In the interest of full disclosure: I read “The Tipping Point” when it first came out, but don’t remember much. I haven’t read “Blink”. I haven’t read “Outliers”, but I have read a few things about it. In it, Gladwell argues that the reason Asian students do better in math is because of their ancestor’s history of rice farming, where there is an obvious connection between hard work and success. But it would seem to me that the reason you get good in math is because you use it in your line of work. It doesn’t take a background in differential calculus to know how to plant a rice seed. And of course many industries have the same kind of connection. “Outliers” argues that it’s the environment, the time and place of ones birth, that is more responsible for success. Gladwell gives an example of the world’s smartest man, who it turns out, is a “ne-er do well.” If individual talent were more important, why is this man a failure? Malcolm, this is ONE example. Not exactly statistically relevant.
It seems to me that although Gladwell has interesting ideas, he doesn’t back them up with empirical evidence, at least as far as “The Tipping Point” is concerned. At lease I don’t remember him doing so in that book. I might be misrepresenting Gladwell’s work. So I turn to you, the intelligent people of The Dope: Is Malcolm Gladwell full of it? Does he just make shit up?
Bear in mind that he’s a journalist, not a scientist; so you can’t judge them on the same scale.
On another note, has anybody read both the Outliers book and the earlier stuff that Csikszentmihalyi did on highly successful people? If so, how would you compare/contrast them?
Chris Langan is the man mentioned in Gladwell’s book as being the world’s smartest man:
A pretty common observation is that Asian students do better in math because the notion that either one is naturally good at math or it’s not even worth trying to be good at it isn’t accepted in Asian countries. In Asia, unlike much of the Western world, a student is expected to do their best at any course, regardless of what one thinks one’s natural abilities are. Asians consider that the most important thing determining one’s success at subject is how hard one works at it. One’s natural abilities have some influence on one’s success, but they aren’t the most important thing. In Western countries, on the other hand, it’s often expected that one might as well not even try at subjects one isn’t good at, since natural ability is most of what determines one’s success.
What Gladwell does in Outliers is to try to discover why Asian culture emphasizes hard work over natural ability. His thesis about rice farming causing this emphasis is his own theory. The theory about Asians believing more in hard work and Westerners believing more in natural ability has been around for a while.
Ummm…wasn’t ‘Tipping Point’ basically a collection of case studies. That is, as I recall, it was almost all empirical evidence.
Granted you may not find that empirical evidence convincing support of Gladwell’s theories , but as far as the book not having any, I’d say that’s pretty much dead wrong.
But then, I’ve been called perverse and often baffling.
Similarly, “Outliers” presents tons of empirical evidence about what IQ means for success, how upper middle class parents prepare their children differently for the world than working class people, and so forth (or at least, presents summaries of the evidence – as noted, Gladwell, a journalist, doesn’t conduct controlled research of this own). The strange story of the world’s smartest man is presented as an example, not as the whole story.
It’s an interesting book, even if one doesn’t have to be convinced by all the arguments.
I Like Gladwell’s books (I haven’t read Outliers yet), but I’d have to err on the side of fiction as the case studies he cites don’t really seem like they’d hold up under any kind of serious study.
Besides his books, he was also heavily in the Frontline special “The Merchants of Cool” that attempted to track how certain things become cool and as someone who was a teenager when the documentary was being put together, I know for a fact that some of the stuff he discussed as “manufactured cool” couldn’t be further from the truth and some of the “widespread teen phenomenoms” were things with very dedicated, but very small, fanbases.
I have not yet read the new book, but I’m a big fan of Malcolm’s work. He was among my favorite authors for a long time before I knew who he was, due to his articles in The New Yorker. I’ve got autographed copies of Blink & The Tipping Point, and I’ve heard him speak.
He doesn’t just make stuff up, he’s reporting facts, albeit colored by opinion, perception, and a desire to move the story forward. It’s more entertainment than science, and presented as such. I’m intrigued now – I know what somebody’s getting me for Xmas. Outliers sounds like a great read.
Having seen a couple of what claimed to be interviews with him recently, I’m willing to believe that’s he’s fiction, just a skinny character actor in a fright wig sent over by central casting. I’m willing to be proved wrong, though.
He’s got the world’s highest IQ, and he spent 20 years working as a bouncer. You’d expect someone like that to be a professor at Harvard and have a couple Nobel Prizes under his belt. That’s what stuns people.
I am missing the point of this thread: in his books, Malcolm Gladwell is attempting to make a case for an idea. The data he cites is illustrative of the concepts he is trying to share, but is not positioned to be, nor can it function as, empirical evidence that Gladwell’s idea is fact.
I can’t call what Gladwell is promoting in any of his books an hypothesis, in a scientific sense: in that case, a theory should translate into replicatable, predictable results and should be more accurate vs. other theories. In the case of The Tipping Point, Blink and now Outliers, Gladwell is showing us a different way to think about basic assumptions. The idea being offered may challenge the foundations of our world view, but not the underlying nature of it.
In the case of Outliers, I have seen many interviews and read reviews and look forward to reading it soon. My take is that it appears to assert that the in-born nature of genius is less valuable than currently thought and environment / nuture is more important. If you accept the premise, it may help you think about the world in a different and potentially valuable way. But it can’t be reduced to a mathematically-documentable, reproducible formula.
But I don’t see that as Gladwell’s intent. People expecting more or something more scientifically rigorous from his work are, near as I can tell, missing the point…
So someone is missing a point somewhere here, darn it…
It’s a shame. Maybe if he worked at Harvard he wouldn’t have wasted 20 years trying to prove the existence of God from pure reasoning. It’s like the last two hundred years of intellectual development never happened for him.
I think the point there was not a direct relationship between rice farming and math, but a direct relationship between rice farming and a cultural understanding of hard work (mental or physical) leading directly to beneficial consequences.
I haven’t read the new one yet, but I’ve read Blink and Tipping Point. I would characterize Gladwell’s work as “thought provoking, sometimes compelling, but never anything like conclusive.” If you go into it with the right point of view, it’s pretty stimulating stuff; you can pick holes in it, but that just means it’s working correctly (making you think). If you expect it to be ironclad, you’re not reading it right. Yeah, sometimes Gladwell oversells himself a bit, and thinks he’s more conclusive than he is, but he’s just got a healthy ego. Keep your brain engaged and enjoy the ride.
Limp Bizkit was the “manufactured cool” band and I take issue with that. The documentary specifically pointed to their Woodstock appearance and the record companies promotion of “Break Stuff” as the band’s breakthrough even though anyone that was a teenager in the 90s could point to “Faith” as being their first big hit, even if no one really knew who this Crunchy Biscuit band (what my uncle called them once) was.
As for the not as popular as the documentary says band, that would be Insane Clown Posse. Sure, there’s plenty of Juggalos out there. But the show painted them as some huge phenomenom even though they never sold more than a million copies of any CD (which wasn’t all that impressive in the 90s) and they rarely played a venue bigger than a small concert hall. I’ll bet there are some people that have no idea the band is still touring even today.
I just finished reading Outliers, and have read his other books as well. I think you are simplifying what he “argues” a little to much. It’s a good book worth reading. I will try to do his arguments justice, but I would recommend reading it to get a better understanding of what he is trying to say. To quote from the book:
The connection between rice paddies and math scores is an argument underscoring the importance of cultural legacy. The chapter begins with a old Asian quote:
The importance of the quote, he argues, is that that it shows their cultural appreciation for hard work. He follows by contrasting the work required to harvest wheat and rice. Rice cultivation is more complex and more tedious. He quotes anthropologist Francesca Bray:
The next piece of the puzzle is language related. Humans have a roughly 2-second memory loop. He argues that languages with attenuated numbering systems allow their speakers to memorize longer stings of numbers. Chinese numbers (er, san, qi) are shorter than English ones (two, three, seven). According to research done by Stanislas Dehaene (The Number Sense), Chinese speakers do memorize random number strings more effectively.
On a related note, how number naming systems are constructed in Western and Asian languages differs greatly as well. Irregularities like thirteen, twenty, and fifty don’t exist in many Asian languages. They use a more logical expressions that generally translate to one-three, two-ten, and five-ten. Both differences contribute to the Asian children’s relative facility with math. It’s much easier to add two-tens-four and one-ten-seven, than it is twenty-four and thirteen. There is a transparency and predictability there that makes it easier for children to learn counting and basic math functions. That translates to a comfort level and confidence that many American children lack, leaving them math phobic as adults.
He ties his argument together by noting an interesting fact relating to International math and science scores on the TIMSS test given to elementary and junior high students. When the kids take the test, they also fill out a non-math/science-related questionnaire. The questionnaire is very long and tedious, so many students leave some questions blank. Interestingly enough, the score on the actual test (measuring math/science competence) were highly correlated to the number of questions left blank on the questionnaire. When ranked by country, they were exactly the same. The take away is that math proficiency is less about the math and more about one’s willingness to work hard, and that those ideals are often set by environment and culture.
Between built-in language advantages, a cultural legacy of hard work, and a longer school year, Asian children are usually better at math. The positive thing is that this is not some innate intellectual gift that Americans lack; all we have to do is change our ways of doing things by working harder and smarter.
Well, the book has plenty of support and examples. It also worth noting that Gladwell books are popular because he does not bog you down with study after study. His footnotes for each argument reference related books and studies done by hard researchers that give a more rigorous investigation of the claims made. Gladwell, to a large extent, is just repackaging dense academic research in a unifying, more accessible way.
The time and place thing is pretty compelling. For example, far more hockey players are born in the beginning of the year because of the way the age cutoffs work in kid’s hockey. He also has an interesting table showing the 75 richest people ever. It includes people like Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Sam Walton. On the list are 14 Americans all born within 9 years of one another in the mid-19th century. Many, if not most of the super rich and influencial computer guys were born around 1955 too (Gates, Allen, Ballmer, Eric Schmidt, Jobs, Bill Joy, Tim Berners-Lee, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Steve Wozniak, etc.). That’s not to take away from their brilliance or diligence, just to say it’s hard to argue that Bill Gates would have become Bill Gates if he were born in Russia 10 years later. The circumstances of history often create clusters of successful people.
He doesn’t make anything up. You could argue he draws connections where few exist, or presents speculative conclusions, but there is always hard research backing up the facts he states in his book.
