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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.

16 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Questions for Malcolm Gladwell! by advancecoder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Questions for Malcolm Gladwell! by vux984 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ten-thousand hours (~3.4 years if a regular job)

      Where did that come from? 10000/3.4 = 2941 hours per year. Nobody works that. The average full time *American* works less than 1800 year, and has since the 70s. Other countries full time work even less.

      A 2000+ hr work year is a fiction

      If you are working 2000+ hrs for someone else your probably being exploited. Take a good hard look at what you are doing and whether its worth it. Most people do NOT have to work that much. And they probably get paid just as well as you. The average full time employee works 1700 hours. (They get PAID for another 200-300 though for holidays, vacation, sick/personal days etc. So the work year might still add up to around 2000... but you shouldn't actually be working that. (This is just one reason, (along with medical and other benefits) why contractors need to charge more... they're not being paid for those 200-300 hours.)

      If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and just making ends meet, (ie its not a choice) then you need to take a hard look at your business.

      If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and making out like a bandit, well... good on you... you can afford to life a more balanced life, and you probably should, but the choice is yours.

      http://www.businessinsider.com...

    2. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.

  4. Did you expect the impact? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

  5. Opinion On Basic Income by Scottingham · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Opinion On Basic Income by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      However, both the population increase as well as the increase in automation is happening at an exponential rate

      It has been growing exponentially for a long time. There's been no correlation between either population growth and unemployment, or automation and unemployment. If your hypothesis is correct, then you need to explain the lack of correlation.

      It could lead to the abolishment of the minimum wage, which expecting people to live on is sort of a joke anyhow.

      Almost no one lives on minimum wage. Look up the demographics of a typical minimum wage earner some time, almost all of them live in a nice middle-class income household.

      Honestly though, I think it'll remain firmly in fantasy land

      Don't. Base your worldview on facts. That is the only way we'll ever get the cheap energy, because people are looking at scientific facts and how we can use them.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Opinion On Basic Income by ranton · · Score: 4, Interesting

      1) A vibrant middle class is an aberration of history. I don't think we can look to history and find meaningful examples of what exponentially increasing technology will do to our current social structures.

      2) Our society determines what basic income is. Just like we determine our laws.

      3) Living in a society that respects property rights has its costs. Almost the only difference between the relatively peaceful western world and places like the unrest in the middle east is that the vast majority of our population has a lot of opportunities. You take those away and we will have the same unrest here.

      I tend to agree with Thomas Paine, who believed that all citizens have a natural inheritance created by the introduction of the system of landed property. So in return for society recognizing property rights those property holders owe society some of its proceeds. He explicitly stated this should not be considered charity.

      4) He never said he thought there would only be positive results. He did say he thinks it would be a good idea, but plenty of good ideas still have consequences. And he was openly asking for other opinions while merely offering his own; there is no need to jump down his throat.

      5) No one is saying people would be paid not to work. All people would just be told "you don't have to work to meet your basic needs." Once that burden is removed, people would still be free to work to better their lives further. Very few people would just sit around all day doing nothing, and those that do really would be the ones we want removed from the workforce anyway.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
  6. Long term effects of filter bubbles/silos by An+dochasac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  7. How by werepants · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  8. 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?

  9. Recent religious topics by werepants · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  10. Why are you a corporate shill? by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.