Malcolm Gladwell's Pseudo-Profundity Link

Steven Poole over at The New Republic:

Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along. Little things really can make a big difference; trusting your gut can be better than overthinking; successful people work hard.

Poole goes on to dismantle many of Gladwell’s setups:

A bizarre coda to this story shows the weaselly potential of Gladwell’s method. Up the road from the state school where he has been talking to a nice teacher, there is a private school, which boasts that its average class size is 12. Oh dear, thinks Gladwell. “Why does a school like [this] do something that so plainly makes its students worse off?” The odd thing is that he simply doesn’t know whether the students there are worse off, because he doesn’t know whether the staff teach in a way that suits their small classes. If they do, then the students won’t be worse off at all. So does Gladwell talk to anyone at the school to find out? He does not. Perhaps he fears ruining the story.

I’m just not a fan of this trend where we exchange hard thinking for easy parables. I know this puts me at odds with many a modern nerd, but I dislike what people like Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin do. They provide easy rationalizations that just don’t work in a complex world. They can be fun and sometimes they can motivate people to do better. But I think a poster of a cat does a better job. At least a poster doesn’t imply that there is a recipe or specific conclusion you can easily quote. It just makes you think.

We’re drowning in the “well, actually” culture of Freakonomics. This is a time when quick and clever appears to be more popular than “I just don’t know. I need more data and hard work.”