I never thought much of Malcolm Gladwell, maybe because he reminded me entirely too much of Desmond Morris for his own good. Morris wrote The Naked Ape, in which he tried to use argument-by-analogy to draw rather shaky and tenuous connections between men in civilization and animals in general. Much of Morris's work was based on conceits about animals that were developed by observing them in captivity, which is a little like doing a general study of human child development and only using children born to parents in prison as the sample pool.
Gladwell's arguments are not much better: he creates a theory, and then uses singular examples as evidence for the theory, instead of looking at the evidence first. To wit: Blink, his book about the "science" of intuitive decision-making, which got savaged by Wesley Cecil in April 2006 Skeptical Inquirer. The opening anecdote for the book, about how an art expert saw in a second that a given piece of art was a fake after others had labored over it for long periods of time, doesn't even support his case.
Ditto Outliers, which used a similarly anecdotal approach, and suffered from the same flaws. The ideas expressed in each book are intriguing: Blink purports to deal with how people can make instant assessments of a situation, while Outliers tries to explain why certain people are successful and others are not — although the biggest wisdom you'll mine from the former is that some people are really good at making instant assessments of a situation (or not), and from the latter it's that some people are successful and others are not. In short, the books do not really explain anything, which not surprising given that they are mainly marketed to businessmen and not laypersons curious about science.
Outliers comes even closer to Morris's "man is an animal so why bother civilizing him" jungle turf:
In Gladwell’s account, individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he told Zengerle, “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.” [*]
Well, duh. That's not even noncontroversial; that's a mere truism. The real question is, to what degree are we allowed to strive for things not immediately provided by our existing environment? That's a more nuanced question, and one that deserves a good book, but from what I've seen Malcolm Gladwell isn't going to be the one writing it.
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It seems to me as though you haven't actually read Gladwell's works and are merely adopting other people's opinions. Interestingly enough, David Brooks negates his own statements by describing social forces that influence the individual's determination, i.e., "A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong." That's a powerful example of social influences on an individual's decision-making process. It does nothing to counter Gladwell's points in Outlier. That op-ed piece smacks of someone who just wanted something to say, even though they really didn't.
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You are entirely correct. I might have done better by simply saying "I haven't read the books [I did a stand-up skim at the bookstore but that's not reading], but so much of what I get off them is things that I have already been disgusted by in another form." But, guess what, that doesn't sound anywhere nearly as smart.
I think again my big problem was that I was reacting to my formulation of what the book seemed to be saying, not the thing in itself, and this happens to me when I get into touchy territory. I was a little more eager to get out my pet comparison, and not have to qualify it, than give the guy his total due. My apologies.
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wanted to have something to say*
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More and more, the question of 'to what degree are we allowed to strive for things not immediately provided by our existing environment?' or even 'what do you want to be?' are becoming demonstrably moot. It's been demonstrated that the 'you' making the decisions in your life isn't the 'you' that you think it is: our conscious minds, it seems, are a framework of rationalizations and self-deceptions to cover up the fact that our brains make decisions long before they let the conscious mind know about them.
We are passengers in our own heads, being telling ourselves lies to try to keep from understanding it enough to drive the stimulus-response mechanisms mad.
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