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Interviews: Ask Malcolm Gladwell a Question

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.

Malcolm Gladwell is a speaker, author, and staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. Gladwell's writing often focuses on research in the social sciences and the unexpected connections or theories made from such research. His books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Outliers: The Story of Success, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants are all New York Times best sellers. Malcolm has agreed to give us some of his time to answer any question you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Genetics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Today, your continued belief in the Tabula Rasa myth seems increasingly outdated and contradicted by a wide variety of research from many notable evolutionary psychologists and genetics researchers. How do you continue to believe that intelligence and ability is not significantly genetic despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

    1. Re:Genetics by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How do you continue to believe that intelligence and ability is not significantly genetic despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

      Because Political Correctness says so. This statement, while likely true, would be deemed racist and bigoted if you actually started to quantify it by any specific means.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  2. Sharpshooter fallacy by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The areas you work in focus on very small sample sizes: software billionaires, major cultural shifts, and cases where the most improbable result happened.

    Within these areas, you've developed mental frameworks off of shared elements between each. This runs into a problem, the Texas Sharpshoot fallacy. You pick out some characteristics that are shared by the things you're looking at, and then the only available data to confirm your hypothesis is the data you extracted your predictions from.

    How did you address this when researching your books?

    1. Re:Sharpshooter fallacy by i+kan+reed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, it's not.

      Confirmation bias is a problem for this sort of thing too, but the sharpshooter fallacy comes from the fact that any given random dataset will have random relationships between variables. Real measurable ones. Especially in small data sets. It's like if I rolled a 6 sided die 6 times, it's very likely some numbers would show up twice and some no times.

      let's say they came up 5,5,4,2,1,1

      A reasonable person, from that dataset alone, might conclude that 5s and 1s are more likely on these dice. If you take that hypothesis, and validate it on the same set, you'll be right.

      You don't have to come in with a preconceived notion that 5 or 1 is somehow special, that you're confirming to yourself, willfully ignoring other data, if those are the only die results you ever see.

      It's a separate class of error.

  3. Interest in science by korbulon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do you think you'd still be interested in science if you had gone to graduate school?

  4. Re:Questions for Malcolm Gladwell! by matbury · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gladwell should learn how to read and interpret research properly and also, as a non-scientist himself, learn to ask the researchers if his conclusions reflect the findings of the research. With his "10,000 hour rule" he most definitely failed to do this and he got it spectacularly wrong. If I can remember correctly, he based it on one paper on one study, investigating practice habits of violinists at a music college in (Berlin?) Germany. One paper doesn't make an adequate foundation for a generalisable conclusion, especially in the social sciences. The standard deviation in this study was huge and 10,000 hours was simply the average. In other words, some violinists practice many more than 10,000 hours to reach mastery, while some didn't no matter how many hours they practiced, but more importantly, some reached mastery in far fewer than 10,000 hours.

    Something that should ring alarm bells in your head when you read stuff like the 10,000 hours rule, and Gladwell when he writes this stuff, is that such simple, broad generalised "rules" are rare in the natural sciences and almost non-existent in the social sciences. Simply put, listening to Gladwell is a waste of time because he has neither the background knowledge and skills, nor the humilty to ask for help in critically analysing his own conclusions. But who cares when you can sell a lot of books? Never let facts and more knowledgeable people than yourself get in the way of a good story.