Open Mike: Malcolm Gladwell

I like Malcolm Gladwell. Yes, I know all the common and usual objections to his work—he oversimplifies, he doesn't like gray areas. He overquantifies, if that's a word. His claims aren't fully supported or supportable. One friend (hi, Scott) notes that he loves ideas but thinks the ideas sometimes don't seem quite correct; another (hi, Karen) says he's a popularizer of other peoples' research—research which, in full parade dress and in the proper academic settings, is often more subtle than Mr. Gladwell portrays it to be. Okay. All duly noted.

I still like him. If you look at his growing oeuvre holistically, it seems clear that he's really just trying to get people to look at things from different angles—to turn ideas inside-out, or stand them on their heads, and look at them afresh, and see what can be seen that way. I personally love those kinds of thought experiments, and I agree with him, broadly, that, often, conventional truths and received wisdom shape our thoughts and our beliefs more than we admit they do, sometimes to society's detriment.

Malcolm Gladwell—born in the U.K., raised in Canada, works in NYC.

His latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is as stuffed with unconventional ideas as any of his books. And yes, he does make some typically Gladwellian jumps to conclusions in a couple of places: he accepts the assumption that "three strikes" laws are always counterproductive, for example, on reasoning that seems a bit rushed and not quite convincing, when the truth is probably more complicated than he makes it out to be.

But he also—again typically—makes some great points. One of the most interesting thoughout the book is his fondness for the inverted-U shaped graph—the idea that many good things get better up to a point and then start to become less good again*.

"Small class size" in schools is one of his primary examples. He points to research that suggests that our conventional assumption throughout society at large is that smaller class sizes are always better, when in fact that is only true up to a point: a class that is too small makes individual students feel too vulnerable, like too much attention is being focused on them, and too-small classes don't allow for the diversity of viewpoints that contribute to good discussions.

There is an optimum class size, and, generally, the more you depart from it—in either direction—the worse things get.

I actually concluded the same thing years ago when I was a teacher. I decided that the optimum size for a class was 15 to 19 students. Turns out that's right in line with a broad spectrum of research on the topic.

One very interesting effect of this is actually not brought up—not brought up forcefully, at least—until the notes. It's that our overwhelming belief in "smaller is better" in class size leads us to make the exact wrong choices in trying to effect reforms. What we do is hire more teachers so that class sizes can be smaller. Because payroll is the #1 expense of schools, that means we can pay all teachers less. But research strongly suggests that the teaching skills of the teacher has far more of an overall effect on the quality of the education than class size does—and there are never enough gifted and talented teachers to go around. What we should be doing, instead of marginalizing the gifted and talented teachers by giving them fewer and fewer students, and demoralizing them by paying them less, would be to work at identifying the really good teachers and then pay those people more to accept the heavier workload and more demanding responsibilities of larger class sizes. By exposing more students to the best teachers (and retaining more of them with higher rewards), we'd be getting a better deal for our educational dollars.

It's a typical Gladwellian idea—turn the conventional widsom inside out, take a fresh look at it, and see what you can discover.

Gladwell, to me, is just not a good "dictator." That is, he's not a writer you have to swallow whole or wholly reject. He's an author whose ideas you turn over in your mind and take or leave. They're triggers to further inquiry and inspiration for further thought on readers' parts—perspectives to put to use in coming to our own conclusions. Whether you agree with him or not. Or both, in the case of different ideas. Nothing at all undesirable about that, if you ask me.

Oh, and who knew there was a real David and a real Goliath, and that we actually know quite a lot about them? That another nice thing about a Gladwell book—you'll always learn something you never knew before.

Mike

"Open Mike," the editorial page of TOP, is often off-topic, and appears on Sundays.

P.S. More recommended reading: If you happen to have a college-attending child who either belongs to a fraternity or parties at them, you must read this article at The Atlantic (it's free, online)—and I mean must! Especially at the part that begins:

Gentle reader, if you happen to have a son currently in a college fraternity, I would ask that you take several carbon dioxide-rich deep breaths from a paper bag before reading the next paragraph. I’ll assume you are sitting down. Ready?

Urgent need-to-know stuff. Seriously.

*I've always believed that. Water is my favorite rhetorical example—it's critical to our survival, but ingest too much in the wrong manner and we have a very negative word for what happens...it's called "drowning."

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Featured Comments from:

[Note: Several teachers responded with their thoughts about class size. I didn't want to "promote" one over another, but they're very interesting and insightful. See the Comments Section for those. —Ed.]

psu: "I find critiques like this or this or this to be kind of off-putting.

"This is more than just using writerly (if that's a word) license to make people think out of the box. It feels to me like he's walking a fine line and trying to present appealing narratives that are clothed in an aura of academic support but he really does not do the work make sure those narratives are in any way based in fact."

Patrick: "I more or less threw in the towel on Gladwell after Blink. He reads a bunch, he is somewhat smart in some sort of non-analytical way, he is a very good writer, but half of that book seemed to contradict the other half. Steven Pinker absolutely killed Outliers in a review, you could look it up sometime...."

Mike replies: I know, and as I said, okay. If you don't like him I won't argue.

Gladwell-bashing has gotten common enough to qualify as a regular olympic sport in some quarters. In truth, the bashing is almost as entertaining as the books (so thanks for the links). If I were Gladwell, or editing him, I would insist on a whole lot more qualifying, and much more elbow room for ambiguity. It's well known that he drives some academics crazy. He has a way of saying "here's a little research that supports the conclusion I like, so now we're going to accept that as completely true." The trick is just to interpret such jumps as him saying "here's what I think."

Don't discount the possibility of professional jealousy in the bash-fest, either. Most social-science types can only dream of selling (and earning) like Gladwell does. He's the superstar. 

And Patrick, have you read much of Pinker? I'll take Gladwell's faults over Pinker's—at least I can figure out what they are. I admit that of the two I'd take Pinker to the desert island, though, where I'd have ample time to figure out what the hell he's talking about and no one would mind me ranting away at the books like a guy yelling at the TV.

They're both just writing about their own ideas and beliefs, really.

John Camp: "I've been force-fed a couple courses in statistics in the context of newspaper reporting, with an emphasis on 'what's wrong with these statistics?' From that viewpoint, what bothers me about much of Gladwell's work is, first, that you don't get much hint of the other side, and second, when you look back at original sources, you find that his popularization of certain ideas mean that he has had to ignore the details, which means nothing is quite as clear cut as Gladwell makes it. I read most of Blink, and gave up; I thought the most interesting book was the one [Outliers —Ed.] that argued (essentially) that work is more important than 'talent,' whatever talent is. I found that idea so interesting that I did go back and read some of the original work, and feel some debt to Gladwell for bringing my attention to it; but to say that he oversimplified it is to oversimplify it."

Robert Roaldi: "I almost feel like telling the critics that if they wanted academic rigor, then they should join academia. You could make the argument, though, that the kind of thoughtful criticism that his works generate are useful parts of the 'thinking outside the box' that he seems to want to encourage. When I read his stuff, I often think, 'Oh yeah, that's interesting.' And then when I read a criticism, I sometimes think, 'Oh yeah, that's interesting too.' Why does there seem to be the need to have winners and losers in such discussions? Gladwell doesn't have to totally correct, and neither do his detractors. It's not a baseball game."

Comments

[Richard Newman]

I'm not an expert on Gladwell, but from what I have read, I don't consider him asthe last word - or necessarily even a good alternative to some common errors. Using the class size example, I have a problem with the analysis. It totally fails to consider a number of signficant factors which can affect any such "optimum size" - if and when one exists. For example:
-Subject matter- quantitative (algebra, math logic), or ideational (politics, literature) or ...Not all subjects can be taught in the same way.
-Learning ability of the students - not all can learn at the same speed.
-Learning/cognitive style - some are better verbal learners, some better visual learners, etc.
-Teacher's teaching methods ('style').
-Class duration - student attention span.
-Learning environment, and external distractions.
And those are the most obvious. There are more. Gladwell's most useful point is that many of the commonly accepted 'rules' of operating or behaving are overly inclusive, but he tends to make similar generalizations which aren't more valid, or thorough - just inverted or otherwise different.

[John Krumm]

Gladwell can be fun but irritating for many of the reasons already stated by others. Pinker I like less. I enjoyed The Language Instinct but his later books kind of died in a torrent of unpleasant speculation for me. Now Oliver Sacks, there is someone I can really read.

[Globules]

Interestingly, there's a term for ingesting too much water in the right manner: water poisoning.

While Gladwell can be entertaining and thought provoking, I think you're giving short shrift to Pinker by saying that they're both just writing about their own ideas and beliefs. Pinker's arguments are far better researched and supported than are Gladwell's.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

The entertainment business is very, very profitable.

[stephen]

Every time I try to read something Malcolm Gladwell's written, I find myself giving up the third time I find myself thinking, "Well, d'uh."

[Mike Fewster]

Re class sizes. I was a secondary school teacher for nearly 40 years and involved in studies of school size and class size in Australia. I think most of the debate on this gets it wrong. It is a critical issue, but not in the way people usually think or the way studies usually try to measure outcomes related to class size. The critical factor is the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the individual students. Where a teacher knows the students well and also knows the families of the students (and the students know that the teacher knows this) a teacher can handle classes of 50-60 plus in many situations. Where the teacher doesn’t know the students and their families, the size of the group that a teacher can effectively work with drops dramatically. In modern secondary schools, teachers are increasingly spread across a wider number of students. ie., in the course of a week a teacher may be in education settings with over two hundred individual students. In this case, the teachers and student remain relatively anonymous to each other and the quality of the relationship deteriorates proportionately. I’d suggest that about eighty is the maximum number of student/family relationships that a teacher can manage in total.
There is a lot more to this than I can expand on here, but in general (and there are many other variables that need to be considered), the total number of students/families that a teacher is involved with in all educational settings in their total teaching program is more important than the size of the class. Schools ought to be organized to ensure that most teachers are working with around 80 -100 students in total at any one time. Ie, more teacher time with fewer different class groups rather than spreading teachers thinly across greater total number of students.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I find this line of critique with respect to Gladwell more interesting, actually, than those who criticize him for being a popularizer. Science needs popularizers, but the question is, who is served by one simplification or another--

http://www.alternet.org/story/155770/is_malcolm_gladwell_america%27s_most_successful_propagandist_and_corporate_shill

[FrankB]

I also like Gladwell's writing. I have read most of his books. I do however put on a heavy "what is he leaving out" filter, the grey areas, contradicting data, etc. But then again, in my old age I seem to have that filter on most of time when I read. Sign of old age curmudgeon or wisdom?

[Soeren Engelbrecht]

Another (On-Topic to photography, hence off-topic to this discussion :-) example of a U-curve was put forward by Donald Norman in his quite rightly famous book "The Design of Everyday Things". His point is that the complexity of use of any technology over time - from its invention - takes on a U-curve.

Imagine Mathew Brady and his US Civil War pictures using wet-coated plates, necessitating having a horse-drawn darkroom with him at all times. Then move forward in time to, say, the Nikon F or the Pentax MZ-5, which were simple, portable, and able to support your creative/visual ideas in a completely transparent manner. To me, this represents the bottom of the Complexity Curve - any photographer will be able to pick one of these up and start shooting.

Today, cameras come with so many settings, buttons, and options that you need a several-hundred-page-long manual to be able to fully exploit them. Which is often not even provided in printed form. Which, again, means that most people just leave it in "Green Mode" and never proceed any further.

[Malcolm Leader]

I agree with the class size argument. I teach one-week professional engineering short courses to working engineers about 3 times a year in various places. I've had classes of 5 and 40 and everything in between. For me the sweet spot is 15 to 25; I put up with more because the payday is much better but a large class wears me out. A too-small a class and everyone clams-up. Teaching a class, on your feet, for 8 hours a day is as much a performance as anything. Getting and holding the attention of a roomful of people is a constant drain. And, the larger the class the more likely you'll have a PIA or two. This can be extremely disruptive and is sometimes very tricky to handle.
I haven't read Malcolm's new book yet, but I will. I think some of his arguments and methodology that are dismissed because he isn't rigorous enough miss the point that truly brilliant people can often see the truth in an ocean of uncertainty and it is so obvious to them that a detailed proof seems superfluous.

[Roy]

McDonalds sell a lot of hamburgers too. Me, I prefer food.
Roy

[Nicholas Condon]

This reaction kind of summarizes my problems with Gladwell: (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/05/05/malcolm-gladwell-is-no-charles/)

Mike, you seem unconcerned with his persistent tendency to misrepresent speculation as scientific fact, while I think it is toxic. I worry that those who would dismiss something evolution as "just a theory" are emboldened by the tendency of certain public intellectuals like Gladwell to couch tentative conclusions, unfounded inferences, and outright guesses in the language of certainty.

[Dave]

I read Gladwell as a lesson in persuasive writing. Right or wrong, Gladwell knows how to communicate his points. And, he's one of the few writers in America that influences both liberals and conservatives.

[Derek]

You know, I probably wouldn't have a problem with Gladwell if he was just writing about his own ideas and beliefs. But in doing so he couches said musings in science! (the exclamation point signifying the popularity of the idea of science, not actual, boring, rigorously-completed-in-a-lab science).

So we're left with very well written thought experimentation that describes its conclusions in scientific terms like "laws" and "rules." And it's apparently my fault as the reader for equating Gladwell's use of Various Capitalized Laws with scientific laws. In a book that continually refers to scientific studies....

At the very best I can conclude he's misleading. I don't begrudge him the money, just the spread of misinformation.

[beuler]

I would argue that any author that generates inteligent discussion has done a good job. I would expect that 99.9% of Social Science literature is just authors presenting old ideas in a different way, why should Galdwell be different? Oh yeah, he is famous...

Regarding the class size argument, the Union factor comes into play. While most teachers believe that unions are pressing for higher wages, in reality unions fight for more teaching jobs irrespective of salary. Unions gain their strenght from the number os members, not how much each member earns in wages. In fact, if teaching was a highly paid profession there would be no need for Teachers Unions. Does that sound a bit Gladwellian?

[ctein]

Dear Mike,

Add my voice to Derek's and Nicholas'–– Gladwell is not thought-provoking… At least not in any good way. Any time I have encountered his ideas in a field where I had even some very modest familiarity, it's been clear that his notions vary between naïve at best and dangerously wrong at worst. As the saying goes, he's just smart enough to be dangerous. He sells superficially-appealing snake oil. The only difference between him and the genuine charlatan is that I do believe he believes in his own snake oil.

This U-shaped curve is just the latest example. On one level it's utterly naïve and simplistic––a reduction of the long-known observation (and mathematically provable statement) that if the extremes constitute a really lousy ideas, and somewhere between them there is a good idea, then somewhere between them there is a most-good idea. On the second level, it's dangerous because it defaults to the most simplistic assumption, which is that the shape of that curve will be a U. In complex real-world systems, it is almost never a U. It can take almost any shape between those bad extrema and usually has more than one peak and valley along the way.

How is that dangerous? Because it leads people to generate hyper-simplistic nonsense which they then attempt to apply to the real world. Remember the infamous Laffer Curve of voodoo economics?

It is terribly easy to find examples that do support Gladwell's generalizations. That's because the world is a marvelously complicated place; you can find some example somewhere to support almost any simplistic theory. The question is whether such theory is valid more often than it is not (and, of lesser importance, whether you have a way of distinguishing between those situations). In the case of Gladwell, far more often his theories are not.

It doesn't matter if it's the 10,000-hour silliness, the reason for outliers, or U-shaped curves. It's a waste of time and intellect. It's all dangerous in its overwhelmingly erroneous simplicity.

It doesn't make people think. It makes them believe dumb and wrong things.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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[expiring_frog]

I agree with all the commenters above who argue that simplification and popularization is great, but unsound "sciency" speculation hurts more than it helps.

Personally, I have not tried to take Gladwell seriously since the following review by Pinker (in all honesty I have not read the book, or much of Gladwell at all): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html , which includes the classic lines:

"[Gladwell] 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."

[marcos]

Gladwell is addicted to confirmation bias, he sets up to prove his point, as opposed to someone who studies data then makes a point applying an accepted and verified set of rules. Tha doesn't mean he is always wrong.

What makes me cringe is your reference to three strikes law. I'm lucky to live in a country where it would be illegal, Spain. Our constitution states that the purpose of incarceration is the rehabilitation of the delinquent. The cruelty, senselesness and perversity of the US penal & judicial system is infinite it seems. I doubt there is another civilized counttry where you can serve a life sentence for minor faults like dealing with 30 grams of Marihuana (legal here), or shoplifting three belts.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/23-petty-crimes-prison-life-without-parole

The social end economic costs associated with such a perverse system always amaze me.

Seems the "common sense politics" traditionally at the core fof the US political system doesn't work in this...