Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell?
ksj.mit.edu
ksj.mit.edu
The idea is to deliver small chunks of insight that is just counter-intuitive enough to be novel, but not so counter-intuitive that we can't take it at face value. It's a market that's developed in response to the fact that nerds are addicted to feeling like they're just a little bit smarter than everyone else.
I think the same rush we get from learning something counter-intuitive and novel is the same reason that many of us have read pg's essays - particularly the early ones.
Edit: It occurs to me that this comment could be seen as an example of what it describes...
In music, just a little bit of (harmonic) dissonance catches the listener's attention, but too much gives you a headache. Funny how that metaphor carries over so well, haven't thought of it before.
Nice to see you around here, Svante!
Seems to plague the softer/human sciences like economics, psychology and anthropology more than physics/chemistry/maths (though these fields have there own poor journalism)
You think so? Planet Money routinely brings on actual economists to explain things in plain language. And when they don't, they're just describing not-very-technical but interesting things (e.g., how the music industry works, what those complex securities that ruined the economy were, etc.). They don't often (ever, that I can recall) come up with new phenomena.
IMO, this is what appeals to many about HN....the desire to find share-worthy things that will help cement their image as the smart person within their social group. Nothing wrong with it, just an (unscientific) observation.
Don't forget those of us who come to HN primarily to post comments about why the linked article is obviously stupid and wrong, or is right but just saying things that we've been aware of for a while now.
This is why I hate being around a good deal of "smart" people (or atleast, people who have smartness attached to their identity, which seems to be rarely the same group). Every statement, every conversation, every fact is just another opportunity for them to put something down or puff themselves up.
Only, things ranging from people going on doomed escapades and startups, via mountaineering accidents up to and including the Eschede train disaster can be at least partially attributed to people being afraid of expressing criticism. Of course there is a valid criticism of how many people express said criticism, but that's another matter.
In fact, what I do see, is a lot of people who are so attached to their own opinion, that even after an amount of statements intended discern between the opinion and person expressing it, they still become angry when facing criticism.
One of the actual reasons I come to HN is to read dissenting views. I may disagree with them, but without them this site would be useless.
At least, that's how I interpreted the comment you were responding to. Maybe you've never met people like that; if so, you're lucky.
The one good quality such people might have is as a continual Devil's Advocate, in the sense that by disagreeing with all conventional wisdom they might make you take a second look at your own beliefs. But I really feel like it's everyone's responsibility to be their own Devil's Advocate; relying on other people to fill that role isn't constructive.
I guess what I'm really getting at is that there's no shortage of negativity or contrariness out there, and contrariness without insight is no better than agreement without insight. In fact, it can easily lead you astray if you're not careful.
Well, I did get sick of it after yet another discussion on HN went into the 'stop raining on the parade' comments.
> At least, that's how I interpreted the comment you were responding to. Maybe you've never met people like that; if so, you're lucky.
I've met many people who dismiss any criticism with complaints of negativism. I've even seen that happen when I complained about how they were dissing others, as if me suggesting they should be more understanding was negative.
In fact, I see a lot of negativity with insight, and a lot of yes-men attitude without any reflection. It's a far more common disease.
What you've described is normal human behavior irrespective of their level of intelligence.
I took a plane ride to Wisconsin for instance, for a three day conference of Christian apologists because they are hard to get a hold of online, and I had serious questiona.
Is there anyone else motivated by this like me?
Analytic philosophers tend to be.
In terms of "people who are unable to engage in reasonable discussion and yet are worth talking to for what they know ... they nitpick at things which should be logically obvious", I would counsel toward assuming good faith on their part, and just not engaging them. If you'd like to benefit from what they know, it's fair that you should try to hear their arguments charitably and even entertain that what you consider "logically obvious" may be more cultural than logical.
There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neurochemical "hit" every time we encounter a particularly juicy piece of insight porn. The reason for this is evolutionary: insights are basically the recognition of deep patterns that explain seemingly unrelated phenomena, which lets us "compress" our knowledge and so increase our understanding of the world. (It's not that our stone age ancestors were developing scientific theories, but they had many complex things in their environment to predict: the weather, animal behaviour, their own social networks, other hunter-gather tribes, etc).
The pleasure gained from studying mathematics, or listening to complicated pieces of music (esp classical, where complex pieces might be based on simple underlying patterns) are good examples. Humour might be a complementary reward circuit, giving us a psychological hit when we discover something that contradicts our worldview.
(I'm aware that the preceding paragraphs was themselves a piece of insight porn :)
As an aside, what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them? Hindsight bias comes to mind, but it's not exactly that. More like a mixture of hindsight/confirmation bias and wishful thinking.
After the fact, of course.
Or maybe you don't, because I just made that up, but it fits.
You have to be precise when talking about the effects of biological evolution on our brains. We know our brains were initially created entirely by biological evolution; what's not clear is how direct or indirect the influence of evolution has been on our psychology. That is, does evolution hardwire relatively complex behaviour (as it does in many animals) or does it merely specify high-level learning algorithms? This appears to be the case with humans - we don't have many instinctual behaviours compared with other animals, but we do have an instinctual ability to learn new things. It's interesting to speculate how this ability might have arisen; the ability to learn new things and to spot patterns must have been useful to our distant ancestors, as they're such fundamental traits of human cognition.
This is also why the "nature vs nurture"/"biology vs culture" debate is a false dichotomy: the foundation of human culture is our ability to learn, which is itself a genetic adaptation.
That sounds like motivated reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
I'm not saying that his argument is wrong, but it definitely runs against the prevailing wisdom. Similarly "Collapse" (the idea that the success or failure of societies is predictable) and "Guns, Germs and Steel" (the advantages of old-world people over new-world people in the 1500s were due to the influence of geography and climate, not inherent superiorities).
Maybe those things are obvious to you, but I don't think they're obvious to most people.
[0] http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
I'm too lazy to look for the actual references, but in one form or another climate-related arguments for the "superiority" of Europeans were made in the late 1700s and in the 1800s (and towards the end of the 1800s a more racist undertone emerged, but that's another story). Something like "one can only be productive in a temperate climate", while those poor souls that have to live at the Tropics will never become industrious peoples.
What's funny is that way earlier than that, the early Greeks were saying that their dry climate was perfect for talking about philosophy and related stuff, and that a more "humid" climate would have been against that (I'm thinking about Heraclitus, mainly).
Similarly Eurasia had a wider variety of indigenous grains suitable for cultivation, and more large mammals suitable for domestication, and these could be taken with a population when the migrated (because of the aforementioned east-west orientation).
These advantages meant that populations were able to increase more rapidly, which necessitated an earlier development of agriculture, which lead to further productivity gains as improving food yields meant that people could spend more time developing more advanced technology.
The increased population densities had two further advantages - firstly, it meant that wars were more frequent, so Eurasians developed more advanced weaponry (the "guns" and "steel" of the title). Secondly, evolutionary pressures selected for resistance to diseases that could spread easily in crowded environments (the "germs").
So it's a little bit more subtle than just "our climate is inherently better for deep philosophical thoughts" or "our climate means that we are more productive workers".
Precisely.
The people here are ripping on the author's simplified theories by presenting even more simplified versions of the arguments.
GGS did cause some despair among academics, as century old discredited ideas were presented as science to the public.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008....
The popularity of the work Guns, germs and steel (GGS) has served to bring the question of human–environment connections once again to the forefront of popular thought. We assert that the recent success of GGS represents both a persistence of environmental determinist logic and a contemporary trend that privileges the environment as the primary influence on human–environment relationships. […] The book is found to mirror earlier environmental determinism by failing to take into account many of the advances in human–environmental thought since the early twentieth century. Its popular success suggests the pitfalls of failures to acknowledge the complex, intertwined and indivisible relationship that exists among humans and their environment. Furthermore, there is evidence that the environmental determinism espoused in GGS has caught the attention of international development policymakers potentially influencing future outlays of aid and assistance to the developing world. These conclusions raise cautionary flags against repeating past theoretical mistakes by accepting simplistic, causal explanations based largely on a deterministic conception of the natural environment.
That abstract is completely empty - and I'm paywalled away from the paper.
If the environment isn't responsible at all, you have to be saying that its entirely something from within people that determines their social structure and achievements. No?
To be fair, the GGS arguments are about explaining the origins of different rates of development, and not giving a rationalization for continued supremacy. For instance, one of his major arguments was that the New World had few domesticated draught animals. That ceases to be of any relevance with modern transportation, or indeed modern industry. He is talking about why some countries got a headstart, not trying to establish some firmly rooted 'natural order'.
Africa, oriented N-S has a huge variation in climates from the Med in the North through the Serengheti, the sahel, the savannah, tropical rainforests, the veldt, and etc. A lot more micro-climates that make transferring crops to a different area problematic. There were some other reasons but this was the basis of his geographical argument.
But I disagree that this puts Jared Diamond in the same category as the other three. I think the fact that he is, for the most part, not wrong, clearly sets him apart from Gladwell, Lehrer and Freakonomics.
Dumping too much data on your readers to ram home the point you're making may be tedious to read, but it's not reprehensible the way twisting and stretching the truth to appear original and profound is.
Both arguments appear to have some truth. Agriculture at early stages led to worse health, caused inequality, people started living in larger groups which helped diseases to spread.
Time to develop science and art came later, and was not available to an average person for a long time anyway - up to 95% population was working in agriculture until relatively recent times (I don't have the reference for this number though).
I won't try to find it since I'm on mobile, but it's just as good.
http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
So, sure this stuff isn't science, but the Gladwell types also give "cultural context" to many geeks I know.
Really, though, I'd argue that most business books I've read had a similar feel. 99% bullshit, and the 1% based on actual science is often based on very shaky evidence.
[1]Gladwell's style is pretty familiar if you've read many business books. Very light, very easy to read; it sounds very authoritative, but is at best 99% fluff and 1% actual solid information. When the fluff is actual fluff (case studies, etc...) so long as you find it entertaining, there's no harm. The problem comes when the fluff is demonstrably incorrect and contributes to you making real-world poor decisions.
I suspect school and teachers are part of the problem. Even at the best universities I would spot professors claiming things which were obviously wrong or not based on strong scientific evidence but presented as if. So all you can do is keeping to plow on hoping you learn more truth than not.
Ok, so, as someone who admits to read this stuff I would like to ask. Is there anyone who was able to break their addiction? And if so, what helped?
Also, is there a good book review source which spots "insight porn". I usually check Amazon before buying a book to check if its outright bullshit but that approach doesn't work all that well.
But as I type this it occurs to me: This might extend to beyond nerds. This effect might be what is addictive about Oprah or Dr. Phil (relationship insights), or even the bobble-heads on tv talking about the latest source of their political rage, or even sports junkies.
Diamond is criticised for stretching his grand unified theories too far and missing all the evidence to the contrary. Levitt is accused of picking bad hypotheses and doing sloppy econometric analysis to support them. Gladwell doesn't have any grand unified theories, or any theories substantial or original enough to be controversial. and doesn't do any comparable statistical analysis.
An interesting supplement to Diamond is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. To greatly oversimplify, Morris endorses the idea of a Western core headstart (with credit to Diamond) but then basically says "Well, yeah, of course that's the case." But how does that explain how things ended up millennia later. A good read.
Another broader point though is that serious researchers are always going to put down popularizers who write books people actually read. But no one is going to read serious researchers except other serious researchers. Of course, you can go too far in the popularization direction and I tend to agree Malcolm Gladwell is a great example of that.
If anyone has other examples, I would love to hear them--I'm trying to pack my immediate reading list right now and am currently uninterested in fiction.
Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek & Paul Krugman are all winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and all have written some accessible books for the public.
The Richard Dawkins books on biology are really good.
Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics has written some fine popular science books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
That's how it often goes when researches are accused of scientific misconduct (not to accuse LD, just noting). One famous example was Potti & Nevins at Duke. There were several back-and-forth "Comments" published to counter the questions Baggerly & Coombes were raising. PN repeatedly addressed the issues, each time releasing another "corrected" supplementary data set. Eventually the journals stopped publishing the BC critiques, PN seemingly convinced the reviewers that BC were just being pedantic about inconsequential statistical subtleties. It only came to a head because Duke was proceeding with human clinical trials based on that research.
To this day Potti still claims that he can address all the issues BN raised and correct them, and that his research was valid.
Even anthropologists sharing the same campus politics have been unwilling to endorse Diamond's arguments with any real enthusiasm.
It doesn't seem limited to nerds, though. These books are always top sellers in places like airport book stores, so there's got to be a wider audience than that. If anything, I'd say these are very middlebrow books that hit a sweet spot in making college-educated (though not necessarily nerdy or even particularly smart) people feel smarter. They're like the USA Today distillations of behavioral and neuroscience research.
The nerdier equivalent would be TED.
The question is would anyone have thought anything of PG's essays before he became "PG" that he is today? Not that people didn't read them but it seem now that anything that he has written or writes takes on such status that people are less likely to question or disagree with any conclusions.
[1] Also noting that PG's (at least the ones's I've seen) essays are always proofed by others it would be interesting to get a sense of the type of comments and changes that are made post that proofing.
When someone achieves repeated and consistent success over many years (say, Warren Buffett), it is wise to listen to what they have to say if they're willing to share their knowledge and experience.
And also, HN isn't full of nearly as many mindless zombies as many other sites. When pg posts something contentious or controversial, usually there's debate about it in the comments.
That's what makes him so influential.
Both Steven Levitt and Jared Diamond devote a lot of ink over whether or not their theories are testable, while Malcolm Gladwell tends to just find anecdotes which seem to back his theories up.
Boyce Rensberger - 5:20pm 10/08/2013
Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.
When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.
So Gladwell's writings, if not specific scientific, may at least have some pedagogical value. Their entertainment value is certainly not questioned.
There's nothing "magic" about 10,000 hours. The implication is that hard work, practice and luck play a bigger role in success than most people believe. It's a theory. Sorry if it was too nuanced for you.
He's got an incredibly creative writing style and pulls things off, like writing a novel in second-person, that not many authors could.
And I never got the impression of intellectual pretentiousness from any of his books.
With Rand, you kind of know these are her opinions. They are ideology. Much like listening to the Right vs. the Left in ideological debates.
But, with Gladwell, he delivers his conclusions as fact, based on "scientific" research. He observes very specific phenomena and draws concrete conclusions, then generalizes to a broader point. But, he doesn't say "here's what I think". He says, "here's what the data says".
With Rand too, you also know that she has a personal belief system/agenda. Gladwell writes as an objective reporter, just delivering the "facts".
Malcolm Gladwell as an entertainer is great. Gladwell as a pundit quoted by (and presumably influencing) real decision-makers ... has me steaming in frustration. He is dangerous.
Also it seems that he sometimes hits a mark. I remember his article on criminal Profilers being mostly correct as far as I could tell.
Anyone who trust a journalist unconditionally and blindly is a fool. They are paid to pique your interest and entertain you, not find out the truth (most people don't like the truth, I definitely wouldn't like all the truth about me to come into light). Just like someone that thinks that most crime TV series depict real life.
Isn't that bigger impact than anything Gladwell's stories had on policies?
People who accept CSI confuse fantasy and reality. People who accept Gladwell confuse a contrived reality with a real one. I think the risk posed by the latter category is greater than the former, because the latter are more difficult to separate from their superficial grasp of reality.
Gladwell isn't dangerous, ignorance is.
That could be a useful prelude to writing about it.
"I have long been an admirer of Gladwell's; I wish I could put stories together the way he does. But I'm now afraid to read him. My work, my intellectual life, and even my social and emotional experiences with my family are based on knowing what's really going on--not Gladwell's made-up ideas of how things should be. I don't want to base my reading, or my life, on Gladwell's currency: things that might or might not be true, but which make possible masterful storytelling."
I often have a hard time remembering where I learned something so it makes it hard to keep strait why I think something is true. As a result, I try very hard to avoid talented liars.
Let me clarify: The article is more about Gladwell's approach/style overall than about his latest book, specifically.
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/malcolm-gladwell-backlas...
"Gladwell is the non-fiction equivalent of Dan Brown."
> The examples of “everything” include basketball coaching, policing, university science, Martin Luther King, and the Impressionists. (The waft of luxury art-history tourism in the Impressionists sequence is only the most obvious example of how Gladwell is now the non-fiction equivalent of Dan Brown.) The promise that such heterogeneous matter can be governed by one or two big ideas and understood through them constitutes the main attraction of the Gladwellian literary genre. Armed with these “ideas”, you won’t have to think for yourself ever again.
Ouch.
http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Barack-Obama-C...
The world he presents is a cartoon caricature of the real world. In the drawing linked above, you can clearly recognize the president, but you wouldn't use the drawing to fit him for a hat. His prominent features are overemphasized in interesting and humorous ways for the purpose of sparking delighted recognition in the viewer.
Gladwell does the same thing in words. He presents us with a caricature of our world with its features humorously exaggerated in order to spark the same sort of recognition.
tl;dr. Its a funny. Don't use it for science.
Second, it's not that he exaggerates something, but often he's flat-out wrong. The fascination he sparks is the "oh, that's an unlikely fact I wouldn't have believed was true, had it not been for the fact that these science studies cited here proves it."
Eh, is it though? I confess I haven't read much by him, but it seems like most of his works are truisms anyway (e.g. if something's hard, it'll make you work harder!).
and here:
http://askakorean.blogspot.no/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-a...
Put it simply, Gladwell seems to form a theory, then find enough facts to support that theory. But that's not the way to do proper research.
In this case, had he actually consulted with pilots, koreans, and finally korean pilots, he might have ended up with a different conclusion (let alone now have made so many trivial errors in the text).
He could also have compared accident statistics and looked at how many accidents could be attributed to poor CRM in different countries. But again, he didn't do that.
He mentions that CRM training is used nowadays in all airlines (to improve crew collaboration) but fails to mention that the accident that sparked the focus on CRM (the worst airline accident of all time) was caused by a Dutch captain, from a country with a low power-distance index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster)
Like the rest of The New Yorker, what Gladwell provides is interesting, entertaining, and realistic stories. Whether those stories are entirely true or not just isn't relevant. It's about entertaining myself and occasionally having a thought-provoking discussion about Gladwell's work. None of this actually affects how I do my work or interact with the world.
However, a good portion of this enjoyment is contingent on the stories ostensibly not being fiction, largely due to the "stranger than fiction" effect. If Gladwell were to write complete fiction, then we wouldn't have plausible lines of reality to reference in his work, or the entertainment of seeing the convolutions he makes in bending reality to his thesis.
For example, I am taking a CMU OLI course on introductory statistics, which is about 216 pages long. I am in it for 29 days at 151 pages thus far, which means I am about 70% complete. I study an hour a day, does about 30 minutes of review minimum each day.
I admit that it's not the most exciting subject to learn and requires a lot of work. Although the subject isn't actually boring to learn. However, armed with knowledge of statistics, I will be able to spot more bullshit coming from writers like Malcolm Gladwell.
Popular science books are not to be trusted, at the very least, without a subject matter expert's recommendation. They should be viewed as only entertainment.
In other words, you're attempting to learn the science so you can apply it, while most others are attempting to read stories which can be explained using science.
I don't need to apply the scientific knowledge. I have gratification in knowing how reality work.
With the hypercompetitiveness of modern scientific careers, scientists who take time off to write popular expositions are looked down upon. The problem is not Malcolm Gladwell, the problem is the insularity of modern scientists.
Feynman's approach was as good as it gets when it comes to popularizing physics, so your best bet are his popular books. And if you have some working calculus knowledge you should just read his Lectures on Physics to get to understand pretty much all of physics up to and not including QFT and General Relativity.
Yes, perhaps, but you need to realize something -- scientists who write popular books often pay a very high price. Not always, there are exceptions, but Carl Sagan is a perfect example of someone who did a lot of public good by popularizing science and scientific topics, but it ruined his scientific career.
Most scientists understand this -- to write a popular science book or article may send the signal to other scientists that you don't have anything more serious to write about. As a reward for such important projects as Cosmos, Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, something extraordinary given his actual scientific accomplishments.
For balance, we can look at Leon Lederman ("The God Particle") and Stephen Hawking (several well-received books) who seem not to have suffered unduly for their popularizations of science. But the risk is real.
For example, the story about TIMMs scores showing that math ability is correlated not with talent but with effort is completely bogus, and obviously so if you look at the actual studies.
First, the effect only appeared for 2 age levels in one year of taking, all the other age levels did not show this correlation. Second, the effect only shows at the national level, if you compare whole countries. It disappears completely as soon as you go down to school or class levels.
Which means that his claim in the book is completely bogus: yes, nations are not more talented at math than others (duh!), but individuals still are, completely contrary to his claims.
That goes way beyond just cherry picking results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCA_v._Singh
My general point was two-fold:
1) he is an excellent popular science writer. He has a PhD in particle physics, and his books are well researched and well received.
2) we all want him to prosper from writing so he keeps writing :)
" if spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market."
I have had this done a lot of times. No one ever told me about any of the risks before starting the procedure. Thanks for the information. http://esciencenews.com/sources/the.guardian.science/2010/04...
Edit: Too late. I'd second the book recommendations though, they're excellent.
It's entertaining fluff. If we become a society of fluffheads, that's okay, these things have a habit of correcting themselves.
Fox News encourages people not to think at all. Gladwell encourages people to think (the adjective thought-provoking is frequently applied to his work), even if his actual content isn't 100% true.
Also, I don't think Gladwell ever completely lies. He certainly bends the truth, but he doesn't make up things on a whim like Fox.
True, but we need to ask what we mean by "lie". Blatant lying is easy to detect and uncover. Cherry-picking facts to make a point contradicted by reality, by science, is a sneakier kind of lying, a kind meant to appeal to the superficially educated, the sort of people for whom the title of the article asks a reasonable question -- should we "believe him"?
Educated people don't need to believe anyone -- they will instead accept a responsibility to gather facts, evidence, for themselves.
Critics demand encyclopedic thoroughness for what is little more than brief casual conversation.
Someone writes a pithy & insightful blog post (a la HN). It fits a convenient size suitable for the medium (1-10 paragraphs). Rather than responding to the substantive point of the post, critics nit-pick some obscure point which the author glossed over precisely because more detail runs at odds to the medium. To wit: the criticism amounts to demands for peer-reviewed scientific process with rock-solid presentation & references, when said critic would in no way actually read such material.
Gladwell's (and many other writers', ex.: 1491 and A History Of The World In Six Glasses) works are like this. The books are not weighty tomes, they are not peer-reviewed, they are not scientific papers with rigorous analysis of the material. They are lightweight overviews of interesting insights, appealing to many people (enough so that some expend energy loudly criticizing the works), and providing launching points for those so motivated to further pursue the subject (such as the would-be pro golfer testing the "10,000 hours" theory by actually doing it). If Gladwell et al wrote books the way critics demand, critics (and pretty much everyone else) would never bother reading them.
"the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Ratatouille
What use is an overview if it's wrong?
Here's an example of the problem:
(http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/10/ten-simple-thing...)
This blog got posted to HN. The first point in the post says:
> Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it's actually been proven to be an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book, The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with either medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study really surprised me. Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels to begin with, the follow up assessments proved to be radically different:
A blog cites a pop sci book, which cites a single study. And this is "proof" of a treatment for depression. It feels like it should be true. it repeats something that many people say ("exercise helps depression") and it has some sciencey stuff to support it (endorphins!). It's not homoeopathy or crystal healing.
The main problem is that it is not clear if exercise works for treating depression.
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004366/exercise-for-depressi...
> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.
[...]
> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.
People do not investigate further. They repeat these factoids and they believe they're promoting science.
"Science doesn’t follow a mythic positivist ideal but the plural scientific methods described by Feyerabend: a mixture of empiricism, flights of fancy, intuition, aesthetics, doggedness, and jealousy. Scientific theories are underdetermined. Any finite set of facts can support multiple theories, and for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models."
They put out a book "GEOSTATIONARY: The Blah of blah blah", and they talk about a tiny subset of the supporting evidence. They won't mention geomobile, or if they do they won't accept that facts at the time are explained equally by both but to destroy geomobile and the gullible saps who believe it.
Your quote argues persuasively against the books of Gladwell, which are semi-truthy, using Science to sound authoritative and accurate but without accepting any of the fluidity of actual science.
There are many such cases, easy to uncover. As just one example, his remarks about easy versus difficult problem solving relied on a preliminary study that failed replication when applied to a larger experimental group, a fact he omitted from his book.
> I was impressed by his unusual look at the David coming down the valley story in a new light including Goliath being a sufferer of pitiutary defect (hence the weak vision). Is that analysis somehow wrong?
To answer, I have to ask "is fiction wrong?" Can a fictional account about fictional characters ever truly be called "wrong"? Whatever novel conclusion made about the David and Goliath story must confront the fact that it's an anecdote about an anecdote.
Indeed he did -- he said, "I was not able to identify a specific point that Gladwell has made that is false." In my reply, I gave an example where Gladwell published something that had not been replicated, always a risky practice in science journalism, but worse, it was an example in which an ambitious effort at replication has failed.
In short, Gladwell published something that had been proven false, a case in which a cautious reading of the literature would have prevented this error.
Also, the original study came from the field of psychology, a field that's famous for superficial studies that lead to grand but unsupportable claims. Even for psychology studies that have stood unchallenged for years, one must be very careful in taking their conclusions seriously.
The Gladwell example I used represented something that was false, that had been falsified, something that all scientific results, to meet the definition of "scientific", must have as a possible outcome (testable and potentially falsifiable).
It's the same mentality that drives people to criticize every article here with an I know better, this is wrong attitude.
Malcolm Gladwell is a popular entertainer, he has a new book out which will surely be a best-seller, so he gets attacked. In the same way that people will attack the work of Ben Affleck or Michael Buble. That's unfortunately how our society works.
If policy makers are quoting Gladwell on important issues, that isn't his fault.
While I strongly agree that he does himself, and those curious about science, a great disservice by what one might label as intellectual laziness and sloppiness, there is a need to make science and interesting ideas more available to the public. So while the criticism of Gladwell's cherry-picking and rough treatment of the truth appears to be valid, we should ask ourselves "what have I done to make ideas more accessible to others"?
I think this is why we love people like Carl Sagan. He made science accessible. He showed a whole generation of kids that science is cool and interesting and beautiful. Without (to my knowledge) compromising scientific integrity.
Objective: Change the world.
Produce a TV show that gets kids and adults excited about science, so that the United States will again be the world leader in technology, innovation, and sound management of the environment.
For example, when our audience is of age, we'd like them to produce the best transportation systems in the world, e.g. cars, electric cars, trains, and aircraft.
Rules of the Road
- The show is entertainment first; curriculum content and presentation of specific facts come later. Ideally, school curricula will follow us.
- All the science we see has to be real science. No fictional “molecular resynthesizer“ machines that perform magic tricks, for example.
- The science being explored provides the drama. For example, there is no time spent looking for someone's stolen lab coat.
- Science Guy is always himself. He could play another character as the Science Guy playing another character. He wears a lab coat and safety glasses for a reason. If he takes them off, it's for a reason.
- Science Guy's reality is television. He can jump from place to place the way a viewer would expect anyone on television to be able to do. There is no need for something like the “Way-Back" machine or the “Transporter” or the "Door to Anywhere." However, the “monitor in the field" can show us supplementary video, e.g. condensation after the walk-in freezer sequence in the pilot.
- Host interacts with guests. kids, other scientists, and celebrities, as peers: E.g. “Hi, Joey; Hi, Michael; "Hi, Cindy; Hi Hammer." / "Hi, Bill."
- Show takes place as much as possible in the field. The world is the laboratory.
I listen to their podcast and they seem pretty intelligent and don't really drawn crazy conclusions and always advice with a pinch of salt.
But hey lets get some pageviews anyway right?
(If yours isn't, you're dogmatic, an epistemological fundamentalist! Even logic has completeness/consistency limitations. At least, those are the limitations we know of so far...).
Well, come on then. This is just blogspam in that case. We have already discussed Chabris's review (in its longer form from Chabris's blog) here on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510996
We should stop believing ANYONE just because of their name or their previously published writings. We should read anything we read with our minds active, ready to disagree if the facts warrant. And that is what Malcolm Gladwell himself has said in interviews: "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."
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...
I have't looked at the actual research behind the topics they are covering, but at least there seems to be a good reference list in the book so it should be possible dig out the articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
What I think we should really be complaining about is that educational books are not sufficiently entertaining.
Many of the startup websites promoted on Hacker News go to extreme lengths to reduce "cognitive load" - to make everything as easy as possible for their users to understand what they are doing.
Entertainment is content presented to us in a manner which does not require unpleasant effort on our part to maintain our attention as readers, listeners or viewers.
When text-book writers put the same effort into making their content entertaining as startup websites put into the UX of their websites, then we will have an educational revolution.
Actually, for most people, video is more entertaining than books, so the best results will come from making entertaining videos on technical subjects.
It is much easier to be entertaining if your content is "fluffy", and some of the most entertaining content is about "almost nothing at all", like Seinfeld, for example.
But that is no excuse for neglecting the need to make serious content as entertaining as possible.
To get some ideas about how to make technical content more entertaining, try the following:
* Search for your favourite technical subject on YouTube, and watch the most popular videos.
* Still on YouTube, search for "vlog", or "youtubers", or anything else that leads to videos made specifically for YouTube which include visual and verbal presentation of non-fictional content and commentary. (For example, see Ray William Johnson.)
* Observe the difference.
* Don't just observe the difference. Revisit the technical videos, and identify each point of pain, where the video requires effort of the viewer in a manner that would never have occurred in the "entertaining" videos. It could be things as simple as an extended interval where nothing happens at all, or too much talking and nothing happening on the screen, or the talking consists entirely of reading words that are already on the screen, or action on the screen but no talking, or too much talking about what the presenter is going to talk about. Etc.
It's not that what he's saying is not true, it's that you don't get the whole picture, because actually giving you the whole picture would take a whole lot more time to research and wouldn't be half as entertaining.
The best example are the "Good to Great" series of books that espouse what companies should to be successful, neglecting to mention that the majority of the companies held up as examples from the previous book have somehow spectacularly failed. The books aren't predictive because they're based on an extremely flawed methodology that cherry-picks data to fit pre-conceived notions.
Also, success on the scale that most people reading these books aspire to requires a huge amount of luck no matter how hard you work, what short and long-term goals you create, or how early you wake up every day to run four miles.
But most people won't read books titled "Preparing For Modest Success from a Lifetime of Hard Work and Saving" or "Success Secrets: Being Lucky."
Pinker: "To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken."[1]
[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-...
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/young...
As long as people think believing stands higher than understanding, people like Gladwell will find a wide audience.
The above should be the disclaimer on these types of books. I like Gladwell but there still needs to be some level of critical thinking involved when reading these books.
I like to take the main ideas and do further investigation on my own.
That was just my adaptive unconscious coming to a rapid blink of an insight rather than a long and convoluted reasoning process. Mr Gladwell seems to think the former is okay though, so I'm sticking with my gut instinct.
Where can we actually get accurate information of what's really going on? News? Government? Businesses? Church? Blogs? Forums?
Gladwell does what many successful authors in this genre do: he tells us what we already intuitively know in a palatable way that makes the concepts feel new. It makes people feel justified in their belief that they can overcome seemingly daunting challenges when they see it in print by a noted author. His books may not reveal groundbreaking results of scientific studies, but they justify the views of the kinds of people that read his books, and that will tend to make them successful regardless of the scientific accuracy of any examples mentioned in his books.
"His points are usually correct (though obvious to many); in this case his point is that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people."
No. Just no. Did you not read the article? The study demonstrating this "point" was a low-powered study. A more highly powered study failed to reproduce the result. Now, at best you could say that the result only applies to "ambitious people", but that remains to be proved - after the Canadian result, the null hypothesis has to be that making the task superficially more difficult has no impact on people's ability to complete the task. In other words, Gladwell's hypothesis is unproven and unjustified.
So, the results were as expected. The ambitious group was inspired by the challenge. A group of average public college students were neither inspired nor deterred by it. And I would bet that my house that a group of homeless people would be significantly deterred by it. It is an apples to oranges comparison that in no way disproves Gladwell's hypothesis.
No, it is not a safe assumption. It remains to be proven, and that's assuming you can even come up with a decent objective definition of "ambition". Your post-hoc reasoning is exactly the type of reasoning that is taken to task in the article -
Gladwell: Making a task harder makes people perform better.
Academia: No, actually, when tested with a higher-powered study, this effect disappeared.
You: (with no evidence, and only after the release of the Canadian study refuting Gladwell) Oh, but the result only applies to ambitious people.
That argument is weak - it's fitting the facts to the hypothesis, and not the other way round. With the available data, the only thing you can really say is that perhaps a study needs to be done to better understand the why the Princeton study and the Canadian study gave different results (statistical fluke? different ambition? cultural bias?)
And Princeton (in undergrad) isn't "intellectually" elite, it is financially elite. I don't think you can derive anything about student "ambitiousness" just from how wealthy they are, and wealth is pretty much the only thing that separates Princeton undergrad student from a public college student.
Caveat: I'm assuming the study was done on undergrads, postgrad princeton is different beast.
"Princeton University is one of the most selective colleges in the country.....Most students who got into Princeton had GPAs close to a 4.0, SAT scores (CR+M+W) above 2100, and ACT composite scores above 30......many students with a 4.0 GPA and extremely high standardized test scores get rejected from Princeton. For this reason, even strong students should consider Princeton a reach school."
The results of the two studies at issue here can be swayed dramatically by the type of students participating, and each study in fact looked at two dramatically different groups of students - one matching the criteria above and one being a public college in Canada. Yet both of you have taken the position that the results of one cancels out the results of the other. You are, quite simply, wrong.
Also, GPAs, SATs, and ACT composites don't measure ambition. So... I'm trying to work out what your point was...
40 people isn't a 'study' it's an anecdote.
What I am saying, is there is not enough information to draw a meaningful conclusion, which I believe the GP is also saying... You can say we are 'wrong' as much as possible, but that's just rhetoric.