Gladwell, on creeping determinism
gladwell.com
gladwell.com
Gladwell gave examples in which he absolutely murdered the pronunciation of the number 7. I'm not talking about tone problems. He pronounced it as "kwee". It was clear that he hadn't even bothered to listen to the number words that he devoted a section of his book to.
Of course I don't expect someone who isn't a student of a language to speak it well, but he could have at least gone to wikipedia or chinesepod and listened to the numbers once or twice!
Personally, I find it incredibly strange for someone to criticize an author for mispronouncing a single syllable word from a language he presumably doesn't know while reading an excerpt of a book he didn't write. He doesn't claim expertise and acknowledges his sources, who are experts, and he explicitly states that these are their arguments. What's the problem?
The problem is that he decided to include the excerpt in his argument and didn't even bother to listen to the numbers, even when it would have been simple to do so if he wanted.
Edit: I guess the problem is the same as the igon values. He regularly writes with an air of authority about things he doesn't really have much understanding of. He's limited to quoting others' arguments as a journalist would.
He writes "as a journalist would" because he is a journalist.
I'm not sure why anyone would read his writing as much of anything else, nor why writing as a journalist is a bad thing.
No, it's not. It's like someone who doesn't know english mispronouncing a single syllable english word while reading an excerpt of a non-english book written by someone else that he quoted in his non-english book. And criticism of it would be just as silly.
The first error is completely understandable. The second one can't help but change one's perception of the writer... if one has any familiarity at all with the topic being discussed. For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality, much like "misspelling" the word igon values.
"For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality"
English is my first language. If a speaker didn't speak english, was quoting a non-english passage from someone else and mispronounced the english word "two" as "swoh" I wouldn't think any less of him or his work, but I would think less of someone who thought it worthy of this kind of criticism.
The error had to come from somewhere originally, right? It couldn't have come from the correct version that appeared in the magazine or its PDF version. The comment mumbles something about HTML editors and their "errors", but it's ridiculous to suggest that an HTML editor would change 'eigenvalue' to 'igon value' when automatically importing text from PDF. No sane program would do that, least of all an HTML editor. It couldn't have been an autospell error either because "igon value" isn't in any spellcheck list.
No, it remains likely that "igon value" was there in the article as Gladwell wrote it, got fixed by the New Yorker's famously punctual fact-checkers, and the fix was ignored by Gladwell as the original text version was posted to the site and later made it to the book.
1. We have sooo much data, its just too hard to ask "what is the useful information"? 2. The second problem is more deeply rooted in the system and that is with the people. More the number of people, more the difficulties in managing them.
Well that's the thing, and what makes it worth the time to read it: while intelligence agencies have known about this for decades, regular people don't know it. Worse, the Congress doesn't seem to know it.
Don't forget that this article was written in March 2003, when the whole country - or at least the government - was still on a "how did we miss 9/11?" kick.