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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

#31

Post by bbgm »

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.

Heartily agree. Godin has made me pause and think which is more than I can say for most people

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#32

Post by DenisM »

dcminter wrote: post #4

Hmm. I can spot an Orlowski article from the title these days; he's made something of a career of detracting from popular organisations (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) and persons. I dislike the approach partly from a distaste for the tabloid savaging of the successful but mostly because it seems to lead to rather thin regurgitations of existing critiques. I believe that is the case with this article.

Orlowski is the sole reason I unsubscribed from the Register. I hope he will not be frequent here.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#33

Post by Alex3917 »

petercooper wrote: post #24
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…

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. The…

"Many of these people go unheralded. This makes those I mentioned successful 'idea spreaders' in my book."

I agree with this, but I guess I would differentiate between someone who comes up with an insight on their own (even if someone else has come up with something similar before), and someone like Gladwell who just reads books and then rewrites the good parts to make the ideas spread.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#34

Post by robg »

pg wrote: post #28
robg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infl…

Absolutely. Newton only became Newton when it was shown the ideas worked, and better than Leibniz, for instance. Same deal with Einstein. Their contemporaries knew they were onto something, but a healthy dose of skepticism was reserved until the ideas gained empirical weight. Still not all of their "good" ideas were validated.

Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven wrong. If we know how the experiment will turn out, there's little point in actually running it. And there, I think the process you describe for startups isn't so different than the process for science. In each, the hunch points the direction but the apparatus must be built to verify or reject it. But it's hard for me to see one hunch, rather than a tested series, leading to a true discovery.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#35

Post by robg »

Alex3917 wrote: post #21
robg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Replication is trivial once someone else has already shown you how to test the idea. But only if they're right will you be too.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#36

Post by andreyf »

trominos wrote: post #12
Alex3917 wrote: post #2

This article is kind of amusing, but it's clear the author didn't actually read Gladwell's newest book. While in general I think it'd be fair to describe Gladwell's writing as intellectual comfort food, Outliers is pretty good. The last chapter on KIPP was pretty dubious, but not in a way that detracted from the thesis.

Dunno about that. I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and that violinists who have a chance to become virtuosos have uniformly practiced about 10000 hours, while the merely "good" ones have practiced about 8000 hours and the bad ones have pr…

I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information...

I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes...

Which is precisely why authors use "statistically irrelevant" anecdotes. Because they help you emotionally connect to the material and remember it better.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#37

Post by pg »

robg wrote: post #34
pg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infl…

Absolutely. Newton only became Newton when it was shown the ideas worked, and better than Leibniz, for instance. Same deal with Einstein. Their contemporaries knew they were onto something, but a healthy dose of skepticism was reserved until the ideas gained empirical weight. Still not all of their "good" ideas were validated. Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven…

If your ideas are only valuable when other people believe them, then if everyone else died of some plague that you happened to be immune to, it would suddenly be impossible to have good ideas. That doesn't seem right.

Re: The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

#40

Post by Alex3917 »

robg wrote: post #35
Alex3917 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

Replication is trivial once someone else has already shown you how to test the idea. But only if they're right will you be too.

Figuring out how to test an idea is a "tame" problem, in that the problem has a definitive formulation and stopping rule.

Coming up with an entirely new paradigm is, if not exactly a "wicked" problem, some other type of complex problem so difficult and uncommon that we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it.

So when I say that coming up with ideas is more difficult than testing them, what I mean is that coming up with an idea belongs to a more difficult class of problem, even if it is occasionally easier to create a specific idea than to test that specific idea.

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