An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But 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. Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective ☀
We are so caught up in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world allowed only one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunity for all. Malcolm Gladwell ☀
He recently had a column in the NY Times vainly attacking Chris Anderson’s take on the free economy and then he has a piece in the New Yorker saying the current depression is mostly about psychology, not necessarily about unregulated markets, scammers, and profiteers. Whatever he writes about — the tipping point, the outliers, and other catchy sounding phenomena — Gladwell manages to start out with a false analogy, comparing one event to a completely unrelated event that did exactly what he uses to describe what the event he is discussing, like the depression, is doing. I can’t even recall the analogy with the current decession because it was so far fetched; perhaps it was something that happened in the Middle Ages. It doesn’t really matter what it was, because Gladwell is so skillful at manipulating an argument, he could have compared the current decession with the First Crusade into Jerusalem and made it seem that they were both all about faith. Malcolm Gladwell Doth Metastasize ☀
Outliers follows the same formula. Here, Gladwell challenges the conventional notion that success comes from being “self-made.” He shows how the rise of certain people to success is never a one-person affair. Culture, family, community, and hard work all contribute to one individual’s success.
I highly recommend that pastors, preachers and teachers read Malcolm Gladwell. You might think that a book like Outliers is a waste of time. Not so. The illustrations and stories here make for powerful sermon examples.
For example, consider the first chapter in Outliers - a story about the Roseto community. Gladwell shows how this unusual community had virtually no cases of heart disease among people below the age of 65. The doctors and scientists were stumped. No answer seemed to make sense of the data… until they realized that the community itself was acting as a sort of vaccine against heart attacks.
Now think of the ways a Christian teacher can use this material. What does the power of community teach us about the church? How does an example like the Roseto community help us as church leaders to emphasize the importance of community?
Gladwell also speaks of the ”10,000 hour rule”. Those who succeed are generally those who worked the hardest and longest. It is not talent or innate giftedness, but perseverance that ultimately counts in working up the ladder to success. And he uses the Beatles as proof! (No more details. I don’t want to spoil the story.)
Or take the case of Bill Gates. Gladwell cites a body of research finding that the “magic number for true expertise” is 10,000 hours of practice. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good,” Gladwell writes. “It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Gladwell shows how Gates accumulated his 10,000 hours while in middle and high school in Seattle thanks to a series of nine incredibly fortunate opportunities—ranging from the fact that his private school had a computer club with access to (and money for) a sophisticated computer, to his childhood home’s proximity to the University of Washington, where he had access to an even more sophisticated computer. “By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own computer software company,” Gladwell writes, “he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.” Yes, Gates is obviously brilliant, Gladwell concludes, but without the lucky breaks he had as a kid, he never could have had the opportunity to fulfill the true potential of that brilliance. How many similarly brilliant people never get that opportunity? Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers ☀
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