Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

ksj.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 232 posts

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#201

Post by sien »

cossatot wrote: post #167
ghaff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both your points--at least with respect to Guns Germs and Steel. Arguably he way overextended his basic research in later works. An interesting supplement to Diamond is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. To greatly oversimplify, Morris endorses the idea of a Western core headstart (with credit to Diamond) but then basically says "Well,…

Fortunately, there are a couple examples of serious researchers who are also excellent (though maybe not as well known) popularizers. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Steven Strogatz (Sync, etc.) come immediately to mind, because I have read them recently. I have some books by Benoit Mandlebrot in shipping, and I am quite excited about them. If anyone has other examples, I would love to hear them--I'm try…

Steven Pinker is an experimental Psychologist you might like. His book 'The Blank Slate' is very good.

Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek & Paul Krugman are all winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and all have written some accessible books for the public.

The Richard Dawkins books on biology are really good.

Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics has written some fine popular science books.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#202

Post by kylebrown »

EricDeb wrote: post #199
kylebrown wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I know, Levitt and Donohue made the corrections, and then made even more "corrections", until they got back their original results (or as close as they could get).

That's how it often goes when researches are accused of scientific misconduct (not to accuse LD, just noting). One famous example was Potti & Nevins at Duke. There were several back-and-forth "Comments" published to counter the questions Baggerly & Coombes were raising. PN repeatedly addressed the issues, each time releasing another "corrected" supplementary data set. Eventually the journals stopped publishing the BC critiques, PN seemingly convinced the reviewers that BC were just being pedantic about inconsequential statistical subtleties. It only came to a head because Duke was proceeding with human clinical trials based on that research.

To this day Potti still claims that he can address all the issues BN raised and correct them, and that his research was valid.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#203

Post by mwfunk »

LaGrange wrote: post #161
d23 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't forget those of us who come to HN primarily to post comments about why the linked article is obviously stupid and wrong, or is right but just saying things that we've been aware of for a while now. This is why I hate being around a good deal of "smart" people (or atleast, people who have smartness attached to their identity, which seems to be rarely the same group). Every statement, every conversation, every…

Ah yes. Let's all stay positive. It's not like anyone ever died from not wanting to criticize something, right? Only, things ranging from people going on doomed escapades and startups, via mountaineering accidents up to and including the Eschede train disaster can be at least partially attributed to people being afraid of expressing criticism. Of course there is a valid criticism of how many people express said criti…

You sound like you're snarkily disagreeing with d23, yet the core of your disagreement is based on something that he/she didn't say. No one is saying criticism is bad; obviously if anyone had a default position of never expressing criticism or disagreement, nothing would ever improve, right? But there is absolutely a personality type that thrives on thinking of one's self as being smarter than everyone else, and constantly trying to prove that via relentless negativity or contrarianism. If you rely on such people for insight, you will generally end up being less informed than if you hadn't listened to them at all, because their views are based on boosting their own ego by trying to appear smarter than everyone else rather than from an intellectually honest attempt to get at the truth.

At least, that's how I interpreted the comment you were responding to. Maybe you've never met people like that; if so, you're lucky.

The one good quality such people might have is as a continual Devil's Advocate, in the sense that by disagreeing with all conventional wisdom they might make you take a second look at your own beliefs. But I really feel like it's everyone's responsibility to be their own Devil's Advocate; relying on other people to fill that role isn't constructive.

I guess what I'm really getting at is that there's no shortage of negativity or contrariness out there, and contrariness without insight is no better than agreement without insight. In fact, it can easily lead you astray if you're not careful.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#205

Post by LaGrange »

mwfunk wrote: post #203
LaGrange wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes. Let's all stay positive. It's not like anyone ever died from not wanting to criticize something, right? Only, things ranging from people going on doomed escapades and startups, via mountaineering accidents up to and including the Eschede train disaster can be at least partially attributed to people being afraid of expressing criticism. Of course there is a valid criticism of how many people express said criti…

You sound like you're snarkily disagreeing with d23, yet the core of your disagreement is based on something that he/she didn't say. No one is saying criticism is bad; obviously if anyone had a default position of never expressing criticism or disagreement, nothing would ever improve, right? But there is absolutely a personality type that thrives on thinking of one's self as being smarter than everyone else, and cons…

> You sound like you're snarkily disagreeing with d23, yet the core of your disagreement is based on something that he/she didn't say. No one is saying criticism is bad; obviously if anyone had a default position of never expressing criticism or disagreement, nothing would ever improve, right?

Well, I did get sick of it after yet another discussion on HN went into the 'stop raining on the parade' comments.

> At least, that's how I interpreted the comment you were responding to. Maybe you've never met people like that; if so, you're lucky.

I've met many people who dismiss any criticism with complaints of negativism. I've even seen that happen when I complained about how they were dissing others, as if me suggesting they should be more understanding was negative.

In fact, I see a lot of negativity with insight, and a lot of yes-men attitude without any reflection. It's a far more common disease.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#206

Post by dcre »

As one of the comments on the article points out, it's amusing that Steven Pinker is one of the cited critics, given his own record of writing intellectual feel-goodery.

Pinker: "To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken."[1]

[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-...

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#207

Post by dcre »

someperson wrote: post #35
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…

This might also apply to NPR Planet Money. Seems to plague the softer/human sciences like economics, psychology and anthropology more than physics/chemistry/maths (though these fields have there own poor journalism)

I worry about this when I listen, but in general I agree with the other commenter that they do pretty well at giving a voice to real experts.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#208

Post by vertr07 »

onebaddude wrote: post #122
georgemcbay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess after the magic 10,000 hours of reading you became an expert on reading.

It's funny that people here are mocking Gladwell and Diamond for presenting popularized, simplified interpretations of the science, but those people are doing the same thing by simplifying the works of the authors. There's nothing "magic" about 10,000 hours. The implication is that hard work, practice and luck play a bigger role in success than most people believe. It's a theory. Sorry if it was too nuanced for you.

They are "mocking" Gladwell for presenting anecdotes as science, not for simplification.

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#209

Post by codex »

The New Yorker recently ran an article with a bevy of scientific studies on redshirting [1] which confirm Gladwell's latest thesis that adversity improves performance. The relative overachievement of immigrant populations tends to support this view as well, but of course you may have selection bias there.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/young...

Re: Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?

#210

Post by pessimizer »

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…

What's the alternative? Racial determinism? I can accept that there were many possible outcomes of different groups of humans and way they formed civilizations, and that which one happened was determined by dumb luck - but the environment that people happen to be born in is a part of that dumb luck.

That abstract is completely empty - and I'm paywalled away from the paper.

If the environment isn't responsible at all, you have to be saying that its entirely something from within people that determines their social structure and achievements. No?

Post reply on HN