61–70 of 232 posts
I have heard the genre (which includes Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, the Freakonomics guys and Jared Diamond) described as "insight porn". The idea is to deliver small chunks of insight that is just counter-intuitive enough to be novel, but not so counter-intuitive that we can't take it at face value. It's a market that's developed in response to the fact that nerds are addicted to feeling like they're just a littl…
As a personal data point, I grew up reading lots of "entertaining" books that claimed to have intellectual value, but in hindsight didn't really end up being that intelligent. My early thought heroes were John Stossel, Chuck Palahniuk, Ayn Rand, the Freakonomics guys, and Michael Crichton. While my views have grown more sophisticated over the years, those early adventures into "intellectual" topics eventually led me…
I have heard the genre (which includes Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, the Freakonomics guys and Jared Diamond) described as "insight porn". The idea is to deliver small chunks of insight that is just counter-intuitive enough to be novel, but not so counter-intuitive that we can't take it at face value. It's a market that's developed in response to the fact that nerds are addicted to feeling like they're just a littl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did he at least see the cover, in order to judge it?
Well, according to this great book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (you might not have heard of him, but all the smart people are reading his stuff), one's first impression of something is sometimes amazingly accurate! So it's really not important that he read the book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jared Diamond counter-intuitive? I'm with you on the other three but Guns Germs & Steel always struck me as very "D'uh".
One of his ideas is that the development of agriculture was "the worst mistake in the history of the human race"[0] contra the popular belief that agriculture improved food yields and freed people up to spend time developing science, technology and art -- and could therefore be considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of the human race. I'm not saying that his argument is wrong, but it definitely ru…
I'm too lazy to look for the actual references, but in one form or another climate-related arguments for the "superiority" of Europeans were made in the late 1700s and in the 1800s (and towards the end of the 1800s a more racist undertone emerged, but that's another story). Something like "one can only be productive in a temperate climate", while those poor souls that have to live at the Tropics will never become industrious peoples.
What's funny is that way earlier than that, the early Greeks were saying that their dry climate was perfect for talking about philosophy and related stuff, and that a more "humid" climate would have been against that (I'm thinking about Heraclitus, mainly).
(If yours isn't, you're dogmatic, an epistemological fundamentalist! Even logic has completeness/consistency limitations. At least, those are the limitations we know of so far...).
I have heard the genre (which includes Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, the Freakonomics guys and Jared Diamond) described as "insight porn". The idea is to deliver small chunks of insight that is just counter-intuitive enough to be novel, but not so counter-intuitive that we can't take it at face value. It's a market that's developed in response to the fact that nerds are addicted to feeling like they're just a littl…
For example, the story about TIMMs scores showing that math ability is correlated not with talent but with effort is completely bogus, and obviously so if you look at the actual studies.
First, the effect only appeared for 2 age levels in one year of taking, all the other age levels did not show this correlation. Second, the effect only shows at the national level, if you compare whole countries. It disappears completely as soon as you go down to school or class levels.
Which means that his claim in the book is completely bogus: yes, nations are not more talented at math than others (duh!), but individuals still are, completely contrary to his claims.
That goes way beyond just cherry picking results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? "His points are usually correct (though obvious to many); in this case his point is that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people." No. Just no. Did you not read the article? The study demonstrating this "point" was a low-powered study. A more highly powered study failed to reproduce the result. Now, at best you could say that the result only applies to "ambitious people", but that remains to be proved…
Actually, you (and the jealous author of the critical article) are comparing apples to oranges. It is a safe assumption that a group of random students at a public Canadian university are not nearly as ambitious as a group of students at an impossibly competitive university such as Princeton. The study does in fact show that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people. So, the results were as expected. The amb…
No, it is not a safe assumption. It remains to be proven, and that's assuming you can even come up with a decent objective definition of "ambition". Your post-hoc reasoning is exactly the type of reasoning that is taken to task in the article -
Gladwell: Making a task harder makes people perform better.
Academia: No, actually, when tested with a higher-powered study, this effect disappeared.
You: (with no evidence, and only after the release of the Canadian study refuting Gladwell) Oh, but the result only applies to ambitious people.
That argument is weak - it's fitting the facts to the hypothesis, and not the other way round. With the available data, the only thing you can really say is that perhaps a study needs to be done to better understand the why the Princeton study and the Canadian study gave different results (statistical fluke? different ambition? cultural bias?)