How the hell does someone lecturing us on social sciences have little-to-no math background?
Are you being intentionally humorous? I thought it was a sad but accepted fact that, on the aggregate, the Social Sciences were largely rather unscientific.
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
QM, interestingly, relies heavily on those eigenvalues.
In other words, a mere misspelling -- while embarrassing -- doesn't demonstrate that someone has "little-to-no math background".
My point was whether the usage was incorrect, because it's not impossible to misspell it and still know the meaning of the term.
Imagine if you get a book about geometry, and the author spells pi as "pie." What would you think of his competency?
Confusing 'pi' with a homophone can only come from an incredibly superficial and lore-based understanding of the mathematics. Even if he offered an explanation was not technically wrong, it wouldn't do much to dissolve the suspicion that his understanding is based on lore. Most likely, he heard someone superficially explain "pie," recorded it or wrote it down in his notes, and then just used that explanation in his book.
Actually our "pie" author would be in a better place than Gladwell, because he could blame it on a spell checker. But it's not possible for bad copy-editing to turn 'eigenvalue' into "Igon Value."