Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too | Hacker News Reader

Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too

nytimes.com

32 points_tk_37 comments

Malcolm Gladwell is an perpetually contrarian charlatan, which of course means he is beloved by people at the NYT and WaPo.

As an example of his nonsense, he was famously a shill for Big Tobacco in the 90's: https://beyondchron.org/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-int...

He's also the guy that found out becoming a savant at something takes 10,000 hours.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who feels this way. He's also a shill for return to office despite not actually working in an office.

Oh you are by far not alone. You'll enjoy: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/malcolm-gladwells-outl...

Thank you! I'm only 2 minutes into it and it's great

The rest of the episodes are great too, this is legit my favorite podcast.

> “Prevention of disease is obviously something we should strive for. But it’s not going to be cheap. We will have to pay for those who survive,”

That was the message they really went with, huh. Tobacco companies were culling old people to save money for pensions.

I think he talked about being a libertarian in his early years (who wasn't?), and moving to progressivism in one of his revisionist history episodes.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/in-tripl...

Gladwell is a master at making a slick and seductive case. When he writes a book about an idea, he approaches it like he is a lawyer representing the idea in court, except in his case he knows that most readers of his books won't hear from opposing counsel.

I was in a book club during COVID and we read Outliers. I knew the name but that was it. The club was epically correct and hung on its every word. I left.

He gives an air of objectivity while being completely subjective. Ugh, just ugh. I think the only other popular writer I detested having read was Robert Kaplan who has left the stage. I actually put his book in the compost.

Not sure why you are downvoted. His ideas are held so loosely he was a Big Tobacco shill. What are his loose ideas currently shilling?

Gladwell doesn't go into detail in this piece about what he means by holding ideas loosely, but there's probably an important distinction between (i) loose in the sense that he's open to new evidence, and (ii) loose in the sense that his understanding is not deep.

Gladwell's performance in the Munk debate versus Taibbi et al. illustrates that when you're in (ii), it's often hard to defend one's ideas. He came to the debate expecting to get by on platitudes, and then pivoted to some ad-hominems rather than being able to defend the merits of his ideas. Based on post-debate audience feedback, it ended up being one of the most lopsided losses in Munk debate history.

I'm curious, what was the debate about?

The debate was "Be it resolved: Do not trust the mainstream media".

To Gladwell's credit, he did try to attempt to understand why he lost and has written about it.

https://youtu.be/R8OgH9EfxuM?t=1667&si=sO3_rOGZRWUSH0Sr

I watched the full debate. The proposition was "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media". On the pro side were Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray; the con side was made up of Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.

It wasn't great. There were lots of personal attacks on both sides. Biting remarks can add spice to a debate, but this got a little ugly for my tastes. Gladwell went especially foul by intimating Taibbi's fondness for Walter Cronkite and other trusted journalists of his era was due not to these iconic newsmen's integrity, but because they were white men, a suggestion Gladwell made three or four times.

The Pro side brought up several of the big stories of the past few years on which the mainstream media went rather hard, but turned out to be widely accepted as wrong, like Trump-Putin collusion and Hunter Biden's laptop, but the Con team essentially dismissed these as nothingburgers.

Before the start of the debate, the audience is polled on their opinion about the proposition. It was 48% Pro (don't trust the media) and 52% Con. Another poll was taken at the end, and it was determined the Pro side (don't trust the mainstream media) won, with 67% now agreeing with them.

The most impressive person on the stage was the moderator Rudyard Griffiths. He struck me as an educated, composed, and immanently fair man.

Because Tim Harford has time for him I had assumed that much of the Gladwell hating was ad hominem attacks because he's a bit of a lefty. However, the opening paragraph really is hard to comprehend.

Gladwell sits under a poster of Mao Zedong, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, for "no particular reason". That is literally _incredible_.

This review in The Atlantic does a good job of critiquing Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' ideas, including those in his latest book.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/revenge...

i didn't find much of substance in that article. what did you find most compelling about it?

Archive: https://archive.ph/icxrI

I would be interested in whether he holds this idea (of holding ideas loosely) and his advice that others should hold this idea too, loosely.

Pay $35 to discover it!

"Strong opinions, loosely held." - Just not too loosely, else you're continually blown about by the breeze.

Mr. Igon Value himself

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Igon_Value_Problem

> The Igon Value Problem is a way of summarizing the lack of depth often encountered in modern journalism that focuses on esoteric subjects in which the journalist (or any writer in general) is not personally an expert.

If eigenvalues and determinants are esoteric knowledge in this day and age then I don’t want to live anymore.

Joking aside, things like these place content Gladwell has said or written under suspicion, because now we are dealing with the Gellman amnesia effect across a broader scope of work and subject matter.

A once in awhile mishap is one thing, typos are common even in the most densely technical of texts. But MG has a history of making lateral jumps to derive nonsensical conclusions to support completely unfounded statements. Elsewhere on the internet we have a term for that sort of creative, lateral thinking: shitposting.

I.e., mostly I just like getting attention for talking.

Very loosely. Neglect them, even.

First you must have ideas.

An author of over-hyped books that contain just one idea, endlessly repeated and reworked into all possible variants until the reader's total boredom is achieved.

And then later he will sell you a book that tells you the idea was actually incorrect.

The fact that he’s idolizing Joe Rogan in the article tells you everything you need to know. Gladwell is the dictionary definition of “pseudo-intellectual.”

The process of simplifying real-life complex events into catchy MBA-compatible anecdotes, while sacrificing any sense, and factuality has been the hallmark of Gladwell's works to the extent that the whole process was nicknamed 'gladwellization', a not exactly flattering word. Every one of his fables gives that, 'aha'-experience which, upon further consideration turns into 'wait, that makes no sense'.

Interesting. Do you have some examples to elaborate here?

There are plenty of great criticisms of his work. I find that this old review by Isaac Chotiner back when he wrote for the New Republic to be a good summary. https://web.archive.org/web/20110105044321/http://www.powell...

See here: https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/

The "If Books Could Kill" podcast did a good demolition of "Outliers" if podcasts are your thing (plus the rest of the episodes are worth a listen.)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/11658428-malcolm...

Another good criticism by Steven Pinker: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.htm....

> An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. 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.

> Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring

Which is pretty funny when you read the critiques of Pinker's (ab)use of statistics in his Better Angels book.

(edit: IBCK did this too: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/14551597-the-bet... and https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/14868290-the-bet... )

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