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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Malcom Gladwell writes clearly and persuasively. I don't believe he uses his rhetoric to deceive, I don't think it's full on sophistry. That said, he clearly won't let the facts get in the way of a good story. As much as I want truth, evidence and proof to have one true meaning, the words really mean different things to different people. Heck, they mean different things to the same person in different contexts.

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?

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It is hard to read this as a positive thing. You are basically describing a con-man (or more neutrally, a politician) who is skilled at convincing people of things through stories that are not factually accurate but feel accurate - "Truthiness" as Jon Stewart called it.

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.

I guess, I like Gladwell for the same reasons you dislike him. He's popular and picked apart. I can read his books and be convinced, then find out about all of the ways he's wrong. Where did I screw up? What did I fall for?

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.

Goodwin's law warning.

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.

But "Mein Kampf" is an important primary source propaganda, whereas Gladwell's books are trash secondary sources, unless the object of research is "comforting false narratives of the early 21st century".

I don't think that's fair to "Mein Kampf" (!).

You say you don't think it's "full on sophistry" then you go on to describe a full on sophist.

I agree, Gladwell tells a great story and he’s absolutely entertaining to read. But I can’t quite wrap my head around how you began your comment by saying Gladwell doesn’t use rhetoric and end it by describing his writing as “stories dressed up as science (kinda)”. Is that not rhetoric?

"rhetoric to deceive"

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.

The book review cites much concrete evidence --- done by actual scholars doing the tedious work of digging through "boring" archives --- undermining Gladwell's conclusions.

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.

You don't get to claim an unproven alternate science just because it's a good story unless you're in the Fiction aisle. Gladwell would like to be in the non-fiction aisle, and he really utterly fails there.

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.

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