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Interviews: Ask Malcolm Gladwell a Question
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.
Ten-thousand hours (~3.4 years if a regular job) is Gladwell's estimate of temporal mastery. With that being said, the Mozarts like Carlsen or Fischer learn faster and become World Champion. What is the difference between the Mozarts and 3.4 years? Is it there some passionate rage to absorb and decipher patterns that magnetizes them to a particular domain or is it their consistent, well-designed regimen for reaching the upper echelons (like Lalzo Polgar's systemic approach with Judith and Susan)? If it is "pure" passion, then will people who find their true calling and invest appropriate time (e.g. have an OCD mentality) always see the unquestionable results? If it is "pure" regimen, then will following the same systematic approach always see the overarching performance? One thing to keep in mind is are these skills transferable to other domains? Is there a way to tackle a number of domains in the same 10,000 hours with an abstract approach? What about the time to create "new" domains rather than to "solve" problems in a particular domain? Is there some sort of estimate for that? Malcolm could possibly use those clues for his sequel to "Outliers" appropriately called "Pioneers". Any thoughts?
Today, your continued belief in the Tabula Rasa myth seems increasingly outdated and contradicted by a wide variety of research from many notable evolutionary psychologists and genetics researchers.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?
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?
Firstly, I'm a huge fan of your work.
Secondly, when preparing for your breakout role in 'A Clockwork Orange', did you, at the time, expect it to have such a long-reaching impact?
I'm curious to know what your take is on a basic income for all US citizens versus our current 'conditional' welfare system. What do you think short term and long term outcome would be? Would the increased tax burden on the upper classes result in a total collapse rendering a basic income useless? My personal opinion is that it is necessary given the increasing rate of job automation coupled with our increasing population size (not to mention aging). Am I delusional? If so, why?
Your books are full of bullshit masquerading as research, yet they sell like pancakes. What is the secret?
There is a positive feedback between human confirmation bias and reliance on information sources which increasingly give us what we want (e.g. Google/Facebook "filter bubbles", Amazon "if you like this... you'll like that." Do you expect this to create more social balkanization and extremism or other social effects? Is there anything we can do to stop or slow this process?
...and now I'm an expert at cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies. -Peter Lynn
You have made a career out of writing books that popularize scientific findings - it seems like this is a task fraught with potential dangers, in terms of representing something that your readers misinterpret and misapply, or perhaps taking a published study and drawing an unwarranted conclusion yourself that attracts the ire of the original researchers. Certainly, much science journalism lately can be criticized for sensationalizing scientific results in the pursuit of better headlines, sometimes at the cost of being deliberately misleading. Can you expound a bit on the issues you've run into as a purveyor of scientific results, and explain how you balance the need for a faithful presentation of the source material with the desire to find something relatable and compelling enough to write a book about?
Do you think you'd still be interested in science if you had gone to graduate school?
I imagine that the different circles you run in might have dramatically different responses to the religious emphasis in your recent work. What kind of reactions (wanted and unwanted) have you gotten from your recent move towards Christianity?
In David and Goliath, you show that the highest science students at U of Maryland are more likely to become scientists than the lowest science students at Harvard, despite the fact that the Harvard students were, before college, much more successful. The idea being that the best place to develop is at a level where you are successful. This is the opposite of the conventional wisdom for soccer. In that world, the consensus for developing players is that they should get on the best team they possibly can, even if that means they don’t regularly play in league matches. Supposedly, being around better players in practice outweighs the lack of actual game experience. This question comes up for American players regularly. Should they stay in MLS, where they start and gets lots of playing time, or move to a better team in a better league in Europe, where they often struggle to see the field? So my question is, is Soccer different than Engineering in some fundamental way, or has the soccer world just not read David and Goliath? Would a rising American soccer player be better of on the Bayern Munich reserve team or starting for the LA Galaxy?
http://shameproject.com/report...
Why did you, after college, attend the National Journalism Center, a corporate-funded program created to counter the mediaâ(TM)s alleged âoeanti-business biasâ?
Why, as someone who is half-Jamaican, have you repeatedly associated yourself (and apparently continue to do so) with the white supremacist organization EPPC, which fights activists for economic justice?
Why did you write for American Spectator, which churned out anti-Clinton conspiracy theories?
Why did you recycle tobacco industry propaganda and quote lobbyists for Washington Post articles you "wrote"? Why did Phillip Morris consider you, according to their internal documents, to be a "friend" who could be counted on for pro-tobacco-industry stories?
Why did you clearly promote drugs for treating ADHD in kids, in which you heavily quoted researchers who were paid heavily by the pharma industry?
Why did you cite a pharma-industry cited study and defend the industry when it was attacked for high drug costs?
Why did you blame the victims in the Enron collapse, defending executives who committed gross fraud?
Please help metamoderate.
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
Accelerated, more sophisticated automation didn't by itself led to a shrinking of the middle class. It is not even the primary factor. Globalization did that. A middle class that was not educationally prepare to move out of what I call "manual/rudimentary" manufacturing, and a national difficulty to operate efficiently, those two played a significant role.
Remember, middle class used to denote blue collar jobs.
But those jobs started to go bye bye quite some time ago. It even preceded 2000's globalization and contemporary automation. The blue-collar middle class built around the auto industry was hurt significantly when it got to compete against Japanese auto makers. Middle class jobs built around the semi conductor industry got severely affected when it could not compete against Taiwanese and Japanese semiconductors.
In the early 90's, way before I got into college I used to work as an electronic welder out in Burbank, CA. Nice gig, but you know what, that type of job went somewhere else. A lot of people back then did not realize the seismic change, and were not equipped to re-adapt.
It used to be the case that Grandpa would work in a good gig, a decent gig, that provided everything he needed, savings, a car and a house. Dad then would work on the same. And then the son. Nothing wrong with that. One generation would pick the trades of the previous one.
That continuity started to break around the late 70's, early 80's, with a full spinal breakage by the late 90's. That generational-job continuity I refer to was possible because there was no industrial competition to speak off. The end of that was inevitable.
The younger generations (some X's and most millennials) are better equipped to make the transition. It's the people within the 35-45 bracket who came out unprepared, those are the ones that are going to be limping for some time, maybe forever.
Automation has very little to do with it because, without globalization, those people displaced by automation would have gone to do something else with little external pressure off international competition.
The country is going to adapt, but a lot of people are going to be limping economically till that happens.
This is probably one of the most unfriendly forums to yourself that you could possibly engage for feedback. Do you feel that you must defend yourself to the most critical audience? Or did you pull a Malcolm Gladwell and jump into a topic that you know nothing about it and then when you realize your in over your head, decide to try and twist the evidence to fit your ill conceived hypothesis?
Boyce Rensberger, your erstwhile editor at the Washington Post, said this a year ago in the comments section of this article:
Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.
When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.
What's your response?
when he saw you wrote about the "Igon Value" problem? Wasn't he a math professor? http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/I...