The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
Gladwell, Godin, 37signals, Merlin Mann, pg, Hugh MacLeod and 1001 other well known pundits and "idea spreaders" do not claim to be making significant scientific discoveries. They are the lubricant of science, programming, design, management strategies, creativity, or whatever their respective niche is. They give us ideas that are easily digested but then force us to consider our own positions and ideas on their ground. This is valuable in itself.
I think you do a disservice to these guys by your description. PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down. Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.
If by "good ideas" you mean "good insights" then I totally agree.
However, very few of the ideas that these people have popularized were truly original (in a sense that I feel a "new" idea should be). My original point was that this doesn't matter anyway - if their good presentation highlights a point, that's awesome. These people all know how to connect dots in an interesting way and then relay these ideas. They are (for the most part) not coming up with wildly new concepts and inventions (pg's founding of Viaweb being a good exception to this, of course!)
For what it's worth, a lot of people have "good ideas" and write them down. Many of these people go unheralded. This makes those I mentioned successful "idea spreaders" in my book.
Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.
Since the insights people have often depend on the hard and boring science and studies to be completed, that strikes me as an odd (or perhaps it was satirical?) statement. Without the lab equipment and "statistical tests" there would be few new confirmed discoveries for us to make these connective insights about ;-)
I agree with this, but I guess I would differentiate between someone who comes up with an insight on their own (even if someone else has come up with something similar before), and someone like Gladwell who just reads books and then rewrites the good parts to make the ideas spread.
There are several pg essays that I wish everyone would read (not only geeks). Can't say that for the other names you mention.
I think the original poster's point was that the ideas of those people are editorial essays, with a largely motivational function. I think that's true.
But they're different kinds of motivational material. I think the primary difference is that Paul's writing usually builds to some point or collection of points of advice rather than the abstractions being the point. This isn't really surprising because basically his job is being an advisor.
Also, I'd be pretty careful in calling it perfect. Referring to almost anyone's ideas as perfect sets off the bullshit alarms for me. Paul's a smart guy and he's got some good insights, but he's sure to get a lot of stuff wrong. The converse would be to assume that he's stopped making mistakes and learning from them, which I think is the opposite of what smart people shoot for.
1) The idea behind the book All Marketers Are Liars
2) His idea that ideas that inspire people to talk about them are the ideas that spread. This idea is spread out across three books (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, and The Big Moo).
3) His collection of ideas about what is and isn't worth measuring. C.f. his blog post on Clean Firetrucks, his blog post on holding the sides of the treadmill, etc.
[EDIT: found a link for All Marketers: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294 ]
But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me.
I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. The difficulty is predicting ahead of time whether they will.
Really? Would you say this is true for Newton's work, or Einstein's?
I find that new ideas in the sense of new insights about how the world works are extremely rare, and that having them is much harder than testing them, because having them requires you to change the way you think.
Perhaps you are influenced here by the situation with startups, where ideas are cheap and execution tends to count for more. But this is a different kind of idea. The reason startup ideas are cheap is that they tend not to be discoveries, but merely hunches about where to look for discoveries. E.g. the startup idea equivalent of Newton's work would be "Explain mathematically why planetary orbits have the shape they do."
Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven wrong. If we know how the experiment will turn out, there's little point in actually running it. And there, I think the process you describe for startups isn't so different than the process for science. In each, the hunch points the direction but the apparatus must be built to verify or reject it. But it's hard for me to see one hunch, rather than a tested series, leading to a true discovery.
To put it another way, in merely writing an idea down it may exist all by itself in some Platonic ideal. Not surprisingly, the Greek philosophers often left it to others to validate (or invalidate) what they produced. Running tests wasn't truly valued. I'd argue those ideas that have stuck with us the longest are those that engendered the greatest utility.
Then there's Heraclitus.
Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc.
If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.
Coming up with an entirely new paradigm is, if not exactly a "wicked" problem, some other type of complex problem so difficult and uncommon that we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it.
So when I say that coming up with ideas is more difficult than testing them, what I mean is that coming up with an idea belongs to a more difficult class of problem, even if it is occasionally easier to create a specific idea than to test that specific idea.
I dislike the approach partly from a distaste for the tabloid savaging of the successful but mostly because it seems to lead to rather thin regurgitations of existing critiques. I believe that is the case with this article.
Don't let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. Well that's the way 'theregister' likes to tell it.
The ideas behind the "6 degrees of separation" are measurable and form a new type of science, not surprisingly called Network theory. The ideas behind them instead of being debunked are strengthening. In '99, "Duncan Watts" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts and "Steven Strogatz" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz wrote a paper submitted to Nature working on the "Small World theory" problem called "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks" . Their results tend to support the idea that there is a measurable, finite, minimum number of links in a network between nodes and that clustering of node links does occur. The idea applied to various other natural networks (Actors in Hollywood, neural networks in the brain, Transmission lines across the US) also support the conclusions.
"... a scale-free network is a network
whose degree distribution follows a
power law ..."
I don't just believe the ideas of Watts, Strogatz and Barabási because of who they are but what their experiments reveal.
I hope he doesn't turn in to Seth Godin.
A counter viewpoint: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...
I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and that violinists who have a chance to become virtuosos have uniformly practiced about 10000 hours, while the merely "good" ones have practiced about 8000 hours and the bad ones have practiced 4000 hours. (Incidentally, I don't really believe the second one -- because it implies that all kinds "effortful practice" are exactly as efficient as one another.) I'm not saying that there weren't others, just that I can't remember them.
I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes, though, and certainly I think anecdotes (and boilerplate) made up at least 80% of those first seven chapters. Plus his anecdotes kind of sucked. The Beatles prove the 10000 hour rule? Okay, I guess. Bill Joy? I don't really think so. Bill Gates? Hell no.
I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes...
Which is precisely why authors use "statistically irrelevant" anecdotes. Because they help you emotionally connect to the material and remember it better.
Gladwell undoubtedly isn't the greatest scientific writer, he just points out that we have to think about things more than we do. The message I got was that on one hand organizations like the military don't act fast enough, while police officers are encouraged to think so fast that they stop reevaluating the situation.
If people like what he's saying, if people find that Malcolm resonates with their perception of reality, then all the better. It should be a personal choice as to what we find interesting and not interesting, rather than some omnipotent pundit at the "Register" dictating it to us.
I think that the author of the article is just jealous that he cannot personally derive anything of interest to say without belittling a colleague.
And on that point, that's the feeling I get when I read this article. The writer is trying to be direct and ride the fence of "condemnation by realization" but only comes off as wrongly crude. While I haven't read any of Gladwell's book, I've seen him speak and he's got his wits about him regarding these things. Let's put it into perspective: how many of us can effectively lecture on the things he does?