Gladwell, on creeping determinism

http://www.gladwell.com/2003/2003_03_10_a_dots.html

by staticshock • 17 years ago

36 23 17 years ago

anatoly3• 17 years ago

I can't, dammit. I'm trying to read the article, but all I'm seeing is "igon value igon value igon value". Damn you, Steven Pinker! I will never enjoy Gladwell again.

MartinCron• 17 years ago

I just read it for you and there's not a single reference to linear algebra, it should be a safe read.

anatoly3• 17 years ago

Thanks! I take it there's no reference to Bel Air either?

xiaoma3• 17 years ago

I listened to the audio version of Outliers a while back. One lengthy section was about how Chinese children have an advantage in learning math over English speaking children due to the regularity and brevity of the number words.

Gladwell gave examples in which he absolutely murdered the pronunciation of the number 7. I'm not talking about tone problems. He pronounced it as "kwee". It was clear that he hadn't even bothered to listen to the number words that he devoted a section of his book to.

Of course I don't expect someone who isn't a student of a language to speak it well, but he could have at least gone to wikipedia or chinesepod and listened to the numbers once or twice!

scott_s2• 17 years ago

As a westerner with extremely limited exposure to asian languages, I'm not sure if I would do any better. I found a website where I can listen to (I hope) a native speaker say "seven" in Chinese. The way I would say it would be similar to the English word "tea."

carbon84• 17 years ago

Here's the section in question: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

Personally, I find it incredibly strange for someone to criticize an author for mispronouncing a single syllable word from a language he presumably doesn't know while reading an excerpt of a book he didn't write. He doesn't claim expertise and acknowledges his sources, who are experts, and he explicitly states that these are their arguments. What's the problem?

sharpn• 17 years ago

It appears that Gladwell wasn't in error - 'his webmaster' fesses up here (sorry for the horribly long url): http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/11/letting-igon...

anatoly3• 17 years ago

I don't see how this means that Gladwell wasn't in error. All it says is that the webmaster missed the error when he uploaded the text version to the site. So what? he/she's a webmaster, not a copyeditor.

The error had to come from somewhere originally, right? It couldn't have come from the correct version that appeared in the magazine or its PDF version. The comment mumbles something about HTML editors and their "errors", but it's ridiculous to suggest that an HTML editor would change 'eigenvalue' to 'igon value' when automatically importing text from PDF. No sane program would do that, least of all an HTML editor. It couldn't have been an autospell error either because "igon value" isn't in any spellcheck list.

No, it remains likely that "igon value" was there in the article as Gladwell wrote it, got fixed by the New Yorker's famously punctual fact-checkers, and the fix was ignored by Gladwell as the original text version was posted to the site and later made it to the book.

cstross• 17 years ago

Shorter Gladwell: "if you seek certainty, and someone gives it to you, sooner or later you'll trip over a rounding error and fall flat on your face."

wicknicks• 17 years ago

Seems to me that he talked about two things:

1. We have sooo much data, its just too hard to ask "what is the useful information"? 2. The second problem is more deeply rooted in the system and that is with the people. More the number of people, more the difficulties in managing them.

billswift• 17 years ago

In a bunch of mostly uninteresting detail, he basically says that although hindsight can pick out missed facts, at the time they are lost in a sea of data with no reason to favor them over other, useless facts. This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.

benmathes2• 17 years ago

That's all Gladwell does -- he spins yarns around widely accepted knowledge in a subfield into stories for "everyone".

edj• 17 years ago

Isn't this actually useful to everyone not an expert in or associated with these subfields?

brown9-2• 17 years ago

This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.

Well that's the thing, and what makes it worth the time to read it: while intelligence agencies have known about this for decades, regular people don't know it. Worse, the Congress doesn't seem to know it.

Don't forget that this article was written in March 2003, when the whole country - or at least the government - was still on a "how did we miss 9/11?" kick.

Gladwell, on creeping determinism

Related Stories