Malcolm Gladwell Is A Dipshit

[Ultra Magnus]

"If I did, I would have written you off when I learned you were a 25 year old kid living in a van."

This explains a lot, thanks for the heads up @Vigilante.

 

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[LifeTransformer]

What I normally find to be a good gauge is if something goes "mainstream", then don't bother.

I'm pretty sure its one of the things @MJ DeMarco mentions too, to paraphrase; "if you see everyone else doing it, do the opposite".

What goes mainstream these days?

Viral content - Oh look a cat doing something hilarious! Also, gossip and other celebrity related garbage = Waste of time.
Books with no real context or actionable advice - Gladwell's stuff, Brene Brown, The Secret, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up = Gooey "feel good" nonsense the lot of it.

The list could be made longer, but that'll do. I don't need to tell people here do I?

There was a tip in Seth Godin book too, he said he only reads books that most people don't/wouldn't. I haven't tried that out myself yet.

 

[RHL]

I can't remember his specific junk science, but the amount for maximum happiness was somewhere south of $100k (I want to say $80k).

Scumbag Gladwell: "Knows" more money makes you unhappy; still publishes new books after selling over 10,000,000 volumes and being worth $30,000,000.

This is the essence of the "goo-roo" paradox. Do what they do and not what they say, folks.

 

[Andy Black]

What I normally find to be a good gauge is if something goes "mainstream", then don't bother.

I'm pretty sure its one of the things @MJ DeMarco mentions too, to paraphrase; "if you see everyone else doing it, do the opposite".

What goes mainstream these days?

Viral content - Oh look a cat doing something hilarious! Also, gossip and other celebrity related garbage = Waste of time.
Books with no real context or actionable advice - Gladwell's stuff, Brene Brown, The Secret, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up = Gooey "feel good" nonsense the lot of it.

The list could be made longer, but that'll do. I don't need to tell people here do I?

There was a tip in Seth Godin book too, he said he only reads books that most people don't/wouldn't. I haven't tried that out myself yet.

I instinctively go the opposite direction. Call it stubborn. Call it contrarian. I've been called both, and I've found it a valuable instinctive reaction.

If the herd's going left, then there'll be less BS and arseholes going right...

 

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[CJZee]

Malcolm Gladwell is a good at finding concepts and crafting stories around them. It just so happens his stories don't accurately represent the concepts that he's interpreting.

Anders Ericsson, the researcher who crafted the 10,000 hour rule, strongly disagrees with Gladwell's interpretation. He says Gladwell just throws out this 10,000 hour number without any context. Ericsson's theory involves the concept of "deliberate practice." That's why a person who hires a golf coach with a detailed training regimine can improve faster in 2,000 hours than a weekend warrior who hacks away for 10,000 hours.

Gladwell just perpetrates the myth that all you need to do is put in the time and in the end you'll be rewarded.

But hey, he's a good storyteller and that's what sells books. Unfortunately people believe it.

 

[splok]

This whole thread seems like missing the forest for the trees. Ok, so I agree that most scientific studies are bad, some REALLY bad, and the popular reporting on them is almost universally REALLY, REALLY bad. Sadly, the terrible reporting is all the popular awareness that studies ever get though, since the vast, vast majority of people aren't going to track down and read the actual studies in question. However, I think lumping Gladwell into the pile of shitty bloggers is a bit much. He may take some liberties with his interpretations of the research, but when I read his stuff, it seems more like he's trying to distill practical lessons from research and present it in a way that the average person will actually find useful.

Now comes this. A statistic I have quoted many times about "10,000 hours of practice" from Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and it turns out Gladwell got that wrong also.

Ok, here are a few quotes from the book:

The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing—that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better—well over thirty hours a week.

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks.

Ok, so he seems to be saying that hard work makes you better and that people shouldn't blame success on talent or luck. I think everyone here would pretty much agree with that, right? If he's cherrypicking a nice round number just to get a point across, does that make him a dipshit and invalidate everything he's written? (Also note the bold. He isn't leaving out the concept of deliberate practice, he just didn't use that specific term.)

However, even if it's cherrypicked, it's not exactly arbitrary:

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. "In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.

Also, a excerpt from Gladwell discussing the critiques: http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule

Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise: There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years.

The Ericsson article talking about how Gladwell got everything wrong (convenient time to play up the problems since they've just released a book of course) mainly complained about his use of the number, not the concept. If you read Ericsson's actual study, instead of using the "10,000 hour rule", he basically uses the "10 year rule". Ten years isn't any more magical than 10,000 hours, but the point is that the best people work the most. Here's the original study in case anyone wants to bother reading it: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/image...f/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

In their classic study of expertise in chess, Simon and Chase (1973) observed that nobody had attained the level of an international chess master (grandmaster) "with less than about a decade's intense preparation with the game"

we know of only a small number of exceptions to the general rule that individuals
require 10 or more years of preparation to attain international-level performance

J. R. Hayes (1981) confirmed that 10 years' experience is necessary in another domain, musical composition.

Simon and Chase's (1973) "10-year rule" is supported by data from a wide range of domains: music (Sosniak, 1985), mathematics (Gustin, 1985), tennis (Monsaas, 1985), swimming (Kalinowski, 1985), and long-distance running (Wallingford, 1975).

expert performance is not reached with less than 10 years of deliberate practice.

So after all of the complaining of wrongness, the conclusion of Ericcson's study says essentially the same thing as I got from Outliers:

Contrary to the popular "talent" view that asserts that differences in practice and experience cannot account for differences in expert performance, we have shown that the amount of a specific type of activity (deliberate practice) is consistently correlated with a wide range of performance including expert level performance, when appropriate developmental differences (age) are controlled.

We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs-novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice.

 

[Raoul Duke]

living in a van.

Matt Foley?

I'm sorry. I have nothing to contribute but that. Yay!

 

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[TonyStark]

The 10,000 hour rule is pretty arbitrary. I get what he's saying, how that's the number of hours it takes to be at a professional level, but a lot of people can achieve this level without needing to practice 10,000 hours.

And I don't remember correctly, but does he mention motivation & drive? Because you don't get to 10,000 without liking what you are doing a lot.

Edit:

I'm pretty sure I thought 3/4 of his books were crap.

 

[csalvato]

if you want to hone your BS meter, read a few of his books. In outliers he all but says Bill Gates was just "lucky" to become CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in history...

 

[TonyStark]

if you want to hone your BS meter, read a few of his books. In outliers he all but says Bill Gates was just "lucky" to become CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in history...

 

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[Sheps]

Princeton University said $75K
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html

I think the honest truth isn't that making >$75k doesn't make you happy, it's that most people spend the money wrong (if the goal is happiness and fulfilment).

Also I thought the thread title was the title of the book, I was thinking "damn that's a book I wonna read, what a punchy title" lol.

 

[nradam123]

In the book Zero to One Peter Thiel called Malcolm Gladwell as inaccurate. I forgot the exact reason (I will have to check again).

 

[csalvato]

In the book Zero to One Peter Thiel called Malcolm Gladwell as inaccurate. I forgot the exact reason (I will have to check again).

maybe Peter Thiel is also jealous of Malcolm's net worth...

oh, wait...

 

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[Digamma]

In the book Zero to One Peter Thiel called Malcolm Gladwell as inaccurate. I forgot the exact reason (I will have to check again).

He cites Gladwell several times, and the feeling I get is that he thinks Gladwell is a dipshit. The topic is relative to Gladwell's idea that successful people are "lucky".