33 thoughts on “Carrie McLaren was way out in front of the anti-Gladwell bandwagon

  1. I think my perception of Gladwell has led the main field but trailed the vanguard of Gladwell-bashers. I liked The Tipping Point but found its arguments disturbingly facile — just felt I wasn’t being given the whole picture — so I started reading his work more critically, as well as caring about it less. I didn’t bother reading any of his other books. I guess this makes me pretty typical.

    Blink sounds like it might be a good pairing with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I think is quite good. Andrew has pointed out that Kahneman may be a bit credulous about some of the research that he reports, but overall it’s very good. Much of the book is about decision-making, which Kahneman says can be usefully imagined as being handled by two separate systems, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 makes quick decisions, mostly unconsciously, whereas System 2 is able to apply higher-level thinking (logic, mathematics, etc.) and is able to monitor many of its own processes. As Kahneman describes, System 1 performs really badly at a lot of things. At most things. It’s better than nothing if you need to make a quick decision, but not very good at all. Sort of the opposite of what Blink supposedly says.

    • I thought the unstated premise of Blink was that if you practice a skill long enough, much of your expertise becomes implicit. That is, System 1 learns too, but it’s much harder to cleanly extract and communicate that knowledge.

      • Eh, you should read the book. According to Kahneman there are some kinds of things System 1 can’t do at all, and it can only do simple things. To give a statistics-related example, It can make some judgments of similarity, but it can’t make use of base rate information. An example is the famous question about whether a timid man who likes to read is more likely to be a librarian or a farmer. System 1 recognizes that the person fits the stereotype of a librarian better than a farmer, but can’t go farther. You have to engage System 2 to make use of the additional information that there are far more farmers than librarians.

        If you’re like me, you are now going to think of an objection or a pointed question about this example, which is why you should really read the book; I won’t be a good proxy for Kahneman and don’t want to try.

    • Phil, is that the same as Vygotskian patterning and puzzling? James Reason discussed those modes of thinking in /Human Error/, as I recall. Patterning is fast, relatively accurate in its domain, and limited in the extent of its domain. Puzzling is more enjoyable, much broader in its domain, but significantly less accurate — all from memory of reading the book some years ago.

      Someone such as Dietrich Doerner and, I think, Reason himself would claim we use practice (simulations in Doerner’s case) to help us broaden the domain of applicability of our patterning.

  2. It’s valuable to knock down popularizers if only because that increases the odds criticism will survive the effects of time. As a student of Rome, I know nearly all sources are highly unreliable and that scholars tend to read into them answers which fit their prejudices. Same about early Christianity, etc. I sometimes shudder to think that in 400 years, what may survive are stories like The Ballad of Marine Todd – see: https://medium.com/matter/the-ballad-of-marine-todd-7886a0f200bd – and that will become truth.

    • Mapman:

      Carrie McLaren and Steve Sailer seems to have started picking on Gladwell at about the exact same time—early 2005—but I think they were acting independently, indeed from opposite political perspectives. Gladwell can perhaps comfort himself that he was being attacked from both the left and the right.

      • Gladwell then responded to the criticism of Posner and myself to Blink:

        “One of the most bizarre reactions that I received from reviewers of Blink is an absolute inability to accept the notion of unconscious prejudice. Here is an example from a fairly well known writer named Steve Sailer. Sailer, in turns, quotes from a very hostile review of Blink in The New Republic by Richard Posner. …

        “It’s hard to know just what to say in the face of arguments like this. … My interpretation is that the reason the car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don’t realize what they are doing…

        “Sailer and Posner, by contrast, think that the discrimination is conscious and, what’s more, that it’s rational. The salesmen, in Posner’s words, `ascribe the group`s average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average.` And what is the ‘group’s average characteristic’ in this case? That, as Sailer puts it, black men “enjoy being seen as big spenders.” Am I wrong or is that an utterly ludicrous (not to mention offensive) statement? Where does this idea come from?”

        http://www.vdare.com/articles/malcolm-gladwell-blinks-again

    • Judge Richard J. Posner ripped Gladwell in The New Republic in 2005 in a review similar to mine in VDARE. We both homed in on Gladwell’s defense of the moral innocence of car salesmen in charging blacks and women higher prices. Gladwell argued in “Blink” that car salesmen know not what they do, and they would make more money if only became conscious of their unconscious bias against blacks and women. Posner wrote in TNR:

      “It would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman’ss discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the “rapid cognition” that he admires… [I]t may be sensible to ascribe the grou[‘s average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. An individual’s characteristics may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more so. Economists use the term ‘statistical discrimination’ to describe this behavior.”

      http://www.vdare.com/articles/malcolm-gladwell-blinks-at-racial-realities

      • I don’t know why Posner calls Gladwell a liberal, or a “good liberal,” whatever that means. Gladwell’s writing doesn’t seem particularly political to me, and he’s written for some conservative publications. I think maybe Posner should accept that someone can disagree with him regarding racial discrimination without being a liberal.

        • Without going into the “liberal” / “conservative” tags, what’s a good rebuttal to Posner’s argument?

          Is “statistical discrimination” rational?

        • To give Posner the benefit of doubt, maybe he was just targeting the specific argument made by Gladwell as a “good liberal” position. Which may not be too wrong?

    • Chris:

      I took a look at the linked article. The stories were fascinating, and the article is interesting and definitely worth reading. It was thought-provoking and I’m glad I read it. That said, the larger theory that Gladwell is pushing in his article, of there being two kinds of creative people etc., seems like B.S. to me.

      • On perhaps a related note, here’s an example of Gladwell both as gifted storyteller and unreliable narrator. It’s the story of group of sycophants toadying after an obnoxious bully then viciously turning on him when he shows signs of weakness, but it’s told through a haze of nostalgia. The bully was described as generous and whimsical; the attack came “with the utmost love and affection.”

        If I had read this in a collection of short stories I would probably have assumed that this was done for effect, but from what I’ve seen of the rest of Gladwell’s work, I don’t think he’s that inclined to either subtlety or irony.

        I recommend the audio version

        http://themoth.org/posts/storytellers/malcolm-gladwell

        but if you’re in a hurry

        http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/aug/09/malcolm-gladwell-how-i-ruined-best-friends-wedding

        • Mark:

          Interesting. On the times that I spoke at the Moth, I always told my stories as truthfully as I could remember. But I guess that, for storytellers who know how to do it, it’s ok to make stuff up. It would fun (but I guess it’ll never happen) if Gladwell were to annotate that story with notations saying which parts actually happened as described, which parts were altered, and which parts were flat-out invented.

          I’ve exchanged emails with Gladwell once or twice but he hasn’t returned my emails for quite awhile (the same could be said of Paul Krugman, Nate Silver, etc.). So I guess there’s no point in asking him. Maybe I could pass on the request via Chris Chabris.

        • Zach:

          At the moth I told some stories. It was about 15 years ago, at some storytelling slams. Rajeev and I also did some poetry slams. Fortunately, none of these were recorded so there’s no incriminating evidence on Google!

      • Andrew,

        I just re-read the article. I still think it’s very good. I’ll give Gladwell some license as a storyteller but, yes, to claim that there are two types of creative people is reductionist at best. More interesting to me is the question of balance between conceptual and experimental approaches to being creative. Gladwell describes people who fit one mold or the other but, presumably, there are people who fall somewhere in between or transition from being more conceptual to more experimental as they age. (My sense of things is that younger people tend to be more conceptual.) Anyhow, it was an interesting piece. After Tipping Point and Blink I’d pretty much filed him under “Not worth the bother” but Late Bloomers put him back in the “Worth reading” category for me – not that I have super high expectations of his pieces but I hold open the possibility that he could be onto something pretty interesting.

  3. The tipping point for Gladwell’s reputation was Steven Pinker’s “igon value” review of one of Gladwell’s books in 2009. Gladwell responded indignantly in the NYT, dragging me into it, and Pinker responded magisterially:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Letters-t-LETSGOTOTHET_LETTERS.html?_r=1

    Here is Gladwell’s letter and Pinker’s response:

    Let’s Go to the Tape

    Published: November 19, 2009
    To the Editor:

    Related
    ‘What the Dog Saw,’ by Malcolm Gladwell: Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective (November 15, 2009)

    It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Steven Pinker, even if — in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15) — he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of I.Q. fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do want to make one small observation about his comments.

    In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

    I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by someone who runs a pre-­employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate — as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long) — the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in The Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called Niners Nation.

    I have enormous respect for Pinker, and his description of me as a “minor genius” made even my mother blush. But maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks, we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.

    MALCOLM GLADWELL
    New York

    Steven Pinker replies:

    What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

    Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains tenuous.

    • Say what you want but the “igon value” thing was pretty hilarious. And the fact that Gladwell was shameless/audacious enough to discount it as a mere spelling error.

  4. In defense of Gladwell, his latest book “David and Goliath” was pretty explicitly positioned as a work of inspirational storytelling rather than of social science. That seems like an admirable increase in self-knowledge by Gladwell.

    Back in 2008, I wrote of Gladwell:

    “Gladwell epitomizes some of the best qualities of the modern journalist. He possesses a hunger for novelty and a powerful urge to help his subjects tell their stories in the most effective manner.

    “He truly likes new ideas. Most writers have a small stock in trade of novel ideas that they came up with by age 30 or so and just keep using those over and over. Gladwell, in contrast, is constantly out there searching the human sciences for theorists with new notions. …

    “But, not surprisingly, Gladwell also embodies the chief shortcomings of contemporary journalism: a complete lack of realism and skepticism.

    “He has neither the intellectual capacity nor the moral character to question his sources rigorously. So he ends up just recasting their self-interested talking points in a more reader-friendly format.”

    Gladwell seems to have come around to my way of thinking about him, which says good things about him.

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