Talk:Malcolm Gladwell

July 2006

Why link in the article-section to two articles only? Either link to all his articles or to none, but to link to only two seems a bit arbitrary. -Peak Freak 20:34, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Um, I just read Outliers, and that brief description of what the book is about is a little misleading. While Gladwell does talk about the importance of both effort and meaningful work as opposed to reliance on innate talent, much of the book, maybe half, is devoted to the role of happy accidents and luck, being born at the right time to the right kind of parents in the right community, in determining success. ~~ Mimi —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.90.169.139 (talk) 15:55, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree with Mimi, I think the description of Outliers on the page is pretty much the opposite of the point Gladwell makes in the book. -- Luke —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.117.112.82 (talk) 23:42, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I also agree with Mimi and the above poster, and what's more, Outliers is itself is not so much a how-to book. For instance, it describes Korean Air and their improvement of pilot and co-pilot responses to emergencies-- that's pretty far cry from a typical "self-help" book, and "success" there is defined quite differently than personal aggrandizement. I'm deleting the sentence. Cuvtixo (talk)

Why no criticism section?

Shouldn't there be some? A little bit at least. --IdLoveOne (talk) 02:54, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

WP:CRITICISM Gary King (talk) 03:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

That doesn't answer my question. --IdLoveOne (talk) 22:49, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

You can add information from reliable sources that criticize Gladwell, but not in a section specifically called "Criticism". Gary King (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Well it says that sections titled "Criticism" are discouraged, not forbidden, but I get what you mean. It also says that criticism should be positive and negative. The reason I asked in the first place is because the entire article seems to be in favor of his texts. Not only is this not NPOV and not only does it seem common that many authors and their works do get negative criticism sections (probably because of an unconscious habit by editors to sprinkle only positive reception in the article and save the negative for one area), but frankly I find it hard to believe that NO ONE think of his books as far-fetched. --IdLoveOne (talk) 02:17, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Feel free to work criticism into the article. Gary King (talk) 02:18, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

It would be politically incorrect in our current contemporary environment to criticize this author. "Mum"'s the word.173.72.63.198 (talk) 11:44, 13 June 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

Just to add my $0.02 here: it seems his individual books (which have their own wikipedia pages) have their own significant Criticism/Reception sections. Personally I think the sentence added in August is sufficient in this article. Prothonotar (talk) 06:14, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

sources

Both Steven Pinker and Stephen Hsu killed his rep for good regarding science writing. How many decades will it take to include this?

Pinker in the New York Times Book Review:

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

...

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

...

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Hsu - here in Technology Review:

Malcolm Gladwell shows exquisite taste in the subjects he writes and talks about -- he has a nose for great topics. I just wish his logical and analytical capabilities were better (see also here). This talk at the New Yorker's recent Genius 2012 conference is entertaining, but I disagree completely with his conclusion. Ribet, Wiles, Taniyama and Shimura are probably the real geniuses, not Michael Ventris, the guy who decoded Linear B. (Gladwell also can't seem to remember that it's the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, not Tanimara. He says it incorrectly about 10 times.) My feeling is that Gladwell's work appeals most to people who can't quite understand what he is talking about.

and there--he refers to this blogspot entry in the TR article linked above ("My opinion of Malcolm Gladwell was expressed here"), so it's authoritative even when it's on a blog:

Gladwell is confused about the exact topic discussed in James Gleick's book Genius. In a field where sampling of talents is sparse (e.g., decoding ancient codexes) you might find one giant (even an amateur like Michael Ventris) towering above the others, able to do things others cannot. In a well-developed, highly competitive field like modern mathematics, all the top players are "geniuses" in some sense (rare talents, one in a million), even though they don't stand out very much from each other. In Gleick's book, Feynman, discussing how long it might have taken to develop general relativity had Einstein not done it, says "We are not that much smarter than each other"!

...

To put it simply, if I sample sparsely from a Gaussian distribution, I might find a super-outlier in the resulting set. If I sample densely and have a high minimum cutoff for acceptable points, I will end up with a set entirely composed of outliers, but who do not stand out much from each other. Every guard in the NBA is an athletic freak of nature, even though they are evenly matched when playing against each other.

...

To counteract the intelligence-damping effect of Gladwell's talk, I suggest this podcast interview with Nassim Taleb, about his new book The Black Swan. Warning: may be psychologically damaging to people who fool themselves and others about their ability to predict the behavior of nonlinear systems.

--tickle me 16:01, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Re: Gary King's Suggestion of Working Criticism Into Article

I have added a brief sentence regarding criticism of Gladwell's sampling and deductive methods by the academic community. Please leave this as is. 11:19, 5 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.91.209.125 (talk)

Okay it looks better, thanks for understanding. Gary King (talk) 18:27, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Proposed Link(s)

• Wow, I see a rather stern warning about adding new links. I recently watched an hour long interview with Gladwell on Q&A (C-Span) and wanted to add the link to the show (transcript and video available). After that warning on the article page I will just post it here:
• Gladwell intervew -(1 hr) Q&A interview program on C-SPAN, December 6, 2009, transcript and video available on line.

--Mdukas (talk) 17:07, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Place of Birth

He was not born in Kent! (no ref there anyway). He was born in Gosport, Hampshire, according to official records on ancestry.co.uk. I did put that in once, but somebody removed it.Ravenscroft32 (talk) 11:00, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Finland and Norway

Did Gladwell ever correct his error about Linus Torvald's nationality? And was this error highlighted as a way of attacking the author, or what? Maybe it's about as significant as mixing up Alabama and Mississippi, two US states with similar climate, culture and geographical location. --Uncle Ed (talk) 18:47, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

I think the critics were just saying that Gladwell sometimes gets sloppy and hasty in his research. Torvald was just one easy example. The article needs to be balanced citing criticism as well as praise. Sure, the article needs work and could include a more in depth exploration of the accusations he faces. But I'd say develop it rather than cut it. Spangle (talk) 21:39, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

I guess you mean "Torvalds" ... even when correcting an error we can make the same kind of error, eh? --Uncle Ed (talk) 21:25, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Criticism is harsh and vague

I deleted the long list of criticisms, since all but one were vague, and the only specific one was trivial. His critics accuse him of severals types of intellectual faults, but our article gives no examples of these.

It's a bit too much to expect our readers to hunt through the cited references to find these examples. Please provide the examples, and then restore the section. --Uncle Ed (talk) 21:43, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Early Life

I'm writing to talk about the inclusion of ancestry in the second paragraph of "early life". Basically, I'm arguing for a change to the second paragraph to substantially remove what I see as non-pertinent data:

Gladwell has said that his mother, who published a book titled Brown Face, Big Master in 1969, is his role model as a writer.Gladwell's family tree includes ancestors of West Indian, Igbo, Irish, English and Scottish heritage. His distant cousin is the Jamaican-American statesman Colin Powell

And then I'd combine it with the previous paragraph. I think it's not super pertinent to list someone's ethnic background, as in the case of GW Bush, though a case could be made for it, based on the fact that their ethnic background is part of the beginning of their life. So I'd leave that, but as to the specific text about Gladwell's distant ancestors: None of them were notable in their own right, and looking again at the Bush article or the first 5 featured biographies of modern figures (1 2 3 4 5), none of them go beyond a mention of ethnic background and a listing of grandparents, let alone talking about ancestors from over 200 years ago. While considering this subject, I did think of Al Sharpton's article talking about his relation to Strom Thurmond through a distant, non-notable person, but this seems different because Al Sharpton's notability is based around his activism surrounding race relations, so a mention of research into his ancestry seems pertinent. But with Gladwell, his distant relation to a slaveowner or British gold prospectors doesn't seem to have anything to do with either his life or his work. My first reaction coming to the article was that it includes information that distracts from an actual biography and strays into a kind of racist fascination with the exotic. (looking now at Obama, you do get a bit of this, but again, does it really matter that his great-great-great-grandfather was from County Offaly, even if there's a reliable source that says so?]] Iowawindow (talk) 03:11, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Discussion of ancestry is quite standard - see Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Abraham Lincoln, Jorge Luis Borges, Siegfried Sassoon or Alexandre Dumas. Exploring family and influence is fine whether they are notable or not. 200 or 300 years ago, it all goes to expositional detail. Span (talk) 15:33, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Okay. Call me convinced. Iowawindow (talk) 02:45, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Reference #31

June 7, 2011 In regards to reference #31 (the review citing "racist pseudoscience" in the criticism section), I believe this should be removed. The website where the review was published does not even recognize the author as valid. (unsigned)

Are we talking about reference 31 or 32? The sentence about racist pseudoscience cites 32, which is a review by an author on an online jewish magazine from san fran. Explain "does not even recognize the author as valid"?

72.213.138.75 (talk) 03:13, 28 July 2011 (UTC)