When pop history bombs: a response to Malcolm Gladwell
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
Sub out history for science in the above paragraph and it is the same criticism that Gladwell has been receiving for literally decades. The guy is a good writer and storyteller but he seemingly prioritizes good writing and story over telling the most honest story. That isn't an unusual trait among pop-non-fiction writers. The reason they become popular is what they write is interesting and it is easier to make things interesting if you are a little loose with the truth.
It’s not fair at all to cast Malcolm Gladwell as typical of pop nonfiction writers—there are tons of great and serious writers in the genre. It’s truly a shame that Malcolm Gladwell, an utter hack, has been consistently publishing garbage for decades and that he has such a wide audience.
Gladwell is not only a superb storyteller, he's sincerely interested in learning himself, has intriguing ideas… it's sloppy (almost in a Gladwellian manner) to be angry about the problems with his approach and then just insist that the conclusion is that his stuff is just garbage and he's just a hack.
They’re like for a person who wants to appear like they read and have interesting though but it’s just a few anecdotes and a complete waste of time frankly
In fact I think I've read that it takes 10,000 hours to attain wisdom or expertise.
I don't quite remember where I read that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del...
That's not "pretty different views". That's agree on all the basics but having a different sense of how much talent matters.
"Malcolm Gladwell's point-of-view about deliberate practice is different from Ericsson's view."
"Hard Practice" vs "Soft Practice" is the center of the argument, it is the point of contention. No one is going to argue that practice isn't important, they are going to argue how you should practice and how much it matters compared to other factors. They disagree on both of these points, so no, they don't agree.
If you focus on the difference, yes, it is the major difference between them. But if you focus on the main point (the overwhelming importance of 10 year of deliberate practice for one to become a top expert in a field), it is non-essential. There is no concrete empirical answer to how much exactly talent matters, even now.
I'm not a Gladwell fan so I'm not certain about what he said. I'm only wanting to point out the difference between the rule and how very many misinterpret it.
- 10k hours guarantees top success
- 10k hours practice is required for top success
The 10k hours rule does not say either. The 10k hours rule only says 10k hours deliberate practice is generally required to be a top expert in most fields. So there are cases where 10k hours practice is not sufficient, and there are cases where talent people (Mozart?) need way fewer practice than regular people.
The 10k hours rule also does not say top experts need more hours to be better. So there is "debunk" claiming no correlation found among top expert performance and practice which is kind of strawman attack.
It's hardly a steadfast rule and he never presents it as such, but it's easy to squint real hard and see it that way, if you just want to argue or be upset.
Furthermore, he is extremely receptive to criticism and never presents himself as the one true source of fact.
Malcolm Gladwell is purporting to communicate factual reality. If he discards good arguments and evidence to entertain, then he is doing a real measurable harm in a way that Dan Brown is not.
It was published with a preface titled "FACT" claiming that all the secret societies and rituals and documents in the novel were historically accurate. That was the book's whole schtick.
The author specifically claimed that certain parts of the book - he listed exactly which parts - were documented historical truth. Isn't that "purporting to communicate factual reality"?
More so that Gladwell, in fact - I don't think any of Gladwell's books ever had a "the following parts of this book are historical fact" preface! (though a few of them could arguably have used one...)
And those that do often live long enough to see themselves become the pop-villain.
I view empirical truth as having layers. There is one objective truth, of course, but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth.
The clichéd example of this would be the Bohr model of atoms being the first "ring" of truth, and quantum mechanics being a second or third "ring". Another example would be "everything revolves around the earth" -> "everything revolves around the sun" -> "Newtonian gravity" -> "Einsteinian general relativity".
As a first-order approximation of the truth, Gladwell is fine. There are serious criticisms of him in this article that may cause me to rethink this, but as long as they aren't full-on manipulations of reality, I view them as a useful entry point into a subject.
Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand. Gladwell, on the other hand, I can read in the bathtub with a cold beer. He's fun in a way that the more academic approach to history necessarily can't be (unless there is a Feynman-esque character writing history books that I'm not aware of?)
I'd hesitate to call it even something that could be true. It's more like an abstract painting.
I went through quite a hostile phase, as it's clearly masquerading as something it isn't. It's more a work of aesthetic-political creation, than any kind of "history".
It's a made up history of a possible world view possible dead people might have had; for the sake of saying something about our world views today.
Or a music video: Massive Attack x Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e3I1mLc3RM&t=54s
So laypeople read his books and listen to his podcasts and don't know that the truth has been fudged so much for the sake of storytelling that it borders on outright misleading. But it was so entertaining in the meantime that it feels like additional insight - which of course is the brilliant trick of his marketing.
Fiction claiming to be non-fiction is annoying and should at least be labeled accurately.
That just seems like how most teaching works. I.e. No one starts out learning physics as it works in any physical space, you start with a simplified fake version to start to understand concepts before you can start to handle greater complexity and approach greater truths.
Using simplified, fake versions to learn concepts makes perfect sense.
Teaching people that fake versions are actually true just to learn concepts is counterproductive. There’s no advantage to lying about training models and it’s not healthy, I think, to pretend I’m doing this for the good of my audience.
It seems like the most objective account of history one can create is merely a recollection of all facts, with no room for editorialization. I've read some books by historians and I find it hard to follow when reading in the 20 minute increments my free time is divided into. Maybe that's just my problem, but it makes me understand why some people reach for pop history.
That said, it is definitely the case that academic history is written for other academics and is often terribly dry for people outside of the field. There are exceptions, but little about a book itself will tell you whether it is one of the ones that are well suited for amateur readers.
Not necessarily, I think it's very likely that the foundation of truth is ever changing in itself, nothing has to be fixed in time and space.
> but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth
I think one thing that was a big "haha" moment for me was actually reconsidering what I'm even trying to accomplish when discussing "truth". I realized that in actuality, we are simply framing facts and observations into conceptual models that allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. This means we really only care about the practicalities.
Like you said, quantum physics and general relativity are simply two conceptual models, in practice they each work well for certain things, but we've found they are incompatible right now, and what one is good at the other not so much. And that's fine, unless you wrongly obsess over "truth", which you will never find. But if you focus on your practicalities, then it's a question of finding the most effective conceptual model you can, and then applying it to your life.
When it comes to history, it's the same. It doesn't really matter what actually happened and why. What matters is the conceptual model you use to look at the artifacts you've got, and what that allows you to do today in your life. It might be that one framing of history helps you keep together a free society and keep authoritarian agents at bay, if so, it's a pretty good model of history. If it doesn't allow you to do this, and actually does the opposite, and that's not your goal, than it's a bad model of history.
Start thinking that way, and history becomes a means to protect yourself from future mistakes using past data. Now your model of history can be objectively measured in how good it is at doing that.
The lesson to learn from the current limits of physics isn't that you should construct whichever narrative best serves your propaganda and stop obsessing about the truth. The only lesson they should teach you in history is to not obsess too much about details that just can't be known (like the internal motivations or beliefs of historical figures) and instead to focus on what actually happened (like the impact their actions had).
"Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications.
This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past.
Generally this is implicitly ackowledged in science, it rarely claims an absolute truth, simply a model that best fits all the data, and which affords us the best predictions and the best methods for accomplishing some desired outcome. The model that succeed the best at that will be the agreed on "truth" and how we go about understanding things until a better model shows up. In that sense, the scientific "truth" is a moving target by design, because the success criteria for truth is just: the current most practical understanding.
What that means for history is that yes, the science of history is very much grounded in this practical reality. You are successfully studying history if the lessons you take from the past allow you to predict the future or increase the likelihood of your desired outcome for some decision you need to make today.
Effectively I'm arguing against the narratives of truth that serves people's agendas, but I'm doing so by pointing out that my "haha" moment related to this was realizing that truth is irrelevant, believing in truth itself is a mistake. If you start to instead seek practical relevance and start to see all truth as "models of the world" and not the real truth, you'll now be able to actually judge truths for what they really are and that means how useful and helpful they are to you or me at predicting events or generating some desired outcome.
Let's take some concrete examples. Say that a Volkswagen engineer came to a hypothetical ethical manager and said that they had discovered some of their cars' emissions were much higher in real life conditions than in the lab tests they reported. If the manager cared about the truth, they would investigate to find out how this came to be. If they cared about utility, they would hide this information, as it may cause Volkswagen to lose an edge.
Similarly for historical purposes - an ethical historian who is interested in helping the English public have a good image of itself would discard information about the horrors that the British Empire forced many people through, and only discuss the nice things they did. After all, truth doesn't exist, so why complicate the story?
I can see that you're getting hooked on the utility side of things, when I say practical I do not imply benefitial to you in a selfish way. In fact, I'm making no moral implications, I'm not speaking to ethics or morals at all.
So it seems you're thinking I'm saying that you can simply make up falsehoods to your benefits, lie and deceive others is a great way to achieve a goal, so why not. Okay, that's not what I'm saying at all, I'm not arguing that the ends justify the means.
What I'm saying is that any argument to the truth is actually a way to deceive yourself and others. It's a dogma:
> Dogma - a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true
You'll tell me this is the truth and argument it to death until I concede defeat and agree to your truth, or we'll just agree to disagree.
Now what I am saying is that this truth of yours, it's simply a hypothetical model which fits the data you have, or at least best tries to fit and explain the data you have. That it is true or not is unknown. What we can know though, is how practical of a model it is.
So replace the word truth with model everywhere and hopefully you'll come to the same "haha" moment as me, when looking at people's truth as simply models they came up with that best explains their current data, everything becomes clearer and starts to make sense.
So in that way, I'm saying someone's truth (which in my head I think of as model of reality, or explanation and understanding of something), is only as "true" (which in my head I think as accuracy of the model to predict or create a desired effect), as it can be used practically to predict the outcome or allow us to design methods that generate some desired outcome.
That means that when a historian explains what happened in the British Empire, why they did what they did, what effects it had on people and our modern times, how it felt to live in that era, etc. I will assess how correct they are based purely on if any of that information can predict anything or allow for any applicable learnings that actually works. Otherwise I will simply conclude that that's just their opinion, and it's probably biased from their frame of reference and beliefs.
So your examples are a little beside my point. But for example, in the case of the ethical manager, let's assume since they are ethical, they don't want their cars to cause harm to the environment. If they followed what I'm saying, they would not look for some absolute truth about the cause of global warming, instead they would look for the current models of climate and emissions that have best predicted the changes in the climate or have shown the most promesse in changing the climates outcome, and use that to figure out what best to do about it. Not try to argue that the model is not the real absolute truth, because of bla bla I believe and I think and therefore, and so don't you get it...
The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far. This is the core of what I consider important for a theory of 'truth' to seem acceptable to me personally, and yours does pass this test.
Again, thanks for bearing with me!
Ya I think we agree on this. Maybe I go one step further though, and I'm proposing that even if your model accounts for everything, it is still not the truth, just a good model, and that it works perfectly today does not guarantee it will work perfectly forever or that reality is exactly as your model explains it to be.
I can imagine both a reality which changes in time and space, thus a model could be perfect given some specific time and space, but no longer apply in another. And I can also imagine equal models that are both just as accurate, yet they differ in their explanation. So a model which would have perfect prediction still might not be the true reality, it could be an equal model with similar behavior, but how you've modeled things could still be very different from how reality works.
Which is where I'm kind of suggesting that the search for truth is irrelevant, and trying to argue for or against truth is futile. It be better to search for models with practical benefits instead, that the model is true to reality or not isn't something we should fight over, because it doesn't matter, and it's not objectively provable.
So when I say "search for truth", I don't mean the search for an understanding that enables better prediction or manipulation of outcomes. I take it to mean the search for what reality actually truly is like. And I'm saying the search for that, while it sounds noble, it really just ends up being dogma, and each of us can believe whatever we want. But the search for the former, the search for models of reality that have practical benefits is something we can all discuss and benefit from. And so I think our focus should move away from this "truth seeking" and towards this "practical model seeking".
Hope that made sense too. I guess in a way I'm saying that for example, if someone says that "this is what really happened in the past", and then they show you evidence as to why, there's this parchment, this old painting, this focile, well that's still just someone's belief of what happened, even if it constructs an explanation that fits the data. It might not be what actually happened at all, it's just a good model that fits the current data. So practically speaking, all you can do is nod and smile, or ask: ok what can I do with this? Can I use it to accurately predict what will happen in the future? Can I use it to make better decisions today so that the future ends up in that way instead of some other way? If no, well your explanation is crap, and all we can do with this explanation if you insist it is true is get mad at each other.
Oh, and the last thing is, with this frame of mind, it is perfectly acceptable for contradicting models to coexist. A model doesn't have to be "absolutely true to reality" to be practical. In fact, a not true to reality model could be more useful sometimes, an approximate model for example can sometimes be more easily computed, or put to use, it can make it that predicting things (while possibly less accurate), can be done more quickly or at higher scale, or with less data, etc. So again, I'm trying to show that if you discuss practical models, you kind of remove all sense of nobility and righteousness and pride and whatever that a belief in "truth" brings.
Edit: Oh and if anyone has read this far, to bring it back to Malcom Gladwell. What this means is that if you don't look at his revisionist history as a claim to the truth, but instead consider it a model of the past. The question isn't if he is right about the truth or not, but how practical is his framing of history for the reader. Can I leverage it to make better decisions today about political policies? About work policies? In my day to day life? Can I apply it to predict social trends? This is now what becomes important, how good a model is it, not how truthful is it.
Unfortunately in the past I have seen people using this type of reasoning to then argue that, if truth is illusory, so is falsehood - that everything is a matter of opinion and utility (for example, Peter Jordan has argued this in the past). This does not at all follow from your my and your beliefs about ultimate truths, but it is tempting for some to extrapolate.
Exactly.
What's this called? Post-Popperian? Predictionist? Predictionatarian?
The last 4 years have transmuted me from a Popperian to a predictionist. Due to the futility, I've stopped trying to inform, refute, persuade. Now I only care about the quality and utility of predictions a model can make.
Young Earth Creationism? Cool. What can I do with that bit of wisdom? Nothing? Ok, well, thanks for sharing, I guess.
> The problem with Descartes’ standard for knowledge is that almost no beliefs meet it. Descartes thought he could show how our ordinary knowledge claims are ultimately based on the Cogito, but most philosophers have not been convinced by his case
-- https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/11/26/descartes-i-think-...
Now I don't deny the existence of a reality, I'm not saying everything is an illusion and we're not even real. I'm saying that reality need not be a constant, which would mean that truth can be a moving target, as it can change in time and space.
And then I'm saying that irregardless of if that reality (or ground truth let's call it) is constant or ever changing, when we humans explain that truth, we are always simply modeling our understanding of it for practical purposes. Our search for truth itself is driven by this practical drive, understanding of the ground truth is researched in order to better predict the future or act upon our environment to create the future we'd prefer.
If you instead think of our explained truths as the absolute ground truth, you are entering the world of human dogma and beliefs, that is a world of personal opinion, with no way to argue or debate anything, its only practical benefits are seeking comfort and/or power.
For me, this was a big "haha" moment. I realized that the opposite of dogma is pragma. Your claim to the truth are useless, and in many cases harmful dogmas. It's much better to focus on practicalities that one model has over another. Most people's "truths" have glaring flaws anyways, that doesn't always invalidate their practicalities though, and that matters much more in the end.
> If you're pragmatic, you're practical. You're living in the real world, wearing comfortable shoes. If you're dogmatic, you follow the rules. You're living in the world you want, and acting a little stuck up about it
-- https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/pragmati...
But then, this is exactly the critique the article advances: in this book Gladwell presents a narrative that gives readers (to put it charitably) an incomplete understanding of the nature of American air doctrine in WWII. Omission of facts IS manipulation of reality, and what Gladwell has created seems to be more akin to a third- or fourth-order representation of reality where a heavily biased selection of (to be fair, mostly true) facts is then glossed and presented in a form where one "can read it in the bathtub with a cold beer" and have a good time. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's pretty remarkable to assume that such a work gives you any meaningful grasp of a subject in addition to being entertainment.
Have you read https://acoup.blog/?
Another reader above (@iainctduncan) said:
> Years ago he was a springboard for me to read further on various topics, each time leading me to conclude he doesn't give a shit about presenting the truth if it gets in the way of his story. :(
If everyone were like her or him, it would be fine to write sloppyly and engagingly about science and history posing as if you were a real authority. But that doesnt seem to be the case (this is HN).
I'm afraid to ever mention anything I heard from him in casual conversation because someone more knowledgeable would probably call me out.
As an overly broad generalization, Gladwell is at heart a journalist, not a historian (even though he has a bachelor's in history). I enjoy listening to Revisionist history and reading some of his books, because some things in history are revealed by trying to form some kind of narrative (e.g., Historical Materialism), but he's not telling you history. He's forming a story from history. But I think his work is often an excellent stepping off point to real history texts, and it sometimes gets you to think about the second-order effect of things (his episode on Brown v. Board was extremely interesting).
Ironically the Boston Tea Party episode was also the one that broke me and made me bring a lot more grains of salt to my experience of his work. I think it's one of his worst episodes, and one where he tips his hand a little too far and breaks the illusion for anyone who has even casually read any serious works on the period. It's a _piece_ as you said, but it's an incredible oversimplification.
But I'm interested in what do you think the Boston Tea Party episode gets wrong?
They wanted to give England the bird. The taxes were just the flimsy pretense. Pretty much all of them paid for it in opportunity cost at a bare minimum.
If I'm a tea smuggler beating the competition by avoiding taxes and my competitor is granted an even better tax-avoidance method (an exemption), then I'm going to pick a fight. I still might find a different business, but I'd see how far I could push it, first.
One excellent example is Watergate. It was an extraordinarily well-reported story, and it remains to this an iconic story that everyone remembers as a major outrage. In the same era, there was the COINTELPRO leak, where a few people broke into an FBI building and found documents detailing extensive, egregious FBI Gestapo-style activities against the Civil rights movement (including trying to blackmail MLK into committing suicide, and working with the guy who assassinated Malcolm X, and many others). This was barely reported by a handful of papers, and even though it sparked actual legislative action, Senate committees, hearings etc, it has been all but forgotten. It never really fit the narratives deemed important by the kinds of people who write the news (who were largely against the Civil rights movement at the time).
This is not to say that extraordinary journalists haven't existed, to whom we owe great debts. It's not even to say that journalism hasn't degraded - there may well be fewer great journalists today than in other periods.
The author of this article is operating on the wrong premise- in his own words Gladwell considers himself more a storyteller than an arbiter of truth.
You need to take it with a grain of salt (and I think it's fair criticism that he goes a bit ott on presenting alternative perspectives as dominant)
The 6 part "Supernova in the East"
When someone with a much (much!) bigger following than you parachutes into your field and joins you on your platform (where you are currently covering the same topic), you maybe withhold your most severe criticism of their work.
Carlin's podcast series are much, much longer than Gladwell's typical podcast treatments though, so at least it lets him include a lot more details.
How so? He seems to be pretty upfront in talking about his sources, quoting from them, and saying repeatedly that he's a journalist and not a historian.
But talking about the people who were in that event, leaning heavily on eyewitness accounts and primary sources, all of that makes the events come alive. I think both are valid and important viewpoints on history. I think history in school would be a lot more interesting if it took a similar approach.
Looking at an historical event at more of a ground-level is nowhere near the same thing as giving outright incorrect information.
That's not to say he never gets anything wrong, he and his researchers aren't steeped in the subject for their whole careers so they'll miss things. He is biased towards the exciting stories and sources, but usually qualifies them with "I'll tell you this fun story but historians disagree about X Y Z because of A".
I'll have to look into the criticisms but my impression just from listening is far better than any other pop history.
But you'll be happy to hear that "sometimes uses outdated sources or oversimplifies stuff" is a common criticism of basically all academic history written outside of the last 20 years, so he is in decent company.
Thanks for the tip on part VI, I've been eagerly awaiting the release of that.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Downfall/cJXtAAAAMAAJ?h...
For a general; history of bombing as a tactic, I recommend A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist [2]. A short and unusual book in that the author gives instructions on how to read the book in two ways, either chronologically as a history book, or thematically, following the themes and ideas of bombing strategies.
[2]. https://books.google.com/books?id=Wws_HAAACAAJ&newbks=0&hl=e...
Firebombing and the atomic bomb, while obviously subjects of internal bureaucratic and ideological jockeying, were considered viable primarily because they might shorten a long and very brutal war. Whether they did so or not is debatable, but we'd be on very shaky ground to debate the morality of the attempt from the comfort of posterity.
I don't particularly care for Gladwell's glib nonsense, but I also find fault with the sort of anti-Gladwell Brooklyn-podcaster history (e.g. https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin) that engages in righteous hand-wringing over supposed American atrocities, without once mentioning any of the context above, nor Japan's atrocities in China in the 1930s leading up to the conflict, nor the very obvious fact that America didn't start the war.
“They only wanted to keep the commies out” is a nicely glib line, but one that glosses over the many, many political considerations that shaped the end of the pacific war and reveals an almost total ignorance of the scholarship on the subject
> The ships' crews were briefed on the nature of the mission and given the opportunity to stay behind if desired; none did.
Your parent post is right, the Japanese military were absolute fanatics.
Edit:
And another point. After the second atomic bombing, military officers attempted to overthrow the Japanese emperor to prevent the surrender. After the second atomic bombing. Let that sink in. If not for the heroic actions of a few Japanese men, they might have succeeded in suppressing the broadcast of the surrender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
The average Japanese soldier was certainly perceived as a fanatic—due a combination of the evidence at hand at the time, deliberate Japanese policy and propaganda, and also a lot of rather nasty racial narratives—which had a lot to do with why total war was seen as unavoidable.
Another example: 21,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, but only 216 taken as prisoners. They fought for five weeks until the bitter end. The stubborn defiance demonstrated at the Battle of Iwo Jima and Operation Ten-Go both played a role in the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
There is also some evidence that Japanese Army officers created a deliberate culture of extreme violence, ordering ordinary soldiers to commit atrocities, for example, as a way of ruling out surrender as an option. The soldiers would then assume that their treatment by the other side would be identical.
I don't object to the word "fanatic" out of some semantic pedantry or because it's derogatory per se, but I think it robs us of some consideration of the individuals in question, and the various strands of policy, training, propaganda, fear, group pressure, and nostalgic death-worshipping cultural narratives to which they were subjected. The result was certainly the perception of fanaticism, which was intended to demoralize the Allies but backfired terribly, like the decision to prosecute the war itself. (And, as you point out, produced an enormous wastage of lives for no real gain.)
It’s probably foolish to say the Soviets didn’t play a part in the decisions of some of the men involved but I also strongly doubt there’s a compelling argument that it was more influential than what the Americans had just shown themselves capable of doing. The Soviets were a distant threat compared to the Americans continually bombing Japan for 3 months up to that point.
The argument goes that the Emperor's public statements were an effort to save face in front of the country. "No, it wasn't our incompetence that created defeat, they had a Super Weapon!" The Russians could have had ground troops on Japanese territory in days, compared to weeks or months for the Americans.
It seems a little odd to hold a journalist to a standard software engineers themselves don't generally meet.
So, how come no one caught the error before publication? How come Gladwell did not even look up what an igon value is? Etc.
Everyone makes mistakes, but seemingly the more successful the author the more responsibility they should bear that their overall point is correct and useful. And Gladwell serially misses these marks. At least that's how I interpret these arguments.
When I talk to a friend and I'm unsure about something I'm about to say, I try to express my epistemic deficiency (e.g. "if I remember correctly ..."). But when I'm giving a presentation to even 5 people I'll make sure to do a quick google search to confirm if I remember correctly. If I was writing an article that I know will be read by thousands, you bet I would do a lot more.
Since I don't expect an ordinary writer to have a lot of linear algebra, it doesn't bother me much to know that they're taking their source's word for it on this stuff. But I do worry a lot about the ability for slick-talking people to persuasively name drop concepts they don't really grok.
Maybe people could blame him for allowing the error to appear in the book, 7 years after it had been corrected in the magazine. Shrug.
> 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.
Whether or not I know about eigenvalues myself is a bit besides the point (although, yes, I did learn that in college).
If I were to write an article about math with glaring errors, then your question would make more sense. Until then, my linear algebra ability isn't relevant.
Gladwell is directly quoting Nassim Taleb, and openly says how little he follows the math Taleb discusses earlier in the same chapter. The point is "Look at how smart Taleb is, I don't even know what half these words mean", he was never trying to understand the math or imply he did. In that context mis-transcribing eigenvalues doesn't feel nearly as damning as it's made out to be around these parts?
"The sole thing the Marianas had going for them was that they were within range of Japan. But even that was an exaggeration. The truth is that they were within range only under perfect conditions. To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious tailwind to lift it off the runway. This was as crazy a situation as anyone faced throughout the whole war."
Generally, planes prefer to land and take off into the wind. Tailwinds are nice once you're already in flight, since they give you free speed.
Knowing how 'lift' works is basically irrelevant to anything in the rest of the story.
Over 500 pages, you're going to get things wrong.
The important facts of that para related to the strategic importance of the Island. The minute details of 'why lift works' are not really relevant.
What's relevant is that "The islands importance is as an airstrip/base and even then it's barely 'in range'".
This is misleading. Air operations in WWII where continuously dependent on weather conditions and the wind conditions make a large difference to the payload a piston powered aircraft of that era can carry. The B-29 was specifically designed to accomplish the strategic bombing mission in a pacific war; it would not have been accepted into production if it could not reach Japan from the Marianas Islands. In fact, it could comfortably reach the vast majority of Japan and its industrial centers, only the north of japan was outside of its normal range.
The removal of most self-defense weaponry (except the tail cannon) made the entirety of Japan reachable; they simply weren't needed for night operations and Japan's fighter force was negligible by the end of the war. In fact, future b-29's were built with only a tail cannon in the first place.
I didn't come away from the audiobook thinking LeMay had "won" even the battle, let alone the war (meaning ultimately precision bombing has won the argument in modern times). Granted, I already knew plenty about this before, but my impression in the end from Gladwell was that both Hansel and LeMay were wrong in different ways, just that LeMay's aggressive firebombing looked like it was "doing something" to the higher ups. The technology of the time simply did not allow the precision bombing approach to "look" like it was even "doing something" (and it was certainly failing by its own primary metric, hitting the target). Indiscriminate bombing is easy, so you can point at photos and say you succeeded in doing it.
Gladwell of course simplifies it a lot and wraps it up in a bow, because his strength is telling a story, not conducting a detailed analysis. At the very least, perhaps a lot of people will become aware of these events and be made to think about them.
Fact is, no one really knows if the firebombing hastened Japanese surrender or convinced the Japanese population that they really had lost. Maybe it did, and maybe it was important. Or maybe not. And it was certainly horrifying. Gladwell doesn't dwell enough on the uncertainty, but he doesn't forget to mention the moral issues.
It was also a war crime as defined by the Hague conventions that the US had signed on to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_...
"There are infinite kinds of irresponsible books that a well-credentialed media insider can write. First are the total farces of fact. ... A second variety of irresponsible books are those whose primary purpose is to market their authors ... And then there are books whose fusion of factual inaccuracy and moral sophistry is so total that they can only be written by Malcolm Gladwell."
*No I didn't say I don't get along. They asked what books I was reading
It's easy to make LeMay look more evil than he was. Once you've got the villain you need a hero if you want to tell a good story.
We're talking an author someone who does a layman level history podcast here. You can't expect him to fight over facts like a lawyer. That's just not what you do when you produce that kind of content. He's gonna find a bunch of facts, point the ones he likes in the direction of the point he wants to make and then turn them loose. And if the result is a good story he's gonna sell a whole bunch of books to the kinds of people who listen to his podcast.
It's a shame that making a mess out of history is a good business model but the fact of the matter is that it is.
(So much for post-truth being a mere problem for the rabble...)
It’s like the Amway of selling ideas.
TED should be viewed as high-quality feel-good, inspirational YouTube videos, not an educational resource.
Talking to strangers- "everyone and their culture is different, it's impossible to know if someone is lying"
Hoving looking at a fake sculpture and instantly going 'NOPE' is not a Joe Average reaction, but draws on lots of experience. The story of gamblers giving stress reactions to unfamiliar and dangerous card games is GAMBLERS.
Your gut feeling has nothing to do with it. What are you so expert at, that you can just glance and you'll know? (as in, more than would be justified by the lack of analysis and prolonged exposure)
Being able to plausibly form hugely accelerated judgements and have them check out, is interesting. It's also plausible to me that few people build up that much expertise, to be able to do that. But for those who do… and it can be in any field, from any person… it's an interesting perspective.
He has a New Yorker writing style but without having anything to say.
Wide spread cargo cult adoption of Kansas City's policing strategy ignored the science, explaining why few reproduced KC's successes, with all sorts of terrible consequences, resulting many senseless deaths, and destroying trust and legitmacy of policing.
Just another tale of bad policy, unintended consequences, railing against entrenched dogma.
In this case, Gladwell's quixotic suggestion is to step back, reassess, try again. Daylighting the science during this cycle of turmoil seems reasonable. Might even help.
What more could he do? What would you do?
After a few years at it, I came away thinking the whole thing was bullshit. Unfortunately, countless tax dollars were wasted.
I guess I was most disappointed because it was getting absolutely stellar reviews at the time and I'm not sure why.
Being objective and moral has lead to amazing amounts of peace, cooperation, and prosperity. But I always think about an example that seems to say you can be too objective and maybe too moral:
Let's say a wolf is hungry and wants to eat you. Your options are (1) let it eat you; (2) run away to safety; or (3) shoot the wolf. No matter what, something will die. Either you die, another prey animal dies, or the wold dies (of starvation or being shot).
Being too objective means you will be the one that dies, because you can't find a reason to take an action like shooting the wolf or running away.
I have a hard time getting past this example when it comes to questions of war and morality. If there is little cost to you, of course it's easy to make the moral choice and avoid needless deaths of your enemies. But if the cost starts to become significant (e.g. protracted bloody war), then you need to make the choice that's right for you and your allies. Right?
His ideas on satire are extremely valuable IMO, explicitly because of the political nature of his arguments. It critiques the inability of modern social systems inability critique those in power, and skillfully intermixes the politics of the time to enhance his point (that part about A Wonderful Country is beautiful, how an extremely political point can be made through satire, leagues beyond SNL)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
It is also known as stop and frisk. This type of policing has also been adopted to traffic stops as well and arguably has lead to warrior cop policing.
Gladwell discusses the implications of this in Talking to Strangers.
So if you want a perspective on guns, gun violence, policing from the 1970s until today, I recommend it.
So it's classic MG? He's a good easy - often feel good - read. However, the pattern that's too clear is he rarely supplies a counter argumemt or counter view. He takes his position and then plays pile on with "the facts."
In contrast, the article puts him in front and centre.
OK. Mark me as sold. Article is dead on. Book is pop history at its worst.
Well it sure is hard to tell because, of course, I wasn't there of course, but isn't that exactly the problem here?
For my entire life I've heard the bot mot that "History is written by the victorious"...well doesn't that mean at its base level that ALL of it bathes in its own bullshit?
I like Malcom's writing and his pod...and at least he has the honesty to call it "Revisionist History" as he is obviously telling us that HERE, yes, narrative story might win out over historical accuracy (which, once again, we have been taught is BS anyway).
Why shouldn't non-textbook history reflect the shades and biases of its author? As long as its well written and presents fair reflections upon this history, why should the author be pummeled by critics for doing so?
Too many questions and not enough answers...as usual.
He didn't always make friends in Bomber Command.
So he's writing like a blogger.
I put him between John Oliver (cherry picked truths veering on lies) and Nate Silver (will have an opinion, but will separate it from the source data).
He tries to reach a conclusion through honest means and good research. However, his narration will skip over / bend the specifics to make the journey to the conclusion more digestible.
He has been an excellent entry point for a lot of my peers who are less inclined to read textbooks or non-fiction novels. Similarly, his podcast is always interesting enough to keep the attention of a random person despite covering what they would've otherwise not been interested in.
There is something to be said for that skill.