The last time the celebrated New Yorker nonfiction writer came up on this blog was after his quirky defense of a much maligned group of university administrators (“I [Gladwell] feel the leadership of Penn State was totally, outrageously attacked over this. I think they’re blameless. . . . Joe Paterno essentially did nothing wrong. . .”), when I conjectured that this could be Gladwell’s “tipping point”: the moment of critical mass when ordinary journalists and book readers would stop taking him seriously. Gladwell had been promoting junk science for over a decade (see here, for example), so it’s not news that you can’t trust what he writes, but loudly defending the Penn State administration, this just seemed like a gratuitous way to diminish his reputation.
But I guess I was wrong. Gladwell wrote a new book, The Bomber Mafia, it got reviewed, and the Penn State story (along with the bogus marriage-prediction story, the “Igon Value” story, and all the others) seem to have been forgotten. As his antagonist Steven Pinker might say, it’s a blank slate with each new book.
That’s the good news for Gladwell. The bad news is that some people decided to review his book carefully, not with the goal of writing a thousand-word newspaper review, but with the goal of looking at some details. What I’m saying is, some people gave The Bomber Mafia the Guzey treatment, and it didn’t fare well.
I learned about this from Palko, who pointed me to this thread by Alan Allport and this reminder by Kai Ryssdal that, no, you don’t take off in a tailwind (or, as Gladwell charmingly puts it, “a ferocious tailwind”). I guess Gladwell was more accurate than he realized when he characterized this as “as crazy a situation as anyone faced throughout the whole war.”
Hey, everybody makes mistakes. I wouldn’t jump on Gladwell here except that he has a history of making technical mistakes and then doubling down. The tailwind thing, I guess he’ll quietly correct in time for the next edition of the book, but I’m also concerned about the historical issues that Allport discusses. I can’t really judge these at all, but, again, given Gladwell’s track record, there’s reason for concern.
I thought that the tipping point should have been when Gladwell said that the Brown v. The Board of Education decision was based on junk science. That blew me away. I just thought how can a white guy be pro-segregation and people still treat him like he’s not a crack-pot. But, that had no impact. Something has gone terribly wrong with our education system. The only people who read Gladwell are well-educated, and they can’t tell immediately that he is a dilettante. It is incredible to me.
Malcolm’s mom is Jamaican:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell
Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg has a classic critique of a chapter of Gladwell’s “David and Goliath” https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8123 The problem is that to know that someone has been harshly criticized by experts (or promote falsehoods about something technical) you need to know something about the topic to find those expert opinions and separate expert criticism from partisan expression. Checking claims requires a network, and that network has been breaking down.
I thought you were going to link to the L.A. Review of Books review by two tenured professors in relevant fields https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-pop-history-bombs-a-response-to-malcolm-gladwells-love-letter-to-american-air-power/ A quick DuckDuckGo tells me that Tomas E. Ricks is a journalist, so he is not qualified to critically review a book on WW II history.
Gladwell fills the same kind of space in print that Eliezer Yudikowsky and co. filled on the Internet – someone articulate BSing about all kind of different topics based on cursory research. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and commentators like David Brooks are the middlebrow equivalent.
Thanks for the review. As the review points out, Gladwell has a unique position. I would say that unlike Joe Rogan or others you mention, Gladwell is taken seriously on the left. And, that puts him in a unique position to do damage.
Steve:
I don’t think of it as left or right. Gladwell just seems to be in that part of the Ted/NPR universe, where experts consider him to be a joke but the general public considers him to be an expert. Another example would be that How We Sleep guy, or various people who write “business books” full of advice gleaned from unreplicated experiments. Rogan etc. seem different in that they’re professional provocateurs: Rogan’s job isn’t to lay down the science, it’s to question authority, to make you think, etc. In contrast, Gladwell, like the Freakonomics guys, is supposed to be playful but also factual. So the problem with Gladwell and other Ted authorities is that people put them in the “factual” category rather than the “provocateur” category. Provocateurs can do lots of damage too, but in a different way.
That all said, entertainers such as Gladwell, Rogan, etc., can do lots of good too. I have no take on whether their net effect on the world is positive or negative, even if such a thing could be measured. I don’t really know much about Rogan at all, but I will say that Gladwell has had lots of interesting ideas. Even if these ideas are often wrong, and even if Gladwell often annoys me with his lack of response to criticism, it could be that his shtick has a positive net value.
Andrew:
My point is Gladwell gets much less push back than rightwing misinformers, and gets read by people in the managerial class. On a hole range of topics, he can have very negative effects. I don’t think that we should talk about “net effects” because as you admit that is not knowable and I think unimportant as whatever positive effects he has, can be had without the misinformation. I think you are being unnecessarily nice to Gladwell. If he misleads the public on the how the U.S. government gradually made removed more and more ethical constraints on aerial bombing as WWII wore on, or that desegregation was a mistake based on junk science, or that dyslexia is a “desirable disability,” these can have profoundly negative consequences for our public discourse. Maybe you feel the need to say something positive because you are constantly critiquing the Gladwells of this world. Understood, but as a culture we far to tolerant of this behavior and would be far better off shaming them and treating them as pariahs.
Andrew says:
> : Rogan’s job isn’t to lay down the science, it’s to question authority, to make you think, etc. In contrast, Gladwell, like the Freakonomics guys, is supposed to be playful but also factual. So the problem with Gladwell and other Ted authorities is that people put them in the “factual” category rather than the “provocateur” category
Steve says:
> My point is Gladwell gets much less push back than rightwing misinformers
Josh says:
But if these takes seem quite selective to me. Rogan is taken as a highly credible truth teller and falsity uncoverer by a large swath of the American public. Brett and Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Alex Berenson…. if you doubt their reach and influence, just look at their impact on issues like mask-wearing or vaccines or ivermectin or the existential threat of “woke.”
Gladwell gets let’s puahback from the left. Rogan gets less puahback from the right.
Is there overall some imbalance in an absolute sense? Maybe. I’m willing to consider that plausible. Maybe if you collect all the identifiable “pushback” from the wdt and the right, respectively, and tally it up you get more against a Rogan than against Gladwell. But I think the tallying should be done and explicated before an assertion of imbalance is made.
Is say that the basic psychological mechanism of motivated reasoning and cognitive bias support an argument that the default should be that no imbalance exists (unless the country isn’t more or less 50/50 split left to right – which it certainly seems it is).
Joshua:
It’s hard for me to really say because most of my information on these people is second-hand, but . . . it’s my impression that Gladwell is supposedly taking science (and, in this latest case, history) and placing it in a larger context (“blink,” “outliers,” etc.), in the spirit of past science and history explainers such as Jared Diamond and all sorts of other people who offer a big picture, going from the What to the Why. Rogan seems more like the kind of person who “tells it like it is” and “says the things that you’re not allowed to say,” which I’d think gives him more leeway, in that even his fans would think that if he gets things wrong sometimes, that’s the price you pay for freedom of expression.
Then again, there’s lots of overlap. I assume that Gladwell fans such as Tyler Cowen are aware that Gladwell makes major mistakes all the time, but they still kind of like him, maybe because they agree with his overall message. I don’t actually have any idea what that overall message is, but that’s my guess, that this is what Cowen etc. like about Gladwell.
From the other direction, Rogan promoted the work of that Why We Sleep guy, so he seems as credulous as Bill Gates, Ted, NPR, and all the rest of them when it comes to falling for credentialed b.s.
Those are all fair points. I meant to emphasis that Gladwell’s position is unique. He is taken seriously by certain groups that might be called “educated” and “leftwing.” Rogan and Peterson and Berenson also have unique appeals and are also doing serious damage to our society. I am not comparing the size of the damage because it is either unmeasurable or practically unmeasurable. We should just get our culture left/right/whatever to value honesty and integrity much more than it does. So, that when someone puts out claims that are demonstrably false and they don’t serious engage and try to correct the misinformation, people stop listening to them, stop buying their books, and when they are discussed journalist feel fine saying “Malcolm Gladwell, whose previous books have contained multiple bogus scientific claims.”
You have him exactly right. He’ll sit in a room with actual experts, opine at them, get corrected, and continue to insist he’s right. It’s pop science nonsense. My favorite such interaction on his podcast was him lecturing a bunch of Country music people on Country music.
It’s comically bad.
I have never actually encountered a cite to Gladwell from someone I know in real life, I see universitied Americans on the internet who don’t like his books and I sometimes see those books in stores.
Aside from provocateurs and talking heads, there are also people who claim to be inventing or revolutionizing a field of knowledge (which means that conveniently there are no valid experts to ask if they are BSing). Yudikowski and Dave “Killology” Grossman are good examples.
“Gladwell is taken seriously on the left.”
I don’t think it’s Gladwell’s ideas that are taken seriously on the left. Its **the idea behind Gladwell** that animates the left. He embodies the “miracle-idea” mentality that motivates TED, Hidden Brain, and a variety of other pseudo-fact journalistic reports, reaching all the way into regular media. All of these shows, websites, books and authors etc push the leftish social science version of “I saw Jesus in my Twinkie”, with all-encompassing narratives built around a few wildly misunderstood/misrepresented facts.
Anon:
I’d call that a problem with the center-left, not the left as a whole. The far left has its own problems, but I don’t think Ted worship is one of them.
“I’d call that a problem with the center-left, not the left as a whole. ”
That’s about what I had in mind.
But I want to know: who/what does the far left worship?
I’m glad a quick DuckDuckGo search revealed to you that Thomas Ricks is unqualified to opine on military history, a valuable meta-contribution to this comment section about articulate BSing. Hopefully it’s a joke that went over my head.
Jackson:
I read Ricks’s review of Gladwell’s book and it was kinda weird. Ricks starts off with lavish praise and then about halfway through says that Gladwell doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
He’s a journalist who IIRC wrote a few trade books critical of the modern US army (one of which looked at command culture in WW II). Per Wikipedia he does not seem to have any higher degrees. Its possible for an autodidact to write good analytical history (and not just a “cracking good read”), but its very rare and very difficult.
Also, what I said was that I would not expect R to write good critical academic reviews of history books. One of the skills that gets taught in history graduate programs is how to write book reviews that place a book in context with other research, analyze how it makes its argument, and assess that argument. There are many ways to learn how to tell a story based on sources, but some specific skills which are hard to learn outside a history graduate program.
You might be interested in the podcast at the link. It is tangential to some topics that have been discussed recently bearing on messaging from people in positions of authority, and quite interesting.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/oct/06/why-everything-youve-heard-about-panic-buying-might-be-wrong?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I agree with Gladwell that Joe Paterno essentially did nothing wrong. That whole story will go down in history like the Salem witch trials.
Haha what an incredibly deranged thing to say. There are and were no fucking witches—it’s impossible. Sandusky certainly could have and almost certainly did rape kids.
Somebody:
I wonder if this is the flip side of left-wing political provocateur Michael Moore saying he thought O. J. Simpson was innocent. An outrageous claim with some sort of political valence. In the O. J. case, it’s an extreme anti-police attitude, along with support for a black defendant. In the Paterno case, it’s an extreme anti-media attitude, along with support for a politically conservative football coach. Gladwell’s not right-wing—I guess we’d call him middle-of-the-road politically, or maybe center-left, but he also likes his contrarianism and he could’ve picked up the Paterno thing from the right-wing press. On the other direction, lots of left-wingers agree with the rest of us that O. J. was guilty, so I’m not saying there’s a strong correlation between these attitudes and political ideology, just that the political connection is there somewhere, as it is in so many aspects of public life.
If you mention GLADWELL, will he appear?
He used to appear in the comments of “gladwell threads” on some other “blogs”.
The:
Back in the days, blogs mattered. Nowadays I’m guessing that Gladwell would judge it safer to just lay low and not respond. Who reads blogs anymore??
Malcolm Gladwell does not deserve the platforms that he is given.
Anon:
As Gandalf would say: Many that have platforms do not deserve them. And some that do not have platforms deserve them. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to take away platforms in judgement.
My understanding of the Gladwell take on the Sandusky scandal is colored by his dive into college rankings in February 2011 several months before the Sandusky scandal saw the light of day. The article reads like an advertisement for Penn State, with a long quote from Spanier.
To me, it is obvious that Spanier was a primary source for this article, and he used the same charm offensive with Gladwell to have this article written as he used with rich alumni to get big donations to the University. After the Sandusky scandal hit, Spanier turned to Gladwell one more time to have him print another press release.
I got this book for xmas. I was a meteorologist for 37 years, 15 on the aviation side. I just about fell off the bed when I read about tailwind takeoff. Pretty basic stuff, proof reading should have caught.