Malcolm Gladwell Gets It Wrong – Again | Hacker News Reader

Malcolm Gladwell Gets It Wrong – Again

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31 pointscwan18 comments

The Gladwell hating gets out of hand sometimes. I'll be the first to admit the man isn't what you would call a rigorous scientist in the social disciplines, but I don't think that he makes that claim. Rather, he provides interesting (if overly broad) insights into patterns that we may or may not have noticed ourselves - and does so in an entertaining fashion.

The New Yorker article the author is commenting on, is actually pretty insightful. Gladwell makes it clear that most social networks are broad and thin, but the networks that result in disciplined individual behavior are those that are reinforced through close, physical, interpersonal ties.

A simple mind-experiment is useful to capture this:

What percentage of the 500 friends you have on facebook will come over and help you move tomorrow if you sent out a request?

Now, what percentage of the friends that you see, in person, on a weekly basis would do so if you sent a request out to them?

That meeting in person creates a much richer, and committed relationship than Poking/Walling/Liking does.

I think that's all Gladwell was trying to state in his New Yorker Article.

The problem with that analogy is that people rarely respond if asked to do something as part of a group. By nature, a mass facebook request isn't personalized. It's like asking if anyone in the class knows the answer vs. picking on a particular student. If the request is made to the group, it is too easy to free ride on others.

It's not fair to compare all your friends on facebook vs. only your closest friends in person. If I sent a request for help via a group text to everyone on my phone I'd probably get less of a response than if I sent personalized messages to my 15 closest friends on facebook. You have to compare apples to apples.

Officially known as "diffusion of responsibility". It's the reason why, if you are a witness to an accident and you are attending to an injured individual, you are supposed to point to a single individual bystander and tell them call for an ambulance rather than say "someone call 911".

Apart from the other replies to your comment, the Facebook analogy is also flawed because a huge percentage of my Facebook friends don't live in the same city or even country as me. I guess that's the case for most people.

The author misses the point of Gladwell's piece completely.

"He’s wrong. Facebook does motivate people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do -– like donate to the Save the Darfur coalition via a Facebook page."

He agrees with the post author, that's exactly what social media does. But what it doesn't do is motivate people to go to Darfur, take a real risk and make a difference on the ground. That's his point, and he's right.

Excellent point.

Gladwell's thesis is that high-risk activism and revolution are "strong-tie" phenomena and require real friendships.

He contrasts that with the "weak-tie" social media scene where people are friends on Twitter or Facebook, but wouldn't really risk their necks based on what their "weak-tie" friends tell them.

The "Save the Darfur coalition" Facebook page demonstrates what a weak-tie network can do and Gladwell's essay also talks about the (limited) usefulness of weak-tie networks (when he uses Shirky's example). It doesn't refute Gladwell's point

One more thing people who discovered the new communication media today forget is: the "social" media existed for much longer, and if anybody would want some serious analysis, we already have decades (even centuries?) of experience, even with much less noise than of today and with more people being more of "peers." I'll spare you of the stories of old Usenet or even chat functionalities before the "web" existed. Much more existed for much longer. There's just more people behind the screens today.

My personal experience is: online communication can help in motivation to do something, but only as long as it actually leads to communication or engagement "in flesh." It's as simple as that, and it can be the easy way to measure real impact of online activity. So I'd say, Gladwell is more than right this time. As long as you just sign online petitions or join Facebook groups with the names "save the ...", it's just the "feel good" activity with no real impact. Whoever wants more scientific measurements has an easy method to measure the real impact.

I didn't find the authors argument to be particularly compelling. Sure facebook may be able to motivate people to do small things like make a donation but he offers no evidence to counter Gladwell's assertion that really revolutionary change won't be driven by social media. I'm not saying that tweeting and facebook won't be involved in revolutionary change, just that they probably won't drive it. Just look at the teaparty as an example ... one of the biggest social movements of our generation and they are certainly not social media driven

I don't agree with the author here.

I think the social media websites do little or are actually detrimental in a way to causes such as the ones shes outlined. Sure they allow people to quickly 'donate' or shoot out a tweet, or change there profile picture as some form of protest. People will feel happy and think they have done something and then the it is all forgotten.

Case in point is Haiti. Everybody donates, concerts were held and everyone felt great. They assume there money was spent by some poor Haitian to rebuild his home. Yet no-one has followed up with the fact that the money isn't getting there [1].

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cb_haiti_earthquake

Similarly she trots out the Tehran protests which I seem to recall being debunked pretty thoroughly as another feel-good American media frenzy, but with almost no effect on the ground in Tehran. For instance, most of the major Tweeters at the time were not even in Iran, and people involved in the actual protests were not tweeting at all. At best it raised American awareness—especially within tech circles, but very little tangible impact.

What is it exactly that Malcolm Gladwell consistently gets wrong? Is there a trait? Any good sources on this?

Gladwell is a writer. If you write enough, eventually you're either going to make factual errors or state opinions that people disagree with. In this case, being "wrong" simply means she disagrees with his opinion.

I assume the 'Again' is a reference to the fact the author wrote another piece disagreeing with Gladwell about something else - see the first paragraph of the article.

I generally enjoy Gladwell's writing in the New Yorker (haven't read any of his books) and enjoy hearing him on Radiolab, but there has been at least one case before where he has made oversimplifications. When noticed, they pretty much upended his thesis.

His article "How David beats Goliath" asserted that smaller, weaker competitors beat their stronger, better equipped opponents by dramatically changing or breaking the rules of engagement.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_...

One of the examples was average or weak high school basketball teams using a full court press technique to defeat the best teams in the league. The other example is Lawrence of Arabia defeating the Ottomans at Aqaba. In letters which were published later that summer, readers pointed out that a full court press is used by many "Goliath" teams, and that the Ottomans were actually the underdogs since Lawrence of Arabia had the support of the British Empire.

I'm not a basketball person or a historian, so maybe the letters were off, but the New Yorker did publish them, and they certainly did make me question the article which I had so enjoyed a month before.

The letters in question:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608m...

Maureen Tcacik wrote about him in The Nation, and was generally critical of his style and methods, but also a little admiring. Interesting read.

http://www.thenation.com/article/gladwell-dummies

And just for HN, I dug this up because it made me laugh: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...

"He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. "

Well, everything. In short, his system of coming up with a folksy sounding counter-intuitive theory, followed by a couple of interesting anecdotes and a tame scientist which "prove" his thesis, does not tend to consistently lead to truth. Or in fact lead to truth at all.

In the cases where he is correct (if only by dumb luck,) it's still not helpful since you don't know which ones they are without doing the legwork yourself.

It is intellectual slop, ideally suited to the best-seller list of a major sunday newspaper, but it is not true or even some approximation of it. If that's how you like your social science, then have a bowl of Gladwell.

For other people's takes on him, try:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063576

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/how-to-write-malcolm-gladwell.ht...

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/gladwell-...

This is just linkbait. The title should be "why I disagree with Gladwell".

The article was also a pretty weak criticism.

There's a point that's not being made here, which is that if you're doing high-risk activism there's a good chance you want its organisation to be private. In fact you may well want to do it in a safe location, with people you really trust, who have left their mobile phones and any other risky electronic equipment somewhere else. I suspect the next (maybe current) generation of activists is going to struggle with that a lot, because they're pretty much cyborgs.

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