top shelf world class success. That's a misinterpretation. The 10k rule is: *If* you make it to the top, you will almost certainly have put in at least 10k hours.
I'm not a Gladwell fan so I'm not certain about what he said. I'm only wanting to point out the difference between the rule and how very many misinterpret it.
The 10k hours rule does not say either. The 10k hours rule only says 10k hours deliberate practice is generally required to be a top expert in most fields. So there are cases where 10k hours practice is not sufficient, and there are cases where talent people (Mozart?) need way fewer practice than regular people.
The 10k hours rule also does not say top experts need more hours to be better. So there is "debunk" claiming no correlation found among top expert performance and practice which is kind of strawman attack.
Mozart is literally in Gladwell's book as an example of someone who got their 10k hours in early. Why do you feel the need to comment while clearly never having read the book you're defending?
I would argue that 10,000 hours is represented as an inflection point in his book, more as a, "This number, with one significant digit, kept showing up when Gladwell would interview people who were great at specific things" instead of a, "do this amount of a specific thing and you'll then be great at that specific thing" or "magic" number in that sense.
It's hardly a steadfast rule and he never presents it as such, but it's easy to squint real hard and see it that way, if you just want to argue or be upset.
I view empirical truth as having layers. There is one objective truth, of course, but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth.
The clichéd example of this would be the Bohr model of atoms being the first "ring" of truth, and quantum mechanics being a second or third "ring". Another example would be "everything revolves around the earth" -> "everything revolves around the sun" -> "Newtonian gravity" -> "Einsteinian general relativity".
As a first-order approximation of the truth, Gladwell is fine. There are serious criticisms of him in this article that may cause me to rethink this, but as long as they aren't full-on manipulations of reality, I view them as a useful entry point into a subject.
Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand. Gladwell, on the other hand, I can read in the bathtub with a cold beer. He's fun in a way that the more academic approach to history necessarily can't be (unless there is a Feynman-esque character writing history books that I'm not aware of?)
> as they aren't full-on manipulations of reality, I view them as a useful entry point into a subject.
But then, this is exactly the critique the article advances: in this book Gladwell presents a narrative that gives readers (to put it charitably) an incomplete understanding of the nature of American air doctrine in WWII. Omission of facts IS manipulation of reality, and what Gladwell has created seems to be more akin to a third- or fourth-order representation of reality where a heavily biased selection of (to be fair, mostly true) facts is then glossed and presented in a form where one "can read it in the bathtub with a cold beer" and have a good time. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's pretty remarkable to assume that such a work gives you any meaningful grasp of a subject in addition to being entertainment.
I think by "manipulations" the parent's implication is, manipulation to some purpose, as in to fabricate support for some political or philosophical belief. It's so common to manipulate reality for the purpose of entertainment that we have a fairly benign term for it: poetic license.
Who'd assume that though? Reading through a book does not give me a robust understanding of a subject. If that were true, why would people go to school? I read for a perspective and some entertainment, and maybe retaining some details. I read the God Delusion, but I wouldn't presume to know all that much about the intricacies of evolutionary biology. I have at most a cursory understanding of how natural selection works, and a few examples to go on that I didn't know about previously. Why would I care to know everything about "American air doctrine in WWII" when I hadn't previously paid the subject any thought at any level?
Truth having layers of detail seems accurate to me. Outer layers conflicting with inner layers is foolish and means that the outer layer wasn’t true at all.
Fiction claiming to be non-fiction is annoying and should at least be labeled accurately.
You'd not be able to label anything as non-fiction, unless it were from the mouth of Cthulu. No matter how dryly something is presented, the reader should still be skeptical.
I think it’s hard to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t mean we should give up and purposely, or incompetently, include falseness when we’re trying to tell the truth.
> Truth having layers of detail seems accurate to me. Outer layers conflicting with inner layers is foolish and means that the outer layer wasn’t true at all.
That just seems like how most teaching works. I.e. No one starts out learning physics as it works in any physical space, you start with a simplified fake version to start to understand concepts before you can start to handle greater complexity and approach greater truths.
Using simplified, fake versions to learn concepts makes perfect sense.
Teaching people that fake versions are actually true just to learn concepts is counterproductive. There’s no advantage to lying about training models and it’s not healthy, I think, to pretend I’m doing this for the good of my audience.
> Years ago he was a springboard for me to read further on various topics, each time leading me to conclude he doesn't give a shit about presenting the truth if it gets in the way of his story. :(
If everyone were like her or him, it would be fine to write sloppyly and engagingly about science and history posing as if you were a real authority. But that doesnt seem to be the case (this is HN).
> Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand.
It seems like the most objective account of history one can create is merely a recollection of all facts, with no room for editorialization. I've read some books by historians and I find it hard to follow when reading in the 20 minute increments my free time is divided into. Maybe that's just my problem, but it makes me understand why some people reach for pop history.
Academic history is storytelling rather than a recollection of facts. This is why there are different analysis modes and multiple views of the same events can all be valid work.
That said, it is definitely the case that academic history is written for other academics and is often terribly dry for people outside of the field. There are exceptions, but little about a book itself will tell you whether it is one of the ones that are well suited for amateur readers.
And that's fair enough, except he doesn't present his work as merely "first ring of truth" - he presents it as a deeper ring, or at least certainly does not indicate that it's merely an introduction.
So laypeople read his books and listen to his podcasts and don't know that the truth has been fudged so much for the sake of storytelling that it borders on outright misleading. But it was so entertaining in the meantime that it feels like additional insight - which of course is the brilliant trick of his marketing.
Curtis is trying to create a certain sort of dream state in which the free association of ideas takes place and you reframe your perspective on society.
I'd hesitate to call it even something that could be true. It's more like an abstract painting.
I went through quite a hostile phase, as it's clearly masquerading as something it isn't. It's more a work of aesthetic-political creation, than any kind of "history".
It's a made up history of a possible world view possible dead people might have had; for the sake of saying something about our world views today.
Not necessarily, I think it's very likely that the foundation of truth is ever changing in itself, nothing has to be fixed in time and space.
> but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth
I think one thing that was a big "haha" moment for me was actually reconsidering what I'm even trying to accomplish when discussing "truth". I realized that in actuality, we are simply framing facts and observations into conceptual models that allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. This means we really only care about the practicalities.
Like you said, quantum physics and general relativity are simply two conceptual models, in practice they each work well for certain things, but we've found they are incompatible right now, and what one is good at the other not so much. And that's fine, unless you wrongly obsess over "truth", which you will never find. But if you focus on your practicalities, then it's a question of finding the most effective conceptual model you can, and then applying it to your life.
When it comes to history, it's the same. It doesn't really matter what actually happened and why. What matters is the conceptual model you use to look at the artifacts you've got, and what that allows you to do today in your life. It might be that one framing of history helps you keep together a free society and keep authoritarian agents at bay, if so, it's a pretty good model of history. If it doesn't allow you to do this, and actually does the opposite, and that's not your goal, than it's a bad model of history.
Start thinking that way, and history becomes a means to protect yourself from future mistakes using past data. Now your model of history can be objectively measured in how good it is at doing that.
This 'means to an end truth' should never be confused for the actual truth. QM and GR are both as true as we can make them. Newtonian mechanics is even more useful of a model, since it's much easier to work with, but it just isn't true at some point.
The lesson to learn from the current limits of physics isn't that you should construct whichever narrative best serves your propaganda and stop obsessing about the truth. The only lesson they should teach you in history is to not obsess too much about details that just can't be known (like the internal motivations or beliefs of historical figures) and instead to focus on what actually happened (like the impact their actions had).
"Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications.
This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past.
Generally this is implicitly ackowledged in science, it rarely claims an absolute truth, simply a model that best fits all the data, and which affords us the best predictions and the best methods for accomplishing some desired outcome. The model that succeed the best at that will be the agreed on "truth" and how we go about understanding things until a better model shows up. In that sense, the scientific "truth" is a moving target by design, because the success criteria for truth is just: the current most practical understanding.
What that means for history is that yes, the science of history is very much grounded in this practical reality. You are successfully studying history if the lessons you take from the past allow you to predict the future or increase the likelihood of your desired outcome for some decision you need to make today.
Effectively I'm arguing against the narratives of truth that serves people's agendas, but I'm doing so by pointing out that my "haha" moment related to this was realizing that truth is irrelevant, believing in truth itself is a mistake. If you start to instead seek practical relevance and start to see all truth as "models of the world" and not the real truth, you'll now be able to actually judge truths for what they really are and that means how useful and helpful they are to you or me at predicting events or generating some desired outcome.
I still think my position is very different, and your position still sounds to me like it would ignore known facts if they don't fit a useful narrative.
Let's take some concrete examples. Say that a Volkswagen engineer came to a hypothetical ethical manager and said that they had discovered some of their cars' emissions were much higher in real life conditions than in the lab tests they reported. If the manager cared about the truth, they would investigate to find out how this came to be. If they cared about utility, they would hide this information, as it may cause Volkswagen to lose an edge.
Similarly for historical purposes - an ethical historian who is interested in helping the English public have a good image of itself would discard information about the horrors that the British Empire forced many people through, and only discuss the nice things they did. After all, truth doesn't exist, so why complicate the story?
Hum, okay it definitely seems I've not explained myself clearly, and I'm not too sure how to best communicate what I'm trying to share, so bare with me.
I can see that you're getting hooked on the utility side of things, when I say practical I do not imply benefitial to you in a selfish way. In fact, I'm making no moral implications, I'm not speaking to ethics or morals at all.
So it seems you're thinking I'm saying that you can simply make up falsehoods to your benefits, lie and deceive others is a great way to achieve a goal, so why not. Okay, that's not what I'm saying at all, I'm not arguing that the ends justify the means.
What I'm saying is that any argument to the truth is actually a way to deceive yourself and others. It's a dogma:
> Dogma - a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true
You'll tell me this is the truth and argument it to death until I concede defeat and agree to your truth, or we'll just agree to disagree.
Now what I am saying is that this truth of yours, it's simply a hypothetical model which fits the data you have, or at least best tries to fit and explain the data you have. That it is true or not is unknown. What we can know though, is how practical of a model it is.
So replace the word truth with model everywhere and hopefully you'll come to the same "haha" moment as me, when looking at people's truth as simply models they came up with that best explains their current data, everything becomes clearer and starts to make sense.
So in that way, I'm saying someone's truth (which in my head I think of as model of reality, or explanation and understanding of something), is only as "true" (which in my head I think as accuracy of the model to predict or create a desired effect), as it can be used practically to predict the outcome or allow us to design methods that generate some desired outcome.
That means that when a historian explains what happened in the British Empire, why they did what they did, what effects it had on people and our modern times, how it felt to live in that era, etc. I will assess how correct they are based purely on if any of that information can predict anything or allow for any applicable learnings that actually works. Otherwise I will simply conclude that that's just their opinion, and it's probably biased from their frame of reference and beliefs.
So your examples are a little beside my point. But for example, in the case of the ethical manager, let's assume since they are ethical, they don't want their cars to cause harm to the environment. If they followed what I'm saying, they would not look for some absolute truth about the cause of global warming, instead they would look for the current models of climate and emissions that have best predicted the changes in the climate or have shown the most promesse in changing the climates outcome, and use that to figure out what best to do about it. Not try to argue that the model is not the real absolute truth, because of bla bla I believe and I think and therefore, and so don't you get it...
Ok then, thanks for taking the time to re-word this, I think I get your point and I agree with it. Your use of 'practical/useful' was what was throwing me off - I'm used to seeing it in the way you meant it in physics,bbut when moving to history it took on other connotations for me.
The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far. This is the core of what I consider important for a theory of 'truth' to seem acceptable to me personally, and yours does pass this test.
> The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far
Ya I think we agree on this. Maybe I go one step further though, and I'm proposing that even if your model accounts for everything, it is still not the truth, just a good model, and that it works perfectly today does not guarantee it will work perfectly forever or that reality is exactly as your model explains it to be.
I can imagine both a reality which changes in time and space, thus a model could be perfect given some specific time and space, but no longer apply in another. And I can also imagine equal models that are both just as accurate, yet they differ in their explanation. So a model which would have perfect prediction still might not be the true reality, it could be an equal model with similar behavior, but how you've modeled things could still be very different from how reality works.
Which is where I'm kind of suggesting that the search for truth is irrelevant, and trying to argue for or against truth is futile. It be better to search for models with practical benefits instead, that the model is true to reality or not isn't something we should fight over, because it doesn't matter, and it's not objectively provable.
So when I say "search for truth", I don't mean the search for an understanding that enables better prediction or manipulation of outcomes. I take it to mean the search for what reality actually truly is like. And I'm saying the search for that, while it sounds noble, it really just ends up being dogma, and each of us can believe whatever we want. But the search for the former, the search for models of reality that have practical benefits is something we can all discuss and benefit from. And so I think our focus should move away from this "truth seeking" and towards this "practical model seeking".
Hope that made sense too. I guess in a way I'm saying that for example, if someone says that "this is what really happened in the past", and then they show you evidence as to why, there's this parchment, this old painting, this focile, well that's still just someone's belief of what happened, even if it constructs an explanation that fits the data. It might not be what actually happened at all, it's just a good model that fits the current data. So practically speaking, all you can do is nod and smile, or ask: ok what can I do with this? Can I use it to accurately predict what will happen in the future? Can I use it to make better decisions today so that the future ends up in that way instead of some other way? If no, well your explanation is crap, and all we can do with this explanation if you insist it is true is get mad at each other.
Oh, and the last thing is, with this frame of mind, it is perfectly acceptable for contradicting models to coexist. A model doesn't have to be "absolutely true to reality" to be practical. In fact, a not true to reality model could be more useful sometimes, an approximate model for example can sometimes be more easily computed, or put to use, it can make it that predicting things (while possibly less accurate), can be done more quickly or at higher scale, or with less data, etc. So again, I'm trying to show that if you discuss practical models, you kind of remove all sense of nobility and righteousness and pride and whatever that a belief in "truth" brings.
Edit: Oh and if anyone has read this far, to bring it back to Malcom Gladwell. What this means is that if you don't look at his revisionist history as a claim to the truth, but instead consider it a model of the past. The question isn't if he is right about the truth or not, but how practical is his framing of history for the reader. Can I leverage it to make better decisions today about political policies? About work policies? In my day to day life? Can I apply it to predict social trends? This is now what becomes important, how good a model is it, not how truthful is it.
I completely agree that a model that fits all data ever thrown at it is still not 'the truth', and that there is in fact no way to access ultimate truths about the world.
Unfortunately in the past I have seen people using this type of reasoning to then argue that, if truth is illusory, so is falsehood - that everything is a matter of opinion and utility (for example, Peter Jordan has argued this in the past). This does not at all follow from your my and your beliefs about ultimate truths, but it is tempting for some to extrapolate.
> ...allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. This means we really only care about the practicalities.
Exactly.
What's this called? Post-Popperian? Predictionist? Predictionatarian?
The last 4 years have transmuted me from a Popperian to a predictionist. Due to the futility, I've stopped trying to inform, refute, persuade. Now I only care about the quality and utility of predictions a model can make.
Young Earth Creationism? Cool. What can I do with that bit of wisdom? Nothing? Ok, well, thanks for sharing, I guess.
Descartes take is refuted by almost all philosophers that followed him, because it's just not a convincing argument.
> The problem with Descartes’ standard for knowledge is that almost no beliefs meet it. Descartes thought he could show how our ordinary knowledge claims are ultimately based on the Cogito, but most philosophers have not been convinced by his case
Now I don't deny the existence of a reality, I'm not saying everything is an illusion and we're not even real. I'm saying that reality need not be a constant, which would mean that truth can be a moving target, as it can change in time and space.
And then I'm saying that irregardless of if that reality (or ground truth let's call it) is constant or ever changing, when we humans explain that truth, we are always simply modeling our understanding of it for practical purposes. Our search for truth itself is driven by this practical drive, understanding of the ground truth is researched in order to better predict the future or act upon our environment to create the future we'd prefer.
If you instead think of our explained truths as the absolute ground truth, you are entering the world of human dogma and beliefs, that is a world of personal opinion, with no way to argue or debate anything, its only practical benefits are seeking comfort and/or power.
For me, this was a big "haha" moment. I realized that the opposite of dogma is pragma. Your claim to the truth are useless, and in many cases harmful dogmas. It's much better to focus on practicalities that one model has over another. Most people's "truths" have glaring flaws anyways, that doesn't always invalidate their practicalities though, and that matters much more in the end.
> If you're pragmatic, you're practical. You're living in the real world, wearing comfortable shoes. If you're dogmatic, you follow the rules. You're living in the world you want, and acting a little stuck up about it
That is fine, of course, but be careful not to believe the conclusions you draw from Gladwell alone and be very careful about asserting those conclusions as guides to future behavior without going to the effort of finding out where he is simply wrong.
I enjoy Revisionist History, but I have learned to take everything he says with a grain of salt. He throws out much of the nuance of history in order to neatly meld it with his narrative. The Boston Tea Party episode, for example, tried to paint the revolution as a bunch of rich smugglers upset about losing business. That may have been a small part of it, but it definitely is not the whole story.
I'm afraid to ever mention anything I heard from him in casual conversation because someone more knowledgeable would probably call me out.
I think Gladwell cares about history, and he cares about story, but if (as is often the case in history) he has to choose one at the expense of the other, it is going to be _story_ that he chooses every single time.
As an overly broad generalization, Gladwell is at heart a journalist, not a historian (even though he has a bachelor's in history). I enjoy listening to Revisionist history and reading some of his books, because some things in history are revealed by trying to form some kind of narrative (e.g., Historical Materialism), but he's not telling you history. He's forming a story from history. But I think his work is often an excellent stepping off point to real history texts, and it sometimes gets you to think about the second-order effect of things (his episode on Brown v. Board was extremely interesting).
Ironically the Boston Tea Party episode was also the one that broke me and made me bring a lot more grains of salt to my experience of his work. I think it's one of his worst episodes, and one where he tips his hand a little too far and breaks the illusion for anyone who has even casually read any serious works on the period. It's a _piece_ as you said, but it's an incredible oversimplification.
Most of history is a story written by the victors and what has survived. Unless there is primary evidence and even then most of that contains interpretation.
But I'm interested in what do you think the Boston Tea Party episode gets wrong?
The part where it was obvious then that picking a fight with England over taxes is not going to secure you a better economic outcome than either paying the taxes and grumbling or finding a new way to dodge them. If picking a war with a superpower makes you rich the Taliban should be rolling in the dough.
They wanted to give England the bird. The taxes were just the flimsy pretense. Pretty much all of them paid for it in opportunity cost at a bare minimum.
You're using an ambiguous pronoun reference. Who's picking the fight? I don't think it was so obvious that war would be the consequence.
If I'm a tea smuggler beating the competition by avoiding taxes and my competitor is granted an even better tax-avoidance method (an exemption), then I'm going to pick a fight. I still might find a different business, but I'd see how far I could push it, first.
That is the problem that most journalism has always had. There has never been a time when the most of the media wasn't pushing one narrative over another - usually in the interest of someone powerful.
One excellent example is Watergate. It was an extraordinarily well-reported story, and it remains to this an iconic story that everyone remembers as a major outrage. In the same era, there was the COINTELPRO leak, where a few people broke into an FBI building and found documents detailing extensive, egregious FBI Gestapo-style activities against the Civil rights movement (including trying to blackmail MLK into committing suicide, and working with the guy who assassinated Malcolm X, and many others). This was barely reported by a handful of papers, and even though it sparked actual legislative action, Senate committees, hearings etc, it has been all but forgotten. It never really fit the narratives deemed important by the kinds of people who write the news (who were largely against the Civil rights movement at the time).
This is not to say that extraordinary journalists haven't existed, to whom we owe great debts. It's not even to say that journalism hasn't degraded - there may well be fewer great journalists today than in other periods.
People live and breathe narratives. We are storytelling animals. We need to string those facts into a sort of coherent whole. We crave understanding, and we do it through stories. Facts don't matter, because they can be interpreted, weighted, viewed in such and such light, post hoc rationalized away...
The author of this article is writing for the casual reader of Gladwell's book who comes away thinking they have learned some history. That person may weigh their enjoyment of the story more or less strongly against whether it says something true about history, so may or may not appreciate Gladwell's emphasis. Either way, this article allows them to put the story better into the context of the history it purports to describe.
He clearly presents his stories in a manner that makes it easy to mistake them for the whole truth, though. I find this kind of excuse pretty thin coming from anyone more serious in tone than, like, Jon Stewart.
The first couple of seasons of Revisionist History were podcast gold. Lately though? I only listen if I'm desperate for content. It has taken a massive nosedive.
Carlin's podcast on this subject, summarizing other well-researched histories, gives a much better idea of why firebombing and the atomic bomb were considered within bounds. The Japanese government was willing to throw away an appalling number of military and civilian lives in order to delay inevitable defeat, or at the very least attempt to bargain for better terms on which to end the war. (Carlin accurately describes this as "a form of political murder.") In places like Burma, New Guinea, and Peleliu, Japanese soldiers were thrown into utterly hopeless actions in order to inflict as many Allied casualties as possible. Beyond this, Japanese soldiers generally refused to surrender, and often had to be killed to the last man.
Firebombing and the atomic bomb, while obviously subjects of internal bureaucratic and ideological jockeying, were considered viable primarily because they might shorten a long and very brutal war. Whether they did so or not is debatable, but we'd be on very shaky ground to debate the morality of the attempt from the comfort of posterity.
I don't particularly care for Gladwell's glib nonsense, but I also find fault with the sort of anti-Gladwell Brooklyn-podcaster history (e.g. https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin) that engages in righteous hand-wringing over supposed American atrocities, without once mentioning any of the context above, nor Japan's atrocities in China in the 1930s leading up to the conflict, nor the very obvious fact that America didn't start the war.
This is a bunch of nonsense. The real reason Americans wanted to finish the war with Japan quickly (at any cost) is that they were afraid that Russia would invade Japan.
Nonsense? How about you read up on Operation Ten-Go and the senseless suicidal demise of the battleship Yamato, wasting the lives of two and a half thousand Japanese men to accomplish absolutely nothing except a show of defiance. In total more than 4,000 Japanese men lost their lives that day, while less than 100 Americans were killed. They knew it was suicide and they did it anyway.
> The ships' crews were briefed on the nature of the mission and given the opportunity to stay behind if desired; none did.
Your parent post is right, the Japanese military were absolute fanatics.
Edit:
And another point. After the second atomic bombing, military officers attempted to overthrow the Japanese emperor to prevent the surrender. After the second atomic bombing. Let that sink in. If not for the heroic actions of a few Japanese men, they might have succeeded in suppressing the broadcast of the surrender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
This is a good example, although I would be careful about characterizing the entire Japanese military as fanatics. (To his great credit, Carlin is also careful in this regard, and discusses the issue at some length.)
The average Japanese soldier was certainly perceived as a fanatic—due a combination of the evidence at hand at the time, deliberate Japanese policy and propaganda, and also a lot of rather nasty racial narratives—which had a lot to do with why total war was seen as unavoidable.
I think the word fanatic is justified, but I see that it has derogatory connotations. Let's put it this way, the Japanese military, soldiers, sailors and officers, all provided their extreme courage and devotion numerous times over in that war. Courage and devotion to a horrible cause, but nonetheless they certainly weren't quitters.
Another example: 21,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, but only 216 taken as prisoners. They fought for five weeks until the bitter end. The stubborn defiance demonstrated at the Battle of Iwo Jima and Operation Ten-Go both played a role in the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
You're right that these are the sorts of figures that influenced the decision. It's also worth remembering that there were high-ranking members of the Japanese military who questioned the logic of the war or ordered retreats from indefensible positions, but were often arrested, assassinated, or ordered to commit suicide. Any stance other than loud, defiant resistance proved dangerous within a military hierarchy dominated by extremists.
There is also some evidence that Japanese Army officers created a deliberate culture of extreme violence, ordering ordinary soldiers to commit atrocities, for example, as a way of ruling out surrender as an option. The soldiers would then assume that their treatment by the other side would be identical.
I don't object to the word "fanatic" out of some semantic pedantry or because it's derogatory per se, but I think it robs us of some consideration of the individuals in question, and the various strands of policy, training, propaganda, fear, group pressure, and nostalgic death-worshipping cultural narratives to which they were subjected. The result was certainly the perception of fanaticism, which was intended to demoralize the Allies but backfired terribly, like the decision to prosecute the war itself. (And, as you point out, produced an enormous wastage of lives for no real gain.)
The research I've read recently puts this concern on the Japanese side. They delayed their surrender, despite atomic attacks, until after it was clear that the Russians were starting to pivot to the Pacific theater, and decided it was better to surrender to the US today than to endure a Russian invasion and occupation.
The Emperor states himself in his surrender that his decision was influenced by the display of the atomic bombs, and ultimately it was the Emperor who put the final end to the Japanese war effort.
It’s probably foolish to say the Soviets didn’t play a part in the decisions of some of the men involved but I also strongly doubt there’s a compelling argument that it was more influential than what the Americans had just shown themselves capable of doing. The Soviets were a distant threat compared to the Americans continually bombing Japan for 3 months up to that point.
> The Emperor states himself in his surrender that his decision was influenced by the display of the atomic bombs, and ultimately it was the Emperor who put the final end to the Japanese war effort.
The argument goes that the Emperor's public statements were an effort to save face in front of the country. "No, it wasn't our incompetence that created defeat, they had a Super Weapon!" The Russians could have had ground troops on Japanese territory in days, compared to weeks or months for the Americans.
There was a faction of right wing Republicans who wanted to end the war quickly in order to forestall Russia, but they wanted to end the war quickly by forgoing an invasion and allowing Japan to surrender conditionally, without an occupation or a forced change of government or constitution, because they thought an armed and relatively intact militarist-run Japan would be a good buffer against the Soviet Union. This was unacceptable to the liberal new deal faction running the US government, who believed that a disarmed and democratic Japan was the only way to prevent another war.
“They only wanted to keep the commies out” is a nicely glib line, but one that glosses over the many, many political considerations that shaped the end of the pacific war and reveals an almost total ignorance of the scholarship on the subject
There is no convincing evidence for this argument. The Soviet Union was deeply engaged in its war against Nazi Germany until the very bitter end, and fully mobilized in that direction. Beyond that, America provided immense quantities of aid to the Soviet Union in the form of Lend-Lease, including military hardware. Some would argue that this was profoundly short-sighted given the realpolitik of Stalin's approach to the war, with an eye on what the Soviet Union would do in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe after the war (as a realization of tsarist fantasies going back a hundred years or more). But the fact is that--while every decision has various complicating factors related to political and institutional concerns--America's primary focus was on ending the war as quickly as possible with an unconditional surrender.
When I first heard Dan Carlin's macho vocal persona, I expected a very hawkish and USA-centric view of history. But he completely defied my bias. He really makes an effort to present a balanced and nuanced view of history, from all perspectives in a conflict.
Thanks for the tip on part VI, I've been eagerly awaiting the release of that.
His voice sounds / sounded so uncannily like Alex Jones' (maybe just to me?) that I had a similar initial reaction, and similarly was pleasantly surprised
> He wasn't anywhere close to as critical as this review, however.
When someone with a much (much!) bigger following than you parachutes into your field and joins you on your platform (where you are currently covering the same topic), you maybe withhold your most severe criticism of their work.
Coincidentally, I just started reading Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank [1]. The very first chapter details survivor accounts of the March 45 fire bombing of Tokyo. Later chapters go into the difficulties LeMay had when trying to precision bomb industrial facilities and how ineffective the bombing was.
For a general; history of bombing as a tactic, I recommend A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist [2]. A short and unusual book in that the author gives instructions on how to read the book in two ways, either chronologically as a history book, or thematically, following the themes and ideas of bombing strategies.
Carlin spends a lot of time telling you where he gets information, who he's quoting from, how reliable they are, what the historical consensus is, etc. In a word, historiography.
That's not to say he never gets anything wrong, he and his researchers aren't steeped in the subject for their whole careers so they'll miss things. He is biased towards the exciting stories and sources, but usually qualifies them with "I'll tell you this fun story but historians disagree about X Y Z because of A".
I'll have to look into the criticisms but my impression just from listening is far better than any other pop history.
I've heard somewhat mixed things from my historian friends.
But you'll be happy to hear that "sometimes uses outdated sources or oversimplifies stuff" is a common criticism of basically all academic history written outside of the last 20 years, so he is in decent company.
> Carlin has also been criticized for being loose with history in favour of story.
How so? He seems to be pretty upfront in talking about his sources, quoting from them, and saying repeatedly that he's a journalist and not a historian.
In one of his podcasts, he talks about the "pendulum of history" and how it swings, depending on the time, between more story (ie more emotion and look as to feelings of the time) or more fact (ie 10k people died in this battle). He mentioned that he preferred to be on the more story side; giving eyewitness accounts and showing the emotion of the history. I wouldn't put him near Gladwell though, but on the more story side of the pendulum.
I think there's a difference between Dan Carlin's "I'm interested in exploring what it felt like to be in some moment of history, and why the people there made the decisions they made" and Malcolm Gladwell's "I'm going to cherrypick facts until my 'history' fits the just-so fable I'm trying to tell".
Being on the "story" side is IMO a large part of his podcast's appeal. You can get the bare facts of a battle or event on Wikipedia, and that's interesting in its own way. After listening to an episode on Carlin's podcast, I usually go look it up on Wikipedia, to get a different picture.
But talking about the people who were in that event, leaning heavily on eyewitness accounts and primary sources, all of that makes the events come alive. I think both are valid and important viewpoints on history. I think history in school would be a lot more interesting if it took a similar approach.
Looking at an historical event at more of a ground-level is nowhere near the same thing as giving outright incorrect information.
Barbara Tuchman's "Stilwell and the American Experience in China" is a good booklength treatment of WW2 in Asia, also prominently featuring a prominent proponent of air warfare, General Chennault.
Every time someone posts this, I wonder if they'd be able to solve some basic (albeit symbolic) eigenvalue problems. Could you? Like just some 2x2 problems that you can't just plug into Wolfram Alpha?
It seems a little odd to hold a journalist to a standard software engineers themselves don't generally meet.
I don't think anyone's saying Gladwell is dumb for not knowing about eigenvalues. They're taking his error as a symbol/symptom of his dilletante approach, and the fact that he's making bold claims and 'teaching' people about topics he has no real knowledge or understanding of. Steven Pinker put it this way when coining the phrase:
> the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
He writes big, popular books making grand, confident claims about the world, and purporting to back them up with scientific evidence. Experts in the fields he draws from regularly point out significant errors (or misleadingly selective presentation of facts) in his work. The Igon Value thing is a reminder that his work is more a storyteller's patchwork than a researcher's synthesis. (You'll say it's obvious that he's not a researcher; maybe, but some pop-non-fiction writers have more of a researcher's mindset than others. They might not be true experts but they read deeply in search of the truth.)
I mean, it's certainly true that he's not the most rigorous of the pop nonfiction writers! That's not so much the draw, I don't think, but I can't fault you for being annoyed that people behaves as if it was --- perhaps Gladwell himself included.
The point isn't about solving the problem, but at the very least spelling correctly what the problem is.
When I talk to a friend and I'm unsure about something I'm about to say, I try to express my epistemic deficiency (e.g. "if I remember correctly ..."). But when I'm giving a presentation to even 5 people I'll make sure to do a quick google search to confirm if I remember correctly. If I was writing an article that I know will be read by thousands, you bet I would do a lot more.
I guess I just wonder which is worse, misspelling "eigenvalue" in such a way that it's clear that the author is piping their source directly to the page, or spelling it correctly without understanding it, so we have to wonder how much of the mathematical validity of the source the author is vouching for.
Since I don't expect an ordinary writer to have a lot of linear algebra, it doesn't bother me much to know that they're taking their source's word for it on this stuff. But I do worry a lot about the ability for slick-talking people to persuasively name drop concepts they don't really grok.
The context that gets forgotten when people bring this up is that the essay initially appeared in the New Yorker in 2002, where "eigenvalue" was spelled correctly. All the controversy about whether he understands incidental math seems to come from his book publisher having a less careful copy editor than the New Yorker.
Maybe people could blame him for allowing the error to appear in the book, 7 years after it had been corrected in the magazine. Shrug.
Wow, and everyone said that all that math for a CS degree is useless, finally the time has come! /s
So, how come no one caught the error before publication? How come Gladwell did not even look up what an igon value is? Etc.
Everyone makes mistakes, but seemingly the more successful the author the more responsibility they should bear that their overall point is correct and useful. And Gladwell serially misses these marks. At least that's how I interpret these arguments.
I'm with you. The focus on this line also ignores context.
Gladwell is directly quoting Nassim Taleb, and openly says how little he follows the math Taleb discusses earlier in the same chapter. The point is "Look at how smart Taleb is, I don't even know what half these words mean", he was never trying to understand the math or imply he did. In that context mis-transcribing eigenvalues doesn't feel nearly as damning as it's made out to be around these parts?
The point of the "Igon Value Problem" is to have a term to describe popsci writers who create oversimplistic and overconfident narratives of complex domains that they know little about, often making basic errors and leading readers astray.
Whether or not I know about eigenvalues myself is a bit besides the point (although, yes, I did learn that in college).
Well, we're on a message board, so of course you're going to say you know what an eigenvalue is. That's the point of asking if you could handle some simple matrix questions. :P
I still don't understand the point of asking me that. I'm not the one writing books or articles in an authoritative tone on topics I know little about.
If I were to write an article about math with glaring errors, then your question would make more sense. Until then, my linear algebra ability isn't relevant.
It's not that Gladwell just place loose with his facts, conveniently leaving out things that contradict his central thesis. It's that he's often just flat out wrong. So wrong that he doesn't even realize how he blows up his own credibility:
"The sole thing the Marianas had going for them was that they were within range of Japan. But even that was an exaggeration. The truth is that they were within range only under perfect conditions. To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious tailwind to lift it off the runway. This was as crazy a situation as anyone faced throughout the whole war."
Yes. It demonstrates his complete lack of understanding how flight works. Lift is generated by air moving from the front of a plane's wing towards the rear. Having a tailwind reduces the amount of air traveling in this direction, reducing lift.
Generally, planes prefer to land and take off into the wind. Tailwinds are nice once you're already in flight, since they give you free speed.
It isn't irrelevant in the context; by saying that they are only in range under 'perfect conditions' he makes it sound like the operation was barely doable.
This is misleading. Air operations in WWII where continuously dependent on weather conditions and the wind conditions make a large difference to the payload a piston powered aircraft of that era can carry. The B-29 was specifically designed to accomplish the strategic bombing mission in a pacific war; it would not have been accepted into production if it could not reach Japan from the Marianas Islands. In fact, it could comfortably reach the vast majority of Japan and its industrial centers, only the north of japan was outside of its normal range.
The removal of most self-defense weaponry (except the tail cannon) made the entirety of Japan reachable; they simply weren't needed for night operations and Japan's fighter force was negligible by the end of the war. In fact, future b-29's were built with only a tail cannon in the first place.
The entire book is written like that. It should be pretty clear by even his tone that he just speculating and creating his own opinions to form a story. On top of that it is casually written like a series of blog posts; I found it incredibly hard to take seriously.
It's not like Gladwell doesn't criticize LeMay. He even accuses the entire US strategic command of waving away the responsibility of considering the morality of such a brutal firebombing campaign.
I didn't come away from the audiobook thinking LeMay had "won" even the battle, let alone the war (meaning ultimately precision bombing has won the argument in modern times). Granted, I already knew plenty about this before, but my impression in the end from Gladwell was that both Hansel and LeMay were wrong in different ways, just that LeMay's aggressive firebombing looked like it was "doing something" to the higher ups. The technology of the time simply did not allow the precision bombing approach to "look" like it was even "doing something" (and it was certainly failing by its own primary metric, hitting the target). Indiscriminate bombing is easy, so you can point at photos and say you succeeded in doing it.
Gladwell of course simplifies it a lot and wraps it up in a bow, because his strength is telling a story, not conducting a detailed analysis. At the very least, perhaps a lot of people will become aware of these events and be made to think about them.
Fact is, no one really knows if the firebombing hastened Japanese surrender or convinced the Japanese population that they really had lost. Maybe it did, and maybe it was important. Or maybe not. And it was certainly horrifying. Gladwell doesn't dwell enough on the uncertainty, but he doesn't forget to mention the moral issues.
It is a shame that nobody really knows the impact of this thing that was experienced by millions of people and extensively documented by the Japanese and subsequently studied by Japanese historians as well as all historians of the war and of East Asia everywhere. I guess it will always be the case that perhaps we achieved ends that offer some justification to the means we employed.
"There are infinite kinds of irresponsible books that a well-credentialed media insider can write. First are the total farces of fact. ... A second variety of irresponsible books are those whose primary purpose is to market their authors ... And then there are books whose fusion of factual inaccuracy and moral sophistry is so total that they can only be written by Malcolm Gladwell."
Personal anecdote about a book of his: I had a lunch interview and the CEO winced when I quoted What the Dog Saw, and corrected me using their actual experience running a large corporation. I think about not having to get along with coworkers, and the CEO said that was nonsense.
*No I didn't say I don't get along. They asked what books I was reading
"Look at the incentives and I will show you the outcome"
It's easy to make LeMay look more evil than he was. Once you've got the villain you need a hero if you want to tell a good story.
We're talking an author someone who does a layman level history podcast here. You can't expect him to fight over facts like a lawyer. That's just not what you do when you produce that kind of content. He's gonna find a bunch of facts, point the ones he likes in the direction of the point he wants to make and then turn them loose. And if the result is a good story he's gonna sell a whole bunch of books to the kinds of people who listen to his podcast.
It's a shame that making a mess out of history is a good business model but the fact of the matter is that it is.
Can’t most of TEDx be classified in the same vein as Gladwell? A bunch of people self congratulating each other for finding a way to make their ideas saleable?
TEDx ended up as a way for cranks and snake oil salesmen to launder their ideas through a façade of reputability with the TED name, because most people don't realize that anyone can organize / speak at a TEDx event with no oversight from TED.
There isn't much else to say. Malcom Gladwell is an utter hack. The mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that and glorifies everything he says.
Meanwhile, pretty much anybody whose field has been touched by Gladwell reports that his account of their field is utterly uninformed, lacking nuance, and shaped to reach a foregone conclusion.
> The mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that and glorifies everything he says.
For some reason I find it utterly hilarious. Because on any subject I know a bit I find reporting by media utterly wrong or willfully ignorant. And it just makes me think what about all the subjects on which I have little or no knowledge. Can I trust anything at all here.
I guess the point is same, like Gladwell media is obsessed with narrative often at cost of details/truth.
Michael Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again.
>>You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Malcom Gladwell writes clearly and persuasively. I don't believe he uses his rhetoric to deceive, I don't think it's full on sophistry. That said, he clearly won't let the facts get in the way of a good story. As much as I want truth, evidence and proof to have one true meaning, the words really mean different things to different people. Heck, they mean different things to the same person in different contexts.
Malcom Gladwell (in my humble opinion) is very good at making political arguments, not scientist arguments. They sound true. They engage in intellectual and emotional ways.
I have, with multiple Gladwell books, been led down the garden path. But golly it's a pretty and enjoyable walk. And eventually that walk leads me to other interesting stuff, like _thinking fast and slow_.
I guess, it's useful to me to read stories dressed up as science (kinda). Otherwise, how could I tell if the science I'm reading is just a story?
It is hard to read this as a positive thing. You are basically describing a con-man (or more neutrally, a politician) who is skilled at convincing people of things through stories that are not factually accurate but feel accurate - "Truthiness" as Jon Stewart called it.
At best, it is a shortcut to convince groups of people of a point but it is the opposite of informative - people come away with bad information, not partial information and curiosity to learn more.
He is specifically disliked because he is selling the "take-aways" as knowledge when they are the opposite, then says he is just a storyteller - which is good and fine except he is marketed and digested as a layman's source of truth. Which is why we have people walking around thinking they can be a concert-grade pianist with 10,000 hours of practice even though the argument falls apart with the slightest analysis.
If Hacker News caters to curious "hacker mindset" types I think Gladwell is the opposite of curiosity: insights without discussion or understanding.
I guess, I like Gladwell for the same reasons you dislike him. He's popular and picked apart. I can read his books and be convinced, then find out about all of the ways he's wrong. Where did I screw up? What did I fall for?
Blink was probably the one that had the biggest impact on me. There are some gems there. It lead me to other thinking about thinking ideas. I learned a bit about quality of sources. I learned a bit about skinner boxes. Ironically I'm here, refreshing HN. So clearly I didn't learn that lesson particularly well.
If you go into it with a critical eye and compare it to other sources, then you didn't fall for anything.
Reading mein kampf can be really insightful if you read it from a historical perspective and use the hueristics of skepticism. You can still dislike the original intent and think it is a missinformative work in general, but hold that the world would be better off without it.
But "Mein Kampf" is an important primary source propaganda, whereas Gladwell's books are trash secondary sources, unless the object of research is "comforting false narratives of the early 21st century".
I agree, Gladwell tells a great story and he’s absolutely entertaining to read. But I can’t quite wrap my head around how you began your comment by saying Gladwell doesn’t use rhetoric and end it by describing his writing as “stories dressed up as science (kinda)”. Is that not rhetoric?
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.
The 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.
You 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.
> Meanwhile, pretty much anybody whose field has been touched by Gladwell reports that his account of their field is utterly uninformed, lacking nuance, and shaped to reach a foregone conclusion.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Yeah, Blink was the first and last of his books I read. Nice anecdotes but it struck me as nothing more than saying "Your gut feeling is right, except when it's wrong"
More like, your intuitive jump related to areas in which you are experienced and expert, can and does give you conclusions way way quicker than it gives you justifications.
Hoving looking at a fake sculpture and instantly going 'NOPE' is not a Joe Average reaction, but draws on lots of experience. The story of gamblers giving stress reactions to unfamiliar and dangerous card games is GAMBLERS.
Your gut feeling has nothing to do with it. What are you so expert at, that you can just glance and you'll know? (as in, more than would be justified by the lack of analysis and prolonged exposure)
Being able to plausibly form hugely accelerated judgements and have them check out, is interesting. It's also plausible to me that few people build up that much expertise, to be able to do that. But for those who do… and it can be in any field, from any person… it's an interesting perspective.
Same!! I watched his TED talk on David and Goliath story and I thought he was interesting. Then I picked up Blink. 25 pages in, I realized he was full of shit.
Just finished Talking to Strangers. That's an unfair ungenerous depiction, by omission. Specifically, the punch line.
Wide spread cargo cult adoption of Kansas City's policing strategy ignored the science, explaining why few reproduced KC's successes, with all sorts of terrible consequences, resulting many senseless deaths, and destroying trust and legitmacy of policing.
Just another tale of bad policy, unintended consequences, railing against entrenched dogma.
In this case, Gladwell's quixotic suggestion is to step back, reassess, try again. Daylighting the science during this cycle of turmoil seems reasonable. Might even help.
I used to work on a government project where we were tasked with building lie detectors based off the concepts of blink (micro expressions) (and really Paul Ekman [1], where the concepts in blink came from)
After a few years at it, I came away thinking the whole thing was bullshit. Unfortunately, countless tax dollars were wasted.
Talking To Strangers was a choice for Zoom book club I was in during the shutdown. I was looking forward to it a little since I recognized but didn't know the name. I couldn't make my way through it and dropped out.
He has a New Yorker writing style but without having anything to say.
The only Gladwell book I have read is "Outliers". When reading it I couldn't shake the feeling that he was cherry picking his examples. It never pulled back far enough to study the phenomenon systematically and the examples he did use were scattered all across the world and decades. I ended up being fairly disappointed and have not bothered with any of his other work.
I guess I was most disappointed because it was getting absolutely stellar reviews at the time and I'm not sure why.
Blink is just an application of the Pareto distribution to what information can be gleaned from someone in what amount of time. 80% of what you’ll get, you’ll get in those first few seconds.
Being objective and moral has lead to amazing amounts of peace, cooperation, and prosperity. But I always think about an example that seems to say you can be too objective and maybe too moral:
Let's say a wolf is hungry and wants to eat you. Your options are (1) let it eat you; (2) run away to safety; or (3) shoot the wolf. No matter what, something will die. Either you die, another prey animal dies, or the wold dies (of starvation or being shot).
Being too objective means you will be the one that dies, because you can't find a reason to take an action like shooting the wolf or running away.
I have a hard time getting past this example when it comes to questions of war and morality. If there is little cost to you, of course it's easy to make the moral choice and avoid needless deaths of your enemies. But if the cost starts to become significant (e.g. protracted bloody war), then you need to make the choice that's right for you and your allies. Right?
The example you give of the hungry wolf, and the use of fire bombing on civilian cities are not equivalent moral problems, because one is much more complicated than the other.
For more on this topic, I recommend _Bombing to Win_ by Robert Pape. It's an older book now, but it does a pretty good job of skewering the idea that you can cheaply achieve military goals by imposing suffering on civilians:
https://www.amazon.com/Bombing-Win-Coercion-Cornell-Security...
I miss his old work, when it was focused more on pop-culture, and less on idealism, and politics. The podcast was going really well but as soon as he started going off on politics I lost interest really quick.
I love the idea that any history/philosophy can be divorced from politics. Like, I only enjoy hearing this human beings thoughts and opinions, but only if they exist in this narrow band of what I deem acceptable.
His ideas on satire are extremely valuable IMO, explicitly because of the political nature of his arguments. It critiques the inability of modern social systems inability critique those in power, and skillfully intermixes the politics of the time to enhance his point (that part about A Wonderful Country is beautiful, how an extremely political point can be made through satire, leagues beyond SNL)
I think there's a valid distinction between "using the politics of the time to better understand history" and "pushing personal politics through the teaching of history"
It is also known as stop and frisk. This type of policing has also been adopted to traffic stops as well and arguably has lead to warrior cop policing.
Gladwell discusses the implications of this in Talking to Strangers.
So if you want a perspective on guns, gun violence, policing from the 1970s until today, I recommend it.
Yeah, I kinda dipped when I felt like there were more opinions than history. Like, I understand that all history is colored by the person telling it, and that was kinda the whole idea behind Revisionist History in the first place, but I felt like he moved from highlighting less known aspects of history to highlighting basically where he thought history had gone wrong.
> "The only issue is that Gladwell’s account doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. As a piece of writing, The Bomber Mafia is engaging. As a work of history, it borders on reckless."
So it's classic MG? He's a good easy - often feel good - read. However, the pattern that's too clear is he rarely supplies a counter argumemt or counter view. He takes his position and then plays pile on with "the facts."
If anyone wants to have a little fun* down a rabbit hole, you can find some before and after aerial photos of Japanese cities on the geological societies web page.
Well it sure is hard to tell because, of course, I wasn't there of course, but isn't that exactly the problem here?
For my entire life I've heard the bot mot that "History is written by the victorious"...well doesn't that mean at its base level that ALL of it bathes in its own bullshit?
I like Malcom's writing and his pod...and at least he has the honesty to call it "Revisionist History" as he is obviously telling us that HERE, yes, narrative story might win out over historical accuracy (which, once again, we have been taught is BS anyway).
Why shouldn't non-textbook history reflect the shades and biases of its author? As long as its well written and presents fair reflections upon this history, why should the author be pummeled by critics for doing so?
Too many questions and not enough answers...as usual.
I suggest people think about reading Solly Zuckerman "from apes to warlords" which includes his time doing statistical and operations research analysis on bombing.
A few years back Gladwell put out a podcast with Rick Rubin. The unlikely duo struck me as interesting so I listened to an episode where they discussed a brand new song by Eminem (which Rubin produced).
I have nothing against Eminem and don’t want to sound like a snob but the way Gladwell gushed over this (super cheesy) Eminem track seriously tainted his reputation for me.
My experience with Gladwell has been a positive one, but I would never consider him the source/expert on anything.
I put him between John Oliver (cherry picked truths veering on lies) and Nate Silver (will have an opinion, but will separate it from the source data).
He tries to reach a conclusion through honest means and good research. However, his narration will skip over / bend the specifics to make the journey to the conclusion more digestible.
He has been an excellent entry point for a lot of my peers who are less inclined to read textbooks or non-fiction novels. Similarly, his podcast is always interesting enough to keep the attention of a random person despite covering what they would've otherwise not been interested in.
Sub out history for science in the above paragraph and it is the same criticism that Gladwell has been receiving for literally decades. The guy is a good writer and storyteller but he seemingly prioritizes good writing and story over telling the most honest story. That isn't an unusual trait among pop-non-fiction writers. The reason they become popular is what they write is interesting and it is easier to make things interesting if you are a little loose with the truth.