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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Gladwell does the literary equivalent of this:

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.

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It's not a very good comparison. First, it's not presented as funny, it's presented as science, complete with links to studies. If you ask most people reading Gladwell, they will believe his theories.

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."

> Second, it's not that he exaggerates something, but often he's flat-out wrong.

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!).

Here's at least one: I've read some rebuttals to the "ethnic theory of plane crashes" here: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

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)

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