For years I've felt quite alone in my opinion that Malcolm Gladwell is a fake (merely one rung above Victoria Knight-McDowell and Kevin Trudeau, and only because Gladwell probably believes his own claptrap). After all, he sells a gazillion books, and speaks at TED (although Karen Amrstrong does both as well, so there you go).
That's why it was great to read Harvard Professor Steven Pinker’s review of Gladwell’s latest product, What The Dog Saw, in today's New York Times Book Review.
Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
...The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings... Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes...
For example, Gladwell observes that teaching qualification tests are imperfect indicators of success, and concludes therefore that they shouldn’t be used at all. Instead “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree,” whose first year results should serve as the basis for future employment. That is a provocative sound bite that sounds wise if you assess it for no longer than it takes to Blink! But Gladwell neglects to consider the costs of such a tactic, nor the impact on the poor students who are subjected to all those failed first year experiments. Who has time for this? By Gladwell’s logic, based on their imperfections we should dispense entirely with the police department, antibiotics and Hillary Clinton.
Does today's book review mean that my view of Gladwell is no longer an Outlier? If Pinker reaches enough readers, perhaps we'll see a Tipping Point…
