Thank you for the very interesting submission. Christopher Chabris, the author of the blog post submitted here, is a good friend of several of my friends around the country, and I have interacted directly with him in online communities of human behavior researchers. So I take Chabris's criticisms of Gladwell's writings, especially his most recent book, seriously.

Gladwell is indeed on record saying that he doesn't write to be true in the scholarly sense, but to be thought-provoking. He has said in an interview that he writes to try out ideas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."

And Gladwell is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book Outliers) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly. And in particular, I recommend Gladwell's "Disclosure Statement," an essay about conflicts of interest for professional writers,

http://gladwell.com/disclosure-statement/

which I learned about from another HN submission. Gladwell has strong integrity of a kind, but it is not the integrity of a scholar of psychology like Christopher Chabris.

Regarding the new book under review, I am particularly worried about claims that dyslexia is any kind of advantage for anything. Many cases of dyslexia are the woeful result of poor practices in teaching reading,

http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html

http://learninfreedom.org/readbook.html

and it would be very regrettable to drop efforts to improve initial reading instruction on the flawed theory that dyslexia provides advantages to young learners. Gladwell says he is "happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think," and definitely we should all think each time we read anything.