Hold up with this one. The author of this article appears to enjoy and appreciate The Tipping Point (as apparently Tyler Cowen did, at the time, and me as well, though not any more). That's problematic, because the society we're a part of (HN, the Internet, whatever) has roundly concluded that Gladwell is a farce, and it's become a genuflection to that society to dunk on Gladwell wherever his name pops up.
But this is an interesting article. The one thing most serious critics of Gladwell --- by serious I mean, not quipping message board comments --- can agree on is that Gladwell is an effective writer. Maybe even a good one? Listen to the sneering "If Books Could Kill" podcast on Tipping Point to see what I mean.
It's not just that Gladwell sells a lot of books. The writing works. It's oddly propulsive, it drags you in. He's not unpleasant to read, it's just irritating to unhitch yourself from it for a moment and realize that the story he's telling or the point he's making is vapid. I get that.
But effective writing is a valuable tool, and a dissection of what makes Gladwell effective, even if this isn't the best or most careful dissection, is interesting.
Get over the Gladwell hate for a minute and actually read this thing. It's not really about what you think it's about.
Another data point towards caution when reading Gladwell:
Malcom Gladwell's book: Outliers, The Stories of Success (2011) is what brought the "10,000 hours to master a skill" quip to popularity.
That book drew on research by Anders Ericson as its scientific basis.
But Ericson himself found Gladwell's book so problematic he later wrote a book of his own: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2017) to set the record straight.
In Peak, there is an entire section dedicated to describing what portions of Gladwell's interpretation is problematic, and how it oversimplified the Ericson's own research.
That comment isn't arguing against the gladwell-is-a-hack perspective, just pointing out that his skill at a certain kind of writing is orthogonal and that he is, in fact, good at a certain kind of writing.
We all get it. Gladwell trades in "it turns out than" constructions as much as anybody else. But so do lots of mediocre writers. Gladwell is fun to read. People don't read him simply to scratch their chin and say "yeah, that's right, that's how the world works, I should uPdAtE mY pRiOrS", the way they do with other it-turns-out-ists. They read him because he knows how to bait a hook and cast a line, and if you make the mistake of nibbling at a Gladwell paragraph you're apt to get snagged. That's a skill, and it's as superficial and vapid as a Gladwell argument to pretend otherwise.
You seem to be confusing the claim hackery is integral to and inseperable from Gladwell's effectiveness rather than orthogonal to it for a claim that hackery is sufficient for his effectiveness.
I think the hackery's necessary in that it's necessary in order for him to have completed his books with as little effort as he did. Writing as well without the hackery would require coming up with better theses (which would mean jettisoning weak ones when you realize they're weak, and starting over, rather than plowing ahead regardless—this could be a long process) and a lot more time finding and evaluating evidence.
Good writing ability (for certain definitions of "good") plus hackery are necessary if you want to make the economics of your writing work as well as he has, writing airport nonfiction books. Writing non-hacky nonfiction is takes a lot more time and (perhaps) more talent.
> Do you think that it's impossible to be as effective with a more correct thesis?
No.
I think that the techniques for being effective at synthesizing and conveying accurate information in writing are very different from the techniques for being effectiveness at selling pseudo-intellectual just-so stories reinforcing conventional values like “putting time in on focussed hard work is the most important ingredient to success”.
My interpretation of Gladwell is simply that he's very good at the standard method of finding a relatable example to illustrate a theory. His problem (a common problem) is that he tends to ignore counter-examples.
Gladwell later changed his view on the 10,000 hours thesis. In the foreword to "Range: Why Generalists Win in a Specialized World" by David Epstein, he openly says that.
I don't think this is a failing of Gladwell, though. He truly believed the Outliers thesis at the time and was, in fact, partially true.
Not just in your opinion. The 39% swing away from Gladwell's position, in favor of the affirmative, is the largest swing in the history of the Munk debates.
The audience was slightly in favor of the media in the pre-debate poll. Or do you think they weren't really, but were massively sandbagging? I admit that it's a possibility, but that wouldn't explain why this was apparently the largest pre/post swing in Munk history.
Can you please elaborate? What type of audience does one expect to not support a particular claim at the start, then to swing their opinion wildly in favor of it?
I'm just looking at the results of all the previous debates on Wikipedia. Whatever the starting vote on this issue was, the result of the debate falls sort of coherently in line with previous results.
Michael McFaul absolutely trounced Mearsheimer on the Ukraine issue. The forum may feature more conservatives than liberals, but the result is not a forgone conclusion. This is evidenced by 30+ point swings in recent debates, where both the liberal and conservative position have prevailed. I encourage you to reconsider your assessment.
The Ukraine debate is I think the one example I think you can come up with, and something like 50% of conservatives are on the same page as liberals on Ukraine.
If you actually watch the debate, you can see the audience shift from their initial position to their final one. I don't buy your premise that the outcome is predetermined based on the political bias you've implied with your comments.
I'm simply observing that if you look at the history of these debates, there's a pretty coherent ideology to the winning side. That's all. Make of it what you will. If I got to bet on this debate before it occurred, I'd have put all my money on the "against the mainstream media" square, and then taken out a loan to get more money to put down.
I've watched about 40 minutes of that debate -- does it improve at all? The pro side seemed content to provide compelling anecdotes almost exclusively. The con side was also presenting anecdotes, but Gladwell at least made the crucial point that the mainstream media at least has a process for discovering and reporting the truth.
The "both sides" game from the pro team was excruciating.
As an aside, even when it comes to the anecdotes, Matt Taibbi was incredibly disingenuous about the one thing I fact-checked: his reporting on ivermectin. Sure, he might not have said "everyone should take ivermectin." But in the very first interview I hit with him about it his statements can be summarized as:
"Ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating parasites." -- this sets up a kind of expert opinion fallacy: if Ivermectin is so good at fighting parasites, and viruses are sort of like parasites, right? So Ivermectin might be good for Covid.
Then he says, "Some studies have given weak evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin for Covid." This elides so much about those early studies.
Then he says, "And no one can talk about it [those positive studies]."
It boils down to "tell me you think Ivermectin is good for Covid without saying the words 'Ivermectin is good for Covid'" and it makes me doubt anything Taibbi says. And the fact that he can have said that and then claim that he never supported Ivermectin tells me he will lie to prove a point.
In the pre-debate vote, trust in media had a 4 point edge (52/48), and in the open-minded poll, 82% said they were open to changing their mind.
He and Michelle Goldberg were beaten soundly by a guy whose first name Malcom got wrong, and a guy whose last name Malcom got wrong (repeatedly, in both cases).
If they are impossible to defend, why did he participate in a Munk debate where his sole purpose was to defend them? Clearly he doesn't agree with your premise. For that he deserves criticism.
I'm unfortunately quite familiar, and I heard him speak in person in Cambridge MA, many years ago when he was in the first period of his fame. Its not just my own feelings about him or his dishonesty, he truly was a lackluster speaker and the person who brought me to hear him was slightly embarrassed!
> That's problematic, because the society we're a part of (HN, the Internet, whatever) has roundly concluded that Gladwell is a farce.
I wish this was backed up with some actual links. Even the comments here asking "Wait, what/who/when decided that Gladwell is a farce?" are met with just comments without more information.
Personally, I am aware of the widespread rejection of how Gladwell presented "10000 hours" in Outliers (and by just googling "Anders Ericsson 10000" it's easy to find plenty of references). And, as Gladwell is a book writer with a point to make in each book, I can understand criticism that he can take conclusions beyond what the data necessarily warrants.
But I'm not, however, aware that the "society" "has roundly concluded that Gladwell is a farce". If you can point to evidence of this I'd definitely like to understand this point.
Alas, I've had to sit through "contrarian" nerds regurgitating various freakish takes that typically drift towards the same ideological valence. Because of this, I quite enjoyed an hour of rather well-informed dunking on Freakonomics.
To an extent, it's salutary: the whole TED-adjacent ecosystem favors storytellers over actual expertise, and it's helpful for me [an author of grant proposals] to review cases where compelling storytelling went too far.
Wait, his writing is bunk? I read the series of books and honestly it changed my outlook a lot and I think it was quite successfully, particularly the whole thing about Mavens and trendsetters.
I also related strongly to the leukemia doctor story. I think my rough up bringing made me more stubborn and tenacious than my peers because if I didn’t work I didn’t eat.
I read the Tipping Point in particular more than once, I thought it was so fascinating
I believe consensus is that there's a tremendous (like, wow, tremendous) cherry picking of data and spurious connections to create a catchy engrossing narrative that makes us feel more enlightened and with profound new understanding of the world... But has no actual rigorous methodology or statistical significance. He is unashamedly a teller of stories, not a scientific researcher. They are fun but should not be taken as accurate. As tptacek says, pretty much all of us have gone through that cycle. He's a great read but should be taken as casual entertainment, more closely related to fiction.
Do not make policy decisions based on Gladwell :-)
Edit : a perhaps stretched analogy - his stories are to me akin to Taylor Swift sharing her story and saying "I practised hard and didn't give up and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams". It's true but not as meaningful or applicable as it may seem - it's insufficient causation and incomplete correlation.
Majority of people who practice hard won't be Taylor Swift.
Conversely,There are many additional reasons beyond practicing hard Taylor Swift succeeded.
It's a compelling narrative but horrible statistical model or understanding of world and causality.
His "The Bomber Mafia" book seems to have gone down pretty badly with WWII historians. Possibly there is an element of professional jealousy, but mostly I think because of his cavalier attitude to the facts as generally understood by historians.
He is unashamedly a teller of stories, not a scientific researcher
This implies he considers himself a storyteller but he does not. I recently heard him interviewed where he (rightly or wrongly) explicitly described his job as being a researcher.
Fascinating! I read couple of interviews with him, but many years ago, where he insisted he was a storyteller! Limited chance I'll dig them up but I'll try
> He is unashamedly a teller of stories, not a scientific researcher. They are fun but should not be taken as accurate.
Real science is boring, wishy-washy and full of caveats, as they should be, researchers should disclose limitations of the studies. But because of that, it's not something the average person will find memorable or talk to a friend about.
Gladwell's popularity comes from the fact that his narratives are told with conviction and in a way that feels exciting. People respond to that, similarly to how they respond to confidence in interpersonal interactions.
It's not that his stories aren't true, so much as that he has a tendency to draw grand conclusions and compelling narratives from history and events that are far more complicated than he depicts. I also personally didn't like his podcast because he has sometimes will make absurd analogies or emotive appeals, but that's more of an academic criticism than his points being bunk.
> An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this 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.
There's probably a deeper philosophical point to make here between "ART" and "SCIENCE" broadly (and reductively) considered, but I see it as a matter of respect: Do you think the author respects the subject enough to write a factual story that portrays that subject honestly, or is the author doing a cleaned-up piece of tabloid journalism and going for readership and responses, and is simply going to use some misunderstood parts of that subject as props to make a Sweeping Conclusion regardless of what the facts support?
In short: Does the author care about facts, or do they care about making their case?
It’s the story of Emil Freireich, M.D[0] who went against conventional wisdom at the time in treating childhood leukemia and (as I recall) made what was once a almost guaranteed death sentence for children something with higher survival rates and ultimately saved millions of lives, but his approach, as told in the book, was not for the faint of heart and it’s credited to his tumultuous upbringing that made him hardened to criticism that would deter others from pursuing something they had conviction about, basically.
At the time Emil was (as I recall) treated as an outsider and viewed with skepticism for his work until basically it was irrational not to see how he was saving lives
The criticism isn't that his stories are vapid, it's that a) his conclusions and wider narratives amount to borderline-meaningless just-so stories dressed up as "deep thoughts" and b) the evidence he uses to build his narratives collapses under even the slightest scrutiny.
Mix in his habits of open disdain for anyone outside of the creative class (see his comments on remote work), his books' occasional cultural supremacy issues, and his recent apologia for strategic bombing, and Malcolm Gladwell has hit the jackpot for distasteful writers.
He is, however, as others have noted, a very compelling storyteller.
I consider him the Graham Hancock (see Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse) of pop culture topics. Gladwell is trying to do for pop culture which Freakonomics did for economic topics which draw from seemingly disparate elements to provide a correlation and explanation.
Or, for me, anyway: He often doesn't deliver what he promises to deliver. I still find his writing enjoyable and he is a captivating speaker, but his stuff seems to go… nowhere.
I don't think Greene is treated anywhere near as seriously. Especially since his books tend to fall into the category (in my mind, at least) of "self-help" rather than scientific non-fiction. The Laws of Power, Strategies of War, etc. are clearly advice books, so him presenting anecdotes for examples and drawing lessons from them makes more sense than someone doing it with explanatory intent of a deeper and more fundamental phenomenon.
I'm not sure vapid is the right word. Truthy is probably more like it. Or, less superficially, he tends to cherry-pick data and observations to come up with a compelling narrative and headline that isn't really supported by the evidence.
That's correct. He ignores and sometimes intentionally misconstrues the evidence in order to tell a compelling story. He makes bold claims that are not really backed up by anything.
Take the 10,000 hours claim? Based on very little. There's nothing special about 10,000 hours. And the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims.
> the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims
Do you have more information on this? I know lots of social science studies have not stood the test of time, but I didn't know Anders Ericsson's paper had big problems.
It's not that deliberate practice isn't a big factor and very important. It's the idea that it's massively and overwhelmingly decisive.
For example, this meta-analysis of sports performance found that deliberate practice was important but not overwhelmingly so, accounting of 18% of performance on average.
It seems like there is a lot of plasticity in human performance, and it may be the case that many of us can get pretty good at a lot of things, but there also appear to be many factors distinct from practice that make substantial contributions to performance.
I honestly found his writing to be super frustrating and not effective in the least. I've never seen a person confuse correlation and causation as much as him. I've also never seen a more convincing case for book burning.
Sapiens made me madder than anything Gladwell wrote. Taleb's book I read was basically one correct idea hammered into your brain for 300 pages. His other books seem to be similar just based on their titles.
He wrote the foreword to Dr. Thorpe's book and it was just a rant against 'academia'. Reading the book, A Man for all Markets, showed that academia was, imo, a foundation for his success and the basis of his successful investment ventures, with some notable reasons that caused him to exit his tenured position. The foreword was imo pretty much a non-sequitur and did not improve an otherwise excellent read.
> I've also never seen a more convincing case for book burning.
I'd encourage you to look a little harder in the same bookstore section that Gladwell tends to be stocked in - there are _lots_ of candidates for this which are far more convincing.
Gladwell is an engaging writer and spins (too good of) a tale. I think reading The Tipping Point fresh some of the characteristics he came to be criticized for weren't as prevalent. But, as with you, once you knew what to look for from reading other books and critiques of them you realize they were there in The Tipping Point too, albeit in more muted form.
> it's become a genuflection to that society to dunk on Gladwell wherever his name pops up.
This is such a trope that I seriously got halfway through the article before I realized it wasn't actually just a long set up for a punchline to explain why Gladwell really sucks.
It was this comment that got me to go read the article. I agree with your sentiment about Dickens, and am now contemplating hanging this other quote over my bookcases:
> the Pessoa quote, “The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed — they buy little dreams.”
> Hold up with this one. The author of this article appears to enjoy and appreciate The Tipping Point (as apparently Tyler Cowen did, at the time, and me as well, though not any more). That's problematic, because the society we're a part of (HN, the Internet, whatever) has roundly concluded that Gladwell is a farce, and it's become a genuflection to that society to dunk on Gladwell wherever his name pops up.
Maybe they're reading him to learn social engineering, like one reads Mitnick (who is also not good but has produced... interesting... work.)
> Get over the Gladwell hate for a minute and actually read this thing
More generally, a really great writer can do incredibly persuasive things with a terrible argument. It really is a super power.
I'd also say, most of the great engineers I know also write for humans well. I think engineers, especially younger ones, can underrate how useful eloquence is.
The “sneering” podcast that found serious problems with his work? I admit that the hosts are both sarcastic sassballs, but in some cases their sneering is justified. That’s the point of their podcast after all, to snipe at these “truthy” ideas that have grabbed hold of the public imagination.
As an aside - I just finished "The Bomber Mafia" and found it to be a very fun and interesting read. A departure from his "Pop-Smart" type books in the past.
He's a very entertaining writer, and effective at telling stories - definitely lessons to be learned from his style.
As LA Review of Books put it, "The only issue is that Gladwell’s account doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. "
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Gladwell - he's a great story teller, and the only issue is that he pretends they are true. (When he either made them up, or he just really didn't understand the problem)
Gladwell is in many ways an incorporation of all that's wrong with journalism. Writing for effect, focused exclusively on drawing eyeballs in. Yes, he's successful at it. Yes, you could learn from him, but you're always in danger of accidentally learning that style trumps substance.
It's clear to me that the authors appreciate and enjoy Gladwell. I do too.
I confess that even though TED (and similar) talks tend toward vapid, oversimplified self-parody, I sometimes find them enjoyable and even inspiring to watch.
Great podcast recommendation - the 5 out now are all books h enjoyed for their perspective, but it wasn’t a perspective I was a supporter of / believer in.
Every chapter of every book follows the same formula, but it works and it's fun to read. And while arguably he's kind of a grifter who set back society by a couple of decades, he might still have claim to be being the most important writer of our times.
I think the very worst thing you can pin on Gladwell is "broken windows policing", which really did cause a lot of harm, but he was writing about it, not instigating it. Maybe some municipalities enacted more of it after he wrote about it, though.
But I don't think he set back society at all, really. He just didn't move it forward, either. (His podcast series about what colleges spend money on is pretty solid, though.)
For those not in the know, as I was, VAM stands for Value-Added Modeling, a method of (apparently) calculating the effect of a teacher by comparing their students' grades with those same students' grades in previous years and with other students of the same grade.
How discredited is VAM actually? (This is a rathole, and we can probably table it, but I don't come to this discussion assuming radical changes to teacher evaluation are a terrible idea, the way I do with broken-windows policing). It clearly predates Outliers by a lot.
Diane Ravitch has an entire book about this. If you read the two chapters about the epistemology of the statistics behind VAM, you can see it's actually pretty similar to Theranos, an idea that can't even work on principle regardless of the technology or how it's implemented:
One on-the-ground outcome of these practices I've heard about:
You're a math teacher. Like half the incoming class is horribly deficient at one part or another of math that was last heavily-covered several years earlier. I'm talking, you're a 7th grade math teacher, and some of these kids aren't able to do long division, plus probably a bunch of other stuff (it's rarely just one thing). This can happen because a single teacher a single year was kinda shit and no-one since has tackled this problem.
You have a choice.
1) The right thing to do is ignore practically everything about what you're supposed to teach them in your grade—not for all the students, but for those with huge gaps in knowledge—and try to fix some of those problems, until all the worst problems are addressed, and only then (and you probably won't have time) try to teach them the new content. They are all but certainly doomed to never truly improve at math if you don't do this.
This will result in those students bombing the standardized tests on which you'll be judged, and on which your career hinges. Good chance they'll do worse than they did the year before. It's also a bunch of extra work because you're coming up with and applying way more lesson plans, activities, assignments, et c. But, they'll in fact be better off.
OR...
2) You can mostly ignore those problems and teach them as much as you can of this year's content. You're a good teacher (else you'd not even consider the first option) so you can do a decent-enough job of getting them to the point they can at least pattern match and guess their way to... well, not success, but something. Yes, their scores will still be bad, but it might mean they get 35% right instead of 15% (if you'd taken the first option), and maybe last year they only got 32% right, so it still looks like you did a good job (the tested content's different each year, so even a small % improvement in scores is good)
Almost nobody chooses the first option because they'd have admin up their ass in a hurry. If they're good and really dedicated they might put in a ton of extra effort and their own time to try to put together supplementary instruction programs of one sort or another. This will likely gain them no extra compensation, and probably involve a whole lot of admin- and politics-induced bullshit. It might even make some enemies. No fun.
Repeat for a few years until the way-above-average teacher burns out and quits to go get paid & treated better in another career, with way less stress.
She was one of the chief architects of NCLB, so on that basis you'd expect her to support high stakes testing and VAM. But obviously she's completely changed her opinion since the Bush era, largely based on the academic research that has been done since on the effects and effectiveness of those policies.
Gladwell is a story-teller first and foremost and a good one at that. The problem everyone, including myself, have is that he won't let the truth get in the way of good story. He'll bend the facts in to the narrative arc. He should be writing fiction.
But this is an interesting article. The one thing most serious critics of Gladwell --- by serious I mean, not quipping message board comments --- can agree on is that Gladwell is an effective writer. Maybe even a good one? Listen to the sneering "If Books Could Kill" podcast on Tipping Point to see what I mean.
It's not just that Gladwell sells a lot of books. The writing works. It's oddly propulsive, it drags you in. He's not unpleasant to read, it's just irritating to unhitch yourself from it for a moment and realize that the story he's telling or the point he's making is vapid. I get that.
But effective writing is a valuable tool, and a dissection of what makes Gladwell effective, even if this isn't the best or most careful dissection, is interesting.
Get over the Gladwell hate for a minute and actually read this thing. It's not really about what you think it's about.