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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

The problem I have with best-seller pseudoscience is that it gets used by people to justify assinine decisions in the workplace and even worse, in public policy. In that respect, people like Gladwell can do real harm, rather than advancing scientific literacy or spreading knowledge.

Gladwell gets rich with his writing, so good for him. But his dubious counterintuitive "insights" are really close to snake oil in some cases.

That said, maybe there's money in writing books to take down Gladwell.

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> The problem I have with best-seller pseudoscience is that it gets used by people to justify assinine decisions in the workplace and even worse, in public policy.

He, like many writers, has a very clear agenda and influencing things like workplace hiring practices or public policy is EXACTLY what he's aiming to do. No doubt, he's sincere in thinking what he's ultimately doing is good, but it's very often insincere in picking or even manipulating data to fits his beliefs rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.

I have respect for him as a writer, I have very little respect for him as a truth teller.

Your opinion doesn't matter; you have not spent the required 10,000 hours to become a Hacker News comment expert.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean when you say that?

I thought Outliers was pretty good (the only one of his I've read). I'd be happy to have you disabuse me of that notion.

As a start, you could read this article (or the book, I guess), exploring elite athletes (like Usain Bolt) and comparing their stories to what Malcolm Gladwell suggests in Outliers: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/media/books/H...

That article is arguing against a gross simplification of an idea in Gladwell's book. Not exactly the same standard of rigorous science that Gladwell's critics seem to demand.

I heard Gladwell very briefly on the radio today and he described his work as "intellectual adventure stories".

I'm good with that.

"there's money in writing books to take down Gladwell.". It is interesting that much of the negativity seems to be about the person, Malcolm Gladwell (masked by talking about "Gladwellism" or his style), rather than attacking the points he has made. I wonder if the criticism was genuine, wouldn't it be more focused on the writings and not the writer?

Well I think when someone willfully writes books with scientific distortions and spin, that person is deserving of criticism. If you had a coworker who clearly knows better who purposefully writes bad code for job security, you wouldn't just criticize the code, you'd criticize the person. It would be different if they just didn't know how to do things correctly.

The reason I floated the idea of writing Gladwell refuting books is that there's a lot more notoriety to be gained when going after someone who is popular. And it would be somewhat poetic (albeit a bit cynical) to profit by calling out a guy who is distorting science for personal profit.

Maybe someone could name this book, "Glad to be Wrong" or "The Glad Well of Pseudoscience". To be fair, it's not like his books are totally wrongheaded, but they're enough so that people who know better should speak up.

I have a hard time imagining that the decisions people would have made, if not for reading Gladwell, would have been of higher quality, generally.

You make a good point. A manager who would take Gladwell's advice of making the font more difficult to read would probably be the type of person who would've made many other ignorant decisions on his/her own.

The problem is, the more popular the pseudoscience is, the more likely it is that you'll run into it.

I wonder how many insane snap judgments on part of management were justified by Blink.

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