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Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

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Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#191

Post by scott_s »

im3w1l wrote: post #181
StavrosK wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone says "There's a possibility X is evolutionary", nowadays, I mentally continue it with "The reason for this is rationalization". As an aside, what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them? Hindsight bias comes to mind, but it's not exactly that. More like a mixture of hindsight/confirmation bias and wishful thinking.

Evolutionary biologists are rightly slammed for having made many strong, wrong predictions. But I think it still has some value, if you just make weaker predictions. Instead of "a is necessary because of such and such living conditions", we think that "a might be more likely then b because of such and such living conditions". From certain assertions to potential hypotheses basically.

Please don't confuse "evolutionary biologists" with "evolutionary psychologists."

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#192

Post by wavefunction »

Brakenshire wrote: post #144
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…

> 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 i…

The argument actually was that the extreme area offered by Europe and Asia being situated along a large e-w oriented latitude offered both a wide variety of domesticated plant species as well as a greater area to grow them. So a crop domesticated in W Europe could much more easily be traded as there are more markets and arable land.

Africa, oriented N-S has a huge variation in climates from the Med in the North through the Serengheti, the sahel, the savannah, tropical rainforests, the veldt, and etc. A lot more micro-climates that make transferring crops to a different area problematic. There were some other reasons but this was the basis of his geographical argument.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#193

Post by davidcuddeback »

StavrosK wrote: post #103
IsaacL wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this where you came across the concept of "insight porn"? http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-... There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neurochemical "hit" every time we encounter a particularly juicy piece of insight porn. The reason for this is evolutionary: insights are basically the recognition of deep patterns that explain seemingly unrelated phenomena,…

Whenever someone says "There's a possibility X is evolutionary", nowadays, I mentally continue it with "The reason for this is rationalization". As an aside, what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them? Hindsight bias comes to mind, but it's not exactly that. More like a mixture of hindsight/confirmation bias and wishful thinking.

> what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them?

That sounds like motivated reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#194

Post by drblast »

Malcolm Gladwell has the same problem as any of the other 100's of authors of those shitty "How to win!" business books.

It's not that what he's saying is not true, it's that you don't get the whole picture, because actually giving you the whole picture would take a whole lot more time to research and wouldn't be half as entertaining.

The best example are the "Good to Great" series of books that espouse what companies should to be successful, neglecting to mention that the majority of the companies held up as examples from the previous book have somehow spectacularly failed. The books aren't predictive because they're based on an extremely flawed methodology that cherry-picks data to fit pre-conceived notions.

Also, success on the scale that most people reading these books aspire to requires a huge amount of luck no matter how hard you work, what short and long-term goals you create, or how early you wake up every day to run four miles.

But most people won't read books titled "Preparing For Modest Success from a Lifetime of Hard Work and Saving" or "Success Secrets: Being Lucky."

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#195

Post by drblast »

natural219 wrote: post #14

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…

Why Chuck Palahniuk? Doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the list.

He's got an incredibly creative writing style and pulls things off, like writing a novel in second-person, that not many authors could.

And I never got the impression of intellectual pretentiousness from any of his books.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#196

Post by the_watcher »

larrys wrote: post #176
crntaylor wrote: post #21

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…

"the same reason that many of us have read pg's essays - particularly the early ones." [1] The question is would anyone have thought anything of PG's essays before he became "PG" that he is today? Not that people didn't read them but it seem now that anything that he has written or writes takes on such status that people are less likely to question or disagree with any conclusions. [1] Also noting that PG's (at least…

The reason PG is the YC founder we hear about is his essays, not the other way around. Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Jessica Livingston were all just as much founders as he was.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#198

Post by andreasvc »

dorkrawk wrote: post #172
debacle wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things by Palahniuk and Rand can have a ton of intellectual value. Anthem is a good story, and everything I've read by Palahnuik has been well written. They make you think, and even if you don't come to the same conclusions as the author wants you to, at least you can see how they got there.

I agree. If you judge a book by what you get out of it rather than what the author's ideas and motivations are you'll probably enjoy your reading a lot more.

That boils down to reading purely for pleasure, in which case fiction may be more effective. The whole point of non-fiction is that it should NOT be fiction, which requires intellectual honesty.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#199

Post by EricDeb »

kylebrown wrote: post #190
triplesec wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's unfair to include Diamond in this genre, as although he's popular, he's also a thinker (and prof) with an academic's consistency and attention to data. The Freakonomics guys are also closer to data, but episodically popularising rather than Diamond's coherent meta-narratives. The biggest argument you could level against Diamond might be one of leaning too heavily on "geographical determinism", which he…

Worth mentioning that the Freakonomics guys (Donohue and Levitt) work tying abortion law to crime reduction was debunked. There was a bug in the regression analysis code, "coding errors" (as in typos while copying data tables from print sources), and flat out statistical errors (most egregious was their use of total arrests instead of arrests per capita). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio..…

More interesting is that reduction in childhood exposure to lead is the most significant factor. Levitt counters the debunking of his theory two paragraphs down from your link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#200

Post by aschearer »

I don't have any opinion one way or another about Gladwell but it really lowers my opinion of MIT to see them publishing posts such as this. The author has not read the book in question (or for all I know any book by Gladwell) and seems to be regurgitating the argument of a second author. I'd expect this from some rag not MIT.
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