Meanwhile, pretty much anybody whose field has been touched by Gladwell reports that his account of their field is utterly uninformed, lacking nuance, and shaped to reach a foregone conclusion.
What more is there?
For some reason I find it utterly hilarious. Because on any subject I know a bit I find reporting by media utterly wrong or willfully ignorant. And it just makes me think what about all the subjects on which I have little or no knowledge. Can I trust anything at all here.
I guess the point is same, like Gladwell media is obsessed with narrative often at cost of details/truth.
>>You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Malcom Gladwell (in my humble opinion) is very good at making political arguments, not scientist arguments. They sound true. They engage in intellectual and emotional ways.
I have, with multiple Gladwell books, been led down the garden path. But golly it's a pretty and enjoyable walk. And eventually that walk leads me to other interesting stuff, like _thinking fast and slow_.
I guess, it's useful to me to read stories dressed up as science (kinda). Otherwise, how could I tell if the science I'm reading is just a story?
At best, it is a shortcut to convince groups of people of a point but it is the opposite of informative - people come away with bad information, not partial information and curiosity to learn more.
He is specifically disliked because he is selling the "take-aways" as knowledge when they are the opposite, then says he is just a storyteller - which is good and fine except he is marketed and digested as a layman's source of truth. Which is why we have people walking around thinking they can be a concert-grade pianist with 10,000 hours of practice even though the argument falls apart with the slightest analysis.
If Hacker News caters to curious "hacker mindset" types I think Gladwell is the opposite of curiosity: insights without discussion or understanding.
Blink was probably the one that had the biggest impact on me. There are some gems there. It lead me to other thinking about thinking ideas. I learned a bit about quality of sources. I learned a bit about skinner boxes. Ironically I'm here, refreshing HN. So clearly I didn't learn that lesson particularly well.
If you go into it with a critical eye and compare it to other sources, then you didn't fall for anything.
Reading mein kampf can be really insightful if you read it from a historical perspective and use the hueristics of skepticism. You can still dislike the original intent and think it is a missinformative work in general, but hold that the world would be better off without it.
I don't think that's fair to "Mein Kampf" (!).
He asks questions with many possible answers. He leads to one specific answer. He picks his favorite and dresses it up.
the difference would be, he knew for a fact that Bob murdered Alice. Saw it with his own eyes. He doesn't write books about how Bob couldn't possibly have killed Alice, it must have been Charlie.
He picks a favorite, says that's a good answer - rhetoric. I don't think he's leading people to an answer he believes to be wrong. He's not lying.
Yes, there are many conclusions to draw about these sorts of things, but getting facts wrong and omitting other information does not for a valid interpretation make.
He's a sophist storyteller.
He's "not lying" only in the sense that he spouts completely uninformed opinion. He knows that he does that, because it's not like he hasn't been told repeatedly. He continues anyways.
At that point, the line to flim-flam becomes tenuously thin.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...