{"id":129,"date":"2006-02-09T11:10:27","date_gmt":"2006-02-09T16:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.elharo.com\/blog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2008-05-29T10:18:10","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T15:18:10","slug":"malcolm-gladwell-misses-the-boat-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/new-york\/2006\/02\/09\/malcolm-gladwell-misses-the-boat-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Malcolm Gladwell Misses the Boat (Again)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of people have been talking about Malcolm Gladwell<\/a>‘s books lately in the blogosphere. Based on multiple recommendations, I’ve recently finished both The Tipping Point<\/a><\/cite> and Blink<\/a><\/cite>. He’s an exceptional writer. It’s rare to find intellectual nonfiction of this sort–i.e. books about ideas–that’s as much of a page turner as a good mystery novel. I devoured both books very quickly.
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\nSadly I don’t think I can trust them. His skill as a writer masks some serious flaws as a thinker and a researcher. In both books, I found major factual and logical errors in the sections that touched on areas that I knew quite well. For instance his recollection of the state of life in New York City in the 1980s in The Tipping Point<\/cite> is seriously out of kilter. I don’t think the facts come close to making the point he’s trying to pull out of them. Now I don’t have the personal experience with his other topics that I do with New York City, but when I catch things I know aren’t true in the parts I do know, I have to wonder about the rest of the material.<\/p>\n

He’s recently published an article about stereotypes in the New Yorker<\/a>. I don’t think I disagree with his conclusions, but the way he gets to them is typically flawed. In particular, read the sections of the article about pit bulls. See if you can spot the problem with his argument.<\/p>\n

Here’s a hint: it involves careful selection of facts. His argument is good as far as it goes, and his conclusion may be more accurate than not; but when drawing his conclusions he neglects to address one crucial fact from earlier in the article that would strongly suggest the opposite conclusion. Read the article. It isn’t hard to spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of people have been talking about Malcolm Gladwell‘s books lately in the blogosphere. Based on multiple recommendations, I’ve recently finished both The Tipping Point and Blink. He’s an exceptional writer. It’s rare to find intellectual nonfiction of this sort–i.e. books about ideas–that’s as much of a page turner as a good mystery novel. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-york","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}