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The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

theregister.co.uk

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Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#21

Post by Alex3917 »

robg wrote: post #17
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that. But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me. I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. T…

"I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that."

Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc.

If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#22

Post by Alex3917 »

Tichy wrote: post #19
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

I swear I don't say this for brownie points, but honestly, I wouldn't put pg in the same category as the other names you mentioned (though I admit I don't know them all, but most). I value pg's essays much more - he is not going for the daily quip, rather, his essays always treat something new in perfect fashion. Gladwell and Godin could be writing daily columns for womens/mens magazines, saying the same things we al…

I'll put Godin's fifteen best ideas against the fifteen best ideas of anyone else. Anyone who really believes in judging talent by the high points should agree that this is a better metric than his daily blog posts, which admittedly have mostly sucked for the past year.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#24

Post by petercooper »

Alex3917 wrote: post #13
petercooper wrote: post #11

Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps ide…

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down.

If by "good ideas" you mean "good insights" then I totally agree.

However, very few of the ideas that these people have popularized were truly original (in a sense that I feel a "new" idea should be). My original point was that this doesn't matter anyway - if their good presentation highlights a point, that's awesome. These people all know how to connect dots in an interesting way and then relay these ideas. They are (for the most part) not coming up with wildly new concepts and inventions (pg's founding of Viaweb being a good exception to this, of course!)

For what it's worth, a lot of people have "good ideas" and write them down. Many of these people go unheralded. This makes those I mentioned successful "idea spreaders" in my book.

Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.

Since the insights people have often depend on the hard and boring science and studies to be completed, that strikes me as an odd (or perhaps it was satirical?) statement. Without the lab equipment and "statistical tests" there would be few new confirmed discoveries for us to make these connective insights about ;-)

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#25

Post by petercooper »

fallentimes wrote: post #18
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

I wouldn't lump Godin with PG & 37signals.

In terms of developing products and services, neither would I. I was joining them for the insights and concepts they all come up with (i.e. pg's essays, 37signals methodologies, Godin's marketing concepts).

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#26

Post by aswanson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #13
petercooper wrote: post #11

Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps ide…

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

I don't think you can equate "being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical test afterward" with "making significant scientific discoveries". You're putting any lab tech in the same league with the founders of quantum mechanics, etc here. And for all the good they do I don't think you can put the above-mentioned authors/bloggers anywhere near the people who lay foundations in scientific fields.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#27

Post by queensnake »

sharkfish wrote: post #14
sharkfish wrote: post #9

I hate rants with misspellings. One I found was "breaktaking". I'm sure he meant "breathtaking". Get an editor, you twat.

I see I'm being modded down by programmers who also can't spell.

For taking up space on HN with nothing.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#28

Post by pg »

robg wrote: post #17
Alex3917 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and 'idea spreaders' do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries." I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment…

I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that. But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me. I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. T…

I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value.

Really? Would you say this is true for Newton's work, or Einstein's?

I find that new ideas in the sense of new insights about how the world works are extremely rare, and that having them is much harder than testing them, because having them requires you to change the way you think.

Perhaps you are influenced here by the situation with startups, where ideas are cheap and execution tends to count for more. But this is a different kind of idea. The reason startup ideas are cheap is that they tend not to be discoveries, but merely hunches about where to look for discoveries. E.g. the startup idea equivalent of Newton's work would be "Explain mathematically why planetary orbits have the shape they do."

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#29

Post by aswanson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #22
Tichy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear I don't say this for brownie points, but honestly, I wouldn't put pg in the same category as the other names you mentioned (though I admit I don't know them all, but most). I value pg's essays much more - he is not going for the daily quip, rather, his essays always treat something new in perfect fashion. Gladwell and Godin could be writing daily columns for womens/mens magazines, saying the same things we al…

I'll put Godin's fifteen best ideas against the fifteen best ideas of anyone else. Anyone who really believes in judging talent by the high points should agree that this is a better metric than his daily blog posts, which admittedly have mostly sucked for the past year.

Would you mind sharing his best 15 here, succintly, for us?I haven't read his books; from the blog posts I haven't distilled anything earthshattering.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#30

Post by [deleted] »

petercooper wrote: post #11

Andrew Orlowski has made the typical geek mistake of dismissing the value of presentation in relation to content. Gladwell may well twist soft scientific insights into "intellectual comfort food" (as said by Alex3917 above) and this might not be particularly challenging or clever, but it's easy to read, gets readers, and gets most of us thinking about the bigger picture. He's just joining dots in a way that helps ide…

[deleted]
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