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Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

ksj.mit.edu

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Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#81

Post by downandout »

antimagic wrote: post #70
downandout wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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." 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…

So you're saying, then, that there are no differences between those that choose to attend a public college and those that attend an elite university? That those two groups of people wouldn't perform differently in studies focused on performance? That is nonsense.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#82

Post by noonespecial »

Gladwell does the literary equivalent of this:

http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Barack-Obama-C...

The world he presents is a cartoon caricature of the real world. In the drawing linked above, you can clearly recognize the president, but you wouldn't use the drawing to fit him for a hat. His prominent features are overemphasized in interesting and humorous ways for the purpose of sparking delighted recognition in the viewer.

Gladwell does the same thing in words. He presents us with a caricature of our world with its features humorously exaggerated in order to spark the same sort of recognition.

tl;dr. Its a funny. Don't use it for science.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#83

Post by dylangs1030 »

gjm11 wrote: post #79
dylangs1030 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another great one from SMBC about how to tell the difference between a math enthusiast from a mathematician. I won't try to find it since I'm on mobile, but it's just as good.

Do you mean this one? It's the only one I can quickly find that includes "math enthusiast" and "mathematician", though it's not exactly "how to tell the difference". http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320

Yeah that's the one! I probably should have just googled for it, but yep, that's it. My memory was a bit hazy.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#84

Post by Evgeny »

crntaylor wrote: post #52
mtts wrote: post #48

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…

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

Both arguments appear to have some truth. Agriculture at early stages led to worse health, caused inequality, people started living in larger groups which helped diseases to spread.

Time to develop science and art came later, and was not available to an average person for a long time anyway - up to 95% population was working in agriculture until relatively recent times (I don't have the reference for this number though).

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#85

Post by crntaylor »

anon1385 wrote: post #76
paganel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guns, Germs and Steel" (the advantages of old-world people over new-world people in the 1500s were due to the influence of geography and climate, not inherent superiorities). 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 emer…

It's usually called environmental determinism and is something no modern anthropologist or geographer really wants to be associated with (as much as a modern biologist would want to be associated with eugenics or phrenology). GGS did cause some despair among academics, as century old discredited ideas were presented as science to the public. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.... The populari…

This paper is really interesting - thanks. Some of my archaeologist friends have criticised Diamond's books for being too simplistic and using outdated techniques (even when they were written in the 80s and 90s) but I had never really figured out why they were wrong before.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#86

Post by jacquesm »

bborud wrote: post #42

Which is harder: to make people like Gladwell scientifically sound or to make the scientifically sound more entertaining? While I strongly agree that he does himself, and those curious about science, a great disservice by what one might label as intellectual laziness and sloppiness, there is a need to make science and interesting ideas more available to the public. So while the criticism of Gladwell's cherry-picking…

Richard Dawkins does a great job of this too.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#87

Post by digitalengineer »

willvarfar wrote: post #49
digitalengineer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a bit about his 'court tangle'? I'm reading 'Bad Science' which also talks about Homeopathy and it basically says homeopathy is relying on the Placebo effect, the attention patients receive and the probability a lot of people will resort to homeopathy when it's really, really bad. That's usually the point when it starts getting better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(book)

Apologies, his tangle was chiropractic not homeopathic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCA_v._Singh My general point was two-fold: 1) he is an excellent popular science writer. He has a PhD in particle physics, and his books are well researched and well received. 2) we all want him to prosper from writing so he keeps writing :)

H_O_L_Y crap. Just read his column 'Beware The Spinal trap' in The Guardian about chiropractic therapy.

" if spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market."

I have had this done a lot of times. No one ever told me about any of the risks before starting the procedure. Thanks for the information. http://esciencenews.com/sources/the.guardian.science/2010/04...

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#88

Post by gnaffle »

noonespecial wrote: post #82

Gladwell does the literary equivalent of this: http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Barack-Obama-C... The world he presents is a cartoon caricature of the real world. In the drawing linked above, you can clearly recognize the president, but you wouldn't use the drawing to fit him for a hat. His prominent features are overemphasized in interesting and humorous ways for the purpose of sparking delighted recogn…

It's not a very good comparison. First, it's not presented as funny, it's presented as science, complete with links to studies. If you ask most people reading Gladwell, they will believe his theories.

Second, it's not that he exaggerates something, but often he's flat-out wrong. The fascination he sparks is the "oh, that's an unlikely fact I wouldn't have believed was true, had it not been for the fact that these science studies cited here proves it."

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#89

Post by route66 »

crntaylor wrote: post #85
anon1385 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually called environmental determinism and is something no modern anthropologist or geographer really wants to be associated with (as much as a modern biologist would want to be associated with eugenics or phrenology). GGS did cause some despair among academics, as century old discredited ideas were presented as science to the public. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.... The populari…

This paper is really interesting - thanks. Some of my archaeologist friends have criticised Diamond's books for being too simplistic and using outdated techniques (even when they were written in the 80s and 90s) but I had never really figured out why they were wrong before.

http://digitaljournal.com/article/302333 discusses limitations of Diamond's approach, http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/guns-ger... mentions where the GGS approach to explain history falls short, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/ggs makes an interesting note of framing in GGS.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#90

Post by Volpe »

downandout wrote: post #81
antimagic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." 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…

So you're saying, then, that there are no differences between those that choose to attend a public college and those that attend an elite university? That those two groups of people wouldn't perform differently in studies focused on performance? That is nonsense.

He isn't saying that at all. I think his main point is you are talking crap (though he articulated it much better than I have).

And Princeton (in undergrad) isn't "intellectually" elite, it is financially elite. I don't think you can derive anything about student "ambitiousness" just from how wealthy they are, and wealth is pretty much the only thing that separates Princeton undergrad student from a public college student.

Caveat: I'm assuming the study was done on undergrads, postgrad princeton is different beast.

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