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Outliers, The Story Of Success
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.
Outliers
author
Malcolm Gladwell
pages
301
publisher
Little, Brown and Co.
rating
Excellent.
reviewer
Leon Malinofsky
ISBN
978-0-316-03669-6
summary
Success comes from external factors or unsuspected internal ones.
Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. Outliers — those persons of exceptional accomplishment — typically have lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden causes of their status.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level, and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history. However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just beginning to boom when they hit their stride.
Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in defending themselves, their reputations and honor.
Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. This chapter is interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.
Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard, intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which outstrips growers of other crops. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.
The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours, which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.
You can purchase Outliers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. Outliers — those persons of exceptional accomplishment — typically have lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden causes of their status.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level, and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history. However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just beginning to boom when they hit their stride.
Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in defending themselves, their reputations and honor.
Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. This chapter is interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.
Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard, intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which outstrips growers of other crops. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.
The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours, which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.
You can purchase Outliers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Looks like a very interesting book, very much in the flavor of Freakonomics, in that it uses each chapter to explore a completely different phenomenon and simply orbits around a nebulous main argument.
I very much like that approach because it leaves me, as a reader, feeling like I've taken an adventure and seen a lot in the course of a book; it appeals to casual readers who like their nonfiction to be as exciting and as unpredictable as their fiction.
I expect to pick it up from the library as soon as I can. Thanks for your review!
Reminds me of stock market games people play. Someone usually winds up increasing their money by a ridiculous factor. The winner just happened to guess a good set of buys/moves. Another analogy is the million monkeys typing - pure chance will eventually produce a winner.
I don't believe in luck - but in chance yes. Successful people usually make their own "luck" by doing things to better their odds. Bill Gates might be an example of both.
..........FULL STOP.
Some people do everything right, research, come to correct conclusions, and yet random events destroy them.
Other people make a series of long odds, even terrible choices and yet do great because of random events.
Given classic random theory, given a series of 50/50 type decisions, out of 32 people, one person will be completely screwed and one person will win every time. For larger data sets, the lucky runs are only longer.
I'm sure Gates determination and business acumen made a difference. But winning so big had a lot to do with luck.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This seems to be his third or fourth book of this type. Not that I'm complaining - I've read Blink, and Tipping Point - both very interesting reads. It gives some of the explanations behind behaviours that I've noticed, but hadn't thought about why they occurred.
..........FULL STOP.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Surprise! You actually aren't god's gift to business after all.
As far as Bill Gates goes though, if you look at his early history he was indeed in the right place at the right time, but he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
At a very early computer conference, all the other people got up and allowed as how there was going to be plenty of room in this new industry for all the different manufacturers. Only Bill got up and said "you guys are all wrong, there's going to be one winner and the rest will lose".
Say what you want about Bill's business methodologies, but I think he's actually about the poorest example of the "outlier" effect that you can find.
G.
Specifically, an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
-
As it happens, I have just finished reading Outliers, and I liked it a lot. (I've also liked Gladwell's two previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink.)
I would summarize Gladwell's conclusion slightly differently. I think he would accept that some people are inherently gifted -- in several places, he is careful to say that people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates were very talented. It seems to me the kernel of his argument is that they had inherent talent, but became truly exceptional owing to a combination of favorable circumstances. In other words, their talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for great success.
It's perhaps similar to what has been said about sex: to turn out really well, it requires both experience and enthusiasm, and no amount of one can compensate for a complete lack of the other. :-)
I agree that intelligence is overrated and interest is key. But you have to have a certain level of intelligence for some pursuits, I think. If you don't have enough intelligence, you have an insurmountable handicap. But once you have enough intelligence, then more intelligence won't help you much. You need to WORK.
This explains why the "losers" in high school didn't become physicists, or cosmologists, but they eventually succeeded at normal occupations. Even though they might not have had as many brains as the smartest, they had enough brains for any normal occupation. And they worked very hard.
The lesson that I draw from this is that I SHOULD have boned that somewhat stupid girl in 10th grade, because she turned out hot and successful even though she wasn't an honors student.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
In the book "The making of the Atomic Bomb" the author, Richard Rhodes, points out something very much like this.
One might think that the distribution of Nobel Prize winning physicists might have a normal distribution, but there is a valley in Hungary (if I remember the book correctly) that has an inordinate amount of Nobel Prize winners.
He makes the case that their elementary level education had a role in this. Students were doing inventive things on their own in math and science at a very early age. As a result, a more natural and internal approach to these subjects followed them through life and put them in a better position to do ground-breaking research.
By the way, if you have not read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" I highly recommend it. Not just because of its account of the events of the Manhattan Project, but also because it goes into the philosophy of the 1800's which resulted in the pursuit of bigger, better weapons to rage "Total War". The chemical weapons of WWI were a result of this as well.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser.The difference is... an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize. I don't know about you, but trying to poison your adviser doesn't sound like evidence of "extreme personability", "likability", or "ability to empathize" to me. Sounds more like "being a sociopath" is an important contributing factor to success! "Lickability", on the other hand, is an important contributing factor in choosing a significant other.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.
I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Someone needs to write a book about total failures, and what NOT to do with your life. I fear it may involve people who spend all day posting on Slashdot.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've decided that Malcolm Gladwell is a storyteller. As such, he learns what stories resonate with people, and because he's a good storyteller, he's become very successful at spinning his tales.
While I haven't read Outliers, I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.
What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.
Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.
"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5)
It's quite plain to see that the author is talking about greatness. If he's well read, he should know the idea that some are bound to greatness by chance was written long ago.
Explaining some of the happenings of chance that confer this effect is a useful goal. Perhaps knowing more ways to improve one's odds at greatness will allow more people to improve them. Perhaps it will even allow more great breakthroughs.
We all in the modern world stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of us put that to better use than others. Some of us by chance are given different giants, too.
Sure, a Chinese or Japanese child may have an easier number system to learn. A European or American child, though, has a much smaller and simpler alphabet. People born with safe running water and household electrical current live a life different from people who spend part of their time hauling water and burn candles or kerosene lamps for light. Which child do you expect to write the next great computer application? It's probably not one who has think about getting power to cook his food. It'll probably be a child who doesn't have to worry about power for his computer.
Of all those who have most of the advantages of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, how many actually take advantage of all of them?
It seems to me the lesson is that you not only need to be smart, but you need to be willing to do the work to find opportunities, and willing to act upon them. Also, you need to have a little luck to be in the right place at the right time.
Not to beat a very bad fanboi cliche to death, but Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Steve saw an opportunity to sell a computer to the masses in the 70s and kick start the personal computer market. Bill saw an opportunity to tie his DOS to the IBM PC when he saw more business people wanted the PC over an Apple II. Steve saw the opportunity to create a graphical UI after visiting PARC and find a way to sell it, but wasn't nearly successful this time, because conditions were not in his favor (thanks to Bill Gates well timed opportunity). Bill then copied Steve's project and used his previous well timed success to do what Steve didn't quite have the leverage to do, get the GUI out to the masses.
Also look at Steve recognizing the market for ripping and mixing CDs, and the coming of the MP3, to create a music player at the right time that's easy to use, and to come up with a marketing plan that made everyone want it.
Both these men have skills and experience I'll never have. But they'd be nothing if the opportunity didn't arise. They'd be even less if the opportunity did arise, and no one took advantage of it. They'd just be here like the rest of us pontificating on how some other guy is a genius or not, struggling to install their copy of Ubuntu or something.
I guess my point is that this isn't something entirely new. This sounds like another book about the butterfly effect, so I'm not sure how useful it would be, though I'm sure its interesting entertainment.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I read Malcolm Gladwell's book about a month ago and I just finished Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, this morning. What I found remarkable was that Steve Martin's book exactly parallels the process that Malcolm Gladwell talks about.
Steve Martin's book begins:
"I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."
There are other parallels such as having the opportunity to work at Disneyland from a young age and being exposed to performance and magic tricks. The most important point is that Steve Martin spent years and years refining his craft.
----
Also, interesting is this very positive review of Gladwell's book by Tomas Sowell, an ultra-conservative economist (Gladwell is an obvious liberal)
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384/
First, who's the "you" you are addressing here?
And you are making the case that Gladwell basically starts with- that successful people are successful simply because they have some unique talent (like having good judgment).
No example of an "outlier" success story in this book isn't immensely talented. But in addition to their talent, they had other supplementary skills (i.e. not just intellectually smart, but also people-smart, and/or creative, etc.), worked hard, and were in the right place at the right time.
Gladwell doesn't really do a great job of summarizing his main argument, in my opinion, but it boils down to this: Highly successful people are pretty smart (but Gladwell argues that you only have to be "smart enough"; success doesn't track linearly with intelligence once you hit the "pretty smart and higher" region), have supplementary talents, work hard, come from the "right" background (though what "right" means here is typically only clear in hindsight) AND were in the right place at the right time.
Not mentioned in the review is the work of Lewis Terman, who identified a cohort of really smart California kids ("Termites") in the 1920's and tracked them for years. The outcomes of the "brightest of the brightest" were not particularly notable; Gladwell explains some of the reasons why.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
1) Gladwell's description of the mechanics windshear was inaccurate. Perhaps he understood what he was saying when he wrote it, but the way it reads sound s like he is saying that when a plane is flying into a headwind, the pilots need to use more power, and then if that headwind shears to a tail wind, all of a sudden, the plane is going too fast to land. This is really the opposite of what is true. Pilots don't really care so much about their ground speed as they approach the runway, only their airspeed. You don't use more power going into a head wind, because using more power would increase your airspeed. On really windy days, you can get small airplanes to track backwards over the ground, but they still have a positive airspeed within the normal operating limits. If a headwind shears to a tail wind, you don't have too much momentum, you have too little airspeed.
2) The idea that these non-US countries were less safe to fly in because of their culture of not questioning superiors is also questionable. Each airline has a corporate which ends up defining how crew members interact. Guess what, 40+ years ago, the corporate culture in the airlines in this country (USA) was similar to Korean Air's culture 15 years ago. The US airlines made a point to change their cultures, and safety was enhanced greatly. When the US consultants when to Korean Air, the same thing happened there. But there is no reason to say that the unsafe culture was do to Korean philosophies -- just a less modern attitude toward cockpit resource management.
3) Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are always awful to read about. I think Malcolm missed the really big explanation for the CFIT crash that he describes. Historically, the ground proximity warning systems in large aircraft were not vary accurate at all. They were based mostly on rates of change of radar altitude, and were highly prone to calling out warnings when there was no problem, just spurious readings from the radar altimeter. As a result, pilots learned to not take advice from these units seriously. If they had, the accident Gladwell discusses certainly would not have happened. Modern enhanced ground proximity warning systems (eGPWS) use GPS and a database of obstructions, and are very reliable. With a reliable instrument, comes trust, and a pilot today, getting a warning from eGPWS is far less likely to make the same mistake.
If there are so many basic reasoning problems with chapter 7, how many problems are there in chapters outside my areas of expertise?
All this said, I'd recommend the book, it's a NYT bestseller, and it is very well written and thought provoking. It's provoking this discussion, and thats what a good book should do.
I was a Chinese major, studied and lived in Japan for 4 years and am fluent in both languages. I've also studied a small bit of Korean as well.
I'm not sure how words for numbers could be more "logical" in these languages. In fact, in Korean there are two number naming systems -- one of native origin and the other of Chinese origin -- that can be used for values up to 100. (Japanese has this as well, but only up to 10.) For higher values the Chinese number names are used. So I doubt it has anything to do with language. Rather, I could see the the use of the abacus as a teaching tool as a big advantage, since it seems to confer a visceral knowledge of numbers and calculations that would be hard to acquire otherwise. Many people I know who became proficient with an abacus can visualize one in their head and use that visualization to do calculations.
That said, learning "Indian methods of calculation" seems to have become popular in Japan recently. There are at least two Nintendo DS games that give instruction on how to do arithmetic using methods taught in Indian schools (I own one of them).
May the Maths Be with you!
They did this by incorporating in states where shareholders have no rights.
And those shareholders were forced to invest in that company... how? Or is it possible that those shareholders actually wanted to see their shares become more valuable, and were happy to reward whoever can make that happen with a big fat paycheck?
Because if all a well-paid executive is is a load on the company, with no benefit, then that means that the shareholders aren't getting what they should get. And when that happens, they unload their shares. The value of the shares goes down. The company's capital shrinks. The visibility of that shrinking value causes concern among other investors, who also divest. And you get companies with worthless stocks, just as ought to happen.
Is it really your contention that the person who guides a multi-billion dollar company is only worth - to the shareholders, the customers, and the other employees of that company - 5 times what the janitor is making? Since you're choosing numbers, why not say he's not worth any more? Gee, maybe because there are very few people in the world who can effectively do that job, and the company needs to compete for them? How are you going to do that when only offering a janitor's wages? Or five times the janitor's wages? Why should someone who knows how to do that job settle for one that pays that much when another company might pay more? And since you're looking to control what shareholders are allowed to decide to pay the people they employ, and cap everyone's pay, why aren't you also talking about capping the janitor's pay? Perhaps all janitors, everywhere, should make the same Government Approved Janitor Salary? We can even have a Bureau Of Wages that centrally manages what each person's pay should be! And since everyone will finally be equally miserable, we can all make ourselves feel better by calling each other "comrade." That'll be great!
Or, you can let the people who choose to invest in a company decide what sort of compensation is reasonable, and let them pull their investment out of that company if they don't like it. Yeah, I know, no governement job is created in that scenario, and no need to tax private citizens to pay for that job. Bummer!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Blink - go with your first feeling. There, that's the whole 100+ page book in a five word sentence.
Actually that's incorrect. The book says that intuition in experienced people works well. It's quite lousy in people without experience. Your brain is intuitively capable of processing lots of data and coming up with a correct action to a problem based on your past experience. It can do this way faster than it takes to consciously work it out. There are many many people who can't seem to grasp this concept.
Perhaps you should give the book a second read.
"And the kids with straight A's in grade school only rarely grow up to be intellectual leaders"
Just because you got straight A's doesn't mean you had to work for them. Much of Gladwell's work shows that effort, time, and experience trump natural talent, if it exists. Who works harder to get the grade they did, the grade A wiz kid that finishes home work in no time or the D student who spends hours and hours trying to understand something.
Not sure if it's true or a myth, but I heard Einstein failed high school a few times before hitting on that relativity thing. I have also known in my own life a couple of academic super stars with Phd's that became useless in the career world. Last I heard one of them took a job on the factory floor at John Deere.
The book's use of Bill Gates as an example of the 10,000 hour rule is rather poor. Bill Gates did not build Microsoft by being a good programmer. He built it by taking other people's good programs. He didn't even need any skill to identify "good", because he took those that lots of people were using. He let the public determine what was good and leveraged that.
I totally agree with you. If a business and its shareholders want to pay their executives 1 hojillion dollars, it's their decision. The executives are an investment, like any other. If the executives bring enough income to the company to justify it, the company wins, and if they don't, the company loses. Or fires them.
If the company is foolish enough to pay the execs based on short-term gains which ultimately cost them billions, the company loses. Everything works itself out.
What breaks this system is when the company makes horrific decisions and the taxpayers bail them out. Now we're paying the huge salaries and there's no penalty for bad investment. Guess what that creates? (Hint: not "valuable jobs and products.")
"the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished."
I'm happy, and that's what's important to me.
I am not left-handed, either!
Bullshit. And that's coming from an atheist.
You'd better be ready to tell me how and why Kenneth Miller, just to name one, is "incapable of thinking for himself" due to his religions belief.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest
Wow, this is what I've always felt. Gotta love the Feynman.
As someone else pointed out to you, it is really an existential question. What is the "purpose" of life? Is "hard work and sacrifice and pain for uncertain rewards largely based on random chance" the only way to live? Is an attempt to reduce the "risk/reward" ratio for everyone an evil deed? Or is life supposed to be like a Las Vegas casino where nearly everyone loses so that some extremely rare random person can win the "jackpot" somehow superior? (and the person in question promptly going on TV to extol his/her "skill" and "perseverance" at pulling the machine's lever to a chorus of adoring true-believers) Is co-operation the superior way of an sentient species, or vicious competition to the death for scraps in an endless winner-takes-almost-all game?
Your excuses would sound more sincere if this was the first "boom" ever caused by the systemic instability of the "winner-takes-most" society. Or a second... or maybe a third ... but this has been going on so long that some dusty 19th century books are still around excusing busts of that time ... equally insincerely. And going further back one can see more busts and booms and wars and famines and what not caused by various different incarnations of greed-and-power based societies. It is endless really. I do think that sentient beings should be able to do much better than this.
If that's the case, then it seems that one company would find these good managers that supposedly are willing to work for 5x the wages of the janitor, and use the savings to become more profitable.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.