Trust No One: Kim Philby and the Hazards of Mistrust (2014)
gladwell.com
gladwell.com
I think his books are made the same way the evening TV news is:- an editorial narrative is decided upon, and then people are interviewed until someone says what the editor wants and that's the clip that gets used.
Buy his books, by all means, just be wary and do your own research :)
I know sometimes lies-to-children are necessarily part of an education but sometimes they are just lies that get in the way of understanding.
So far as I can tell he deciphers what most people want to believe is true and then gives it to them.
Jared Diamond is in a very similar position.
Eventually we'll upset someone, who will then have to draw a reasonable line somewhere between Gladwell and their favored popular author.
I do think Pinker is of a higher calibre than Gladwell but ever since reading Dawkin's (in the God Delusion) vague idea of some eternal progress towards 'Progress' (which he called the Zeitgeist) I haven't seen much substantiating why outbreaks of violence should decline asymptotically. A handful of modern bombs would disturb that nice little chart. Seems like cycles are more likely, perhaps contingent on solar cycles. If we don't understand why we go to war (I find most explanations too high level and utterly unconvincing) we should not predict peace. Things can and do turn on a dime.
Fear, greed, or ideology. Those were the three reasons the Greeks came up with.
You can probably put together a decent argument saying "The second War in Iraq was because of oil", but I haven't heard any stories of soldiers who signed up and came out of their deployment with the rights to an oil well. If you want to have a discussion about the motivations for war, it seems foolish to ignore the motivations of the boots on the ground that are actually making shit happen out there.
Careful there, those things have really piled up since Plato's day.
You unravel one or two of those lies, you're liable to bring down Western Civ. And we need aspirin and cell phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism
Unfortunately for Diamond, Biology and Culture are both real. Humans are not blank slates nor are they mindless automata.
The topics of his books are interesting and worth debating over, so I am (unlike Gladwell) pleased he wrote it since lots of interesting commentary and observations have come out.
I say you would profit greatly by reading around Diamond rather than by taking him at his word.
Thinking of single-factor determinants (or criticising arguments on that basis) is insipid. And yet somehow we accept it in other fields -- economics and its devolution of everything to simple matters of capital and labour comes to mind.
I've found much of Diamond's work to be quite illuminating and useful. I find his critics, most particularly those claimi global fault, cavil and singularly unpersuasive.
Agreed. The further you get from physics the more multi-factor everything becomes.
We know this yet I think our language and minds have difficulty expressing multifactor explanations in ways which seem convincing to most of us. That is a problem.
Strangely we are more confident with a single over-arching explanation. I can't explain why that should be so. Surely more analysis should give us more confidence and not less!
Intelligence analysts and other smart people put their efforts into building multiple scenarios, which is a good way to see things more multi-dimensionally. I picked up on something from Thiel, which is that he tends to run through multiple explanations e.g. from a liberal and conservative and libertarian and communist point of view before proceeding to make a political point. That's a pretty good mental habit!
Whether this gets you to the truth is a separate question I feel but this method will certainly prevent you from overlooking major lines of reasoning, and that in itself is a pretty profound improvement over single factor determinants.
"Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father, and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it altogether."
[0]: http://greyenlightenment.com/malcolm-gladwell-bait-and-switc...
Reading this guy's response to Gladwell's cultural theory of plane crashes sealed the deal for me:
http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-a...
"Why? Because Americans and Europeans are always accorded with the privilege of being treated as individuals, while Asians remain a great undifferentiated mass, unknown and unknowable."
Wow. Good article.
Elliott’s father, Claude, was the headmaster of Eton. According to Macintyre, the elder Elliott “loathed music, which gave him indigestion, despised all forms of heating as ‘effete,’ and believed that ‘when dealing with foreigners the best plan was to shout at them in English.’ ”
Sounds like the inspiration for a character played by John Cleese.
> [Regarding] a don at Trinity College in the mid-nineteenth century:
> In 1848 he published a thesis entitled Horae Apocalypticae, purporting to prove beyond doubt that the world would come to an end in 1868 because the Euphrates would have dried up the previous year. Harmless enough, you would think. But since he was a man of dominating though eccentric personality he succeeded in persuading the wine committee of Trinity that it would be pointless to lay down any 1853 port because it would not be fit to drink before Judgment Day. As 1853 proved to be one of the best vintages of the century and as Trinity was the only college without any, his name was not remembered with overmuch affection.
It reminded me of an old Jewish saying, "If you are planting a tree and you hear that Messiah has come, finish planting the tree, then go and inquire."
Gladwell is an amazinglh eloquent and convincing writer. I only wish I had his talents there. But oh how I wish he were more intellectually honest with his subject matter.
Do others have examples of writers with similar prowess of the pen, but greater merit in seeking truth? Always on the hunt for more good thinkers to read and all the better when their writing is entertaining and of admirable skill to boot.
Gladwell has a knack for making me want to know more about his topics. Not by reading Gladwell, of course; that would be pointless.
He makes the assertion in this article that intelligence services in general, and British intelligence in the early decades of the cold war specifically, are useless. Based on a few examples, he thinks that having MI5 and 6 riddled with spies had no consequences---either the intelligence wasn't believed or it was, it was acted on, and people died, but that didn't change the outcome. Further, he says the later, paranoid period was bad, although other than a couple quotes from politicians, he gives no evidence.
And yet, the period between 1945 and 1965 was the high point of the Soviet Union. Taking over neighbors. Stealing secrets. Influence. Striking terror in the hearts of free world politicos. And then, after the golden age of Philby, not so much, realistically.
Whenever I dig deep into the spy world from my armchair, though, I always come to the conclusion that my father was right when he said that it's not healthy to keep secrets.