Mike Schwartz writes:
I flew home from Europe yesterday, and was browsing through the available movies/shows. I ended up on a page displaying the above.
Gladwell and Walker, together at last. This was just before the pages and pages ot Ted talks. I feel bad for Mashama Bailey, just stuck in the middle (alphabetically).
The funny thing is, I googled, and Walker seems like just about the only janky scientist who Gladwell hasn’t hyped.
P.S. For some background see here and here. All I can say about Gladwell is . . . please don’t let him fly a plane or run a college athletics department.
Gladwell saddens me. He did notice a lot of interesting cases, and worked to look into them.
if only he could’ve also done it with proper critical thinking, surely some of his interesting cases would still be useful for us to learn from!
Jazi:
I’m not sure. On one hand, yes, Gladwell seems to be very thoughtful. On the other hand, his whole career seems to have relied on extreme credulity on his part, so if he had a nature to exhibit true skepticism and open-mindedness, this might have been counterproductive to his career.
definitely his career wouldn’t have been stellar without the credulity!
cheers for the good work!
Hello, Jazi! Perhaps you remember me from the Wikipedia talk page regarding former Professor Brian Wansink. (I use a pseudonym when editing Wikipedia.) I had referenced Andrew’s many blog posts about research malfeasance institutional in our discussion with a since banned editor, jytdog.
All parts of my life seem to converge here at Andrew Gelman’s online place! He probably wishes that weren’t so, and that I would just vanish back into the ether but he and his commenting folks are too pithy and entertaining for that. Perhaps I will find a job again soon, and return to capital and liquidity risk management for banks.
For anyone who hasn’t clicked through yet, DO peruse the second inline ‘here’ link in the original post! The title is hilarious, “Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure” as is much of the accurate, high-integrity content. I suspect that Bill Gates makes a conscious effort not to rip to shreds the faux wisdom of Matthew Walker types. I have read his similar, measured remarks about other popular press figures.
Gelman is entirely correct about Gladwell: I would want to see evidence of qualifications of at least 10,000 hours (Gladwell’s in/famous measure of expertise) before letting him fly a passenger airplane.
Ellie Kesselman!
This is hilarious. and I do remember those discussions. but, yeah. “since banned member” is a recurring Wikipedia theme. it’s less fun than it used to be.
in the past, I enjoyed arguing there with the feeling that if I’m doing the work, I’m odds on top win the argument.
nowadays, is much less viable if an argument is CW. sad.
“Walker seems like just about the only janky scientist who Gladwell hasn’t hyped.” Never having seen or heard the word “janky,” I had to do a search and found this at https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/janky/:
“Janky is a slang term for something run down, of poor quality, or unreliable. It can also be used for someone considered undesirable in some way.”
“Janky first emerged in black slang in the 1990s, featured in rap songs as early as Ice Cube’s 1993 “Really Doe”: “Hard to swallow, janky as Rollo / Count to ten, and don’t try to follow.” ”
However, is this another example of so-called cultural appropriation; in this instance, non-Blacks using Black slang? Recall that conservative right wing, former U.S. House Representative, Michele Bachmann was roundly criticized for butchering/mispronouncing the Yiddish word, “chutzpah” because she was not authentically guttural enough. And then, there is always the issue of pizza and who is entitled to make it, thin crust or deep dish.
Or, am I just upset that I am so far behind present-day discussions, technical and otherwise?
‘
Hi Paul,
I’ve found game developer/coders that like to use ‘dejank update’ as a feature for an update. I always assumed it meant something like clear out the crap or clean up. Thanks for clearing/cleaning this up for me!
I have a problem with the whole concept of cultural appropriation being a bad thing, it’s just what human beings do, for tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds. Comes naturally…
Was that a tear of joy for getting this off your chest, or of frustration?
People seem to love quixotic quests, and ponzi schemes. Once the lower levels in the hierarchy of needs are met, they will participate in those at the first opportunity.
There is probably some evolutionary advantage to it related to religious beliefs.
> I have a problem with the whole concept of cultural appropriation being a bad thing, it’s just what human beings do, for tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds. Comes naturally…
Somewhat problematic logic. I’d imagine you could come up with things that are just what humans do, for thousands of years…that come naturally…but which maybe you wouldn’t recommend continuing.
Cultural appropriation began as a neutral description of a common human behavior, to profit or enrich oneself by learning from another culture. The term became ”problematized” in postcolonial studies when identified with the pattern of cultural elements being stigmatized in their original context only to become acceptable when severed from that context. To use a succinct example, one might observe that jazz was low-class but is now intellectual, and surmise that the problem wasn’t the music the black people involved in it. This cultural pattern is obviously a signal of racist attitudes, but more materially prevents transfer of wealth and power to the cultural originators of ideas.
This isn’t a particularly subtle phenomenon. Sam Phillips, Elvis’s record producer, said before finding Elvis “I always said that if I could find a white boy who could sing like a black man I’d make a million dollars”. Less explicitly, Lou Pearlman advertised when creating the Backstreet Boys that he wanted a “New Kids on the Block look with a Boyz II Men Sound” (and then, cynically, created NSync as a preemptive replacement for the formers aging out, very shewd guy). That’s not to say that anyone involved was necessarily doing the wrong thing, and it’s not like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Boyz II Men lived in destitution, but it feels a little wrong that more money flows to fundamentally the same act if you replace a black face with a white one.
Later, the term “cultural appropriation”, as it propagated out of critical theory into popular culture, became simply a pejorative for cross cultural borrowing that feels kind of tasteless. It’s afflicted by the same sort of concept creep as terms like “emotional labor” and “gaslighting” and “uncertainty quantification.” It’s an unfortunate reality that none of those terms mean anything anymore, but I don’t want it forgotten that they started by identifying specific things that had been previously unnamed.
I nominate “regulatory capture” as a meaningful term that’s been applied broadly (by conspiracy theorists) in meaningless manner.
But I find “none of those terms mean anything anymore,” to have an old man yelling at clouds feel to it. I still find them meaningful terms even if they’re broadly misused, or perhaps better said, often misappropriated in culture wars.
paul alper, you are not superannuated nor far behind anything! Unlike Joshua (who ridicules me for expressing my heart-felt sentiments and also ridicules mildly libertarian Harry Crane who was the subject of a prior post) I have learned that language is a living thing. A salient and unique exception may be the N word which I will not utter here. Despite my conservative prescriptivist tendencies, the linguistics faculty of UPenn’s Language Log and EL&U StackExchange have taught me that cultural appropriation is not a social justice concern in matters of language.
I think Professor Gelman’s usage is acceptable. Walker totally lacks integrity. I hope commenter somebody (who writes beautifully) would agree. Behold the definition of janky by Urban Dictionary:
Same source, alternative definition:
Ellie –
> Unlike Joshua (who ridicules me for expressing my heart-felt sentiments and also ridicules mildly libertarian Harry Crane who was the subject of a prior post)
Can you give the link where i did that? It’s not my recollection.
If you’d like to spend an hour listening to two people completely shred Malcolm Gladwell, checkout this wonderful podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/malcolm-gladwells-outliers/id1651876897?i=1000585745201
Oh, and they have episodes on Freakanomics and David Brooks too!
Sentinel:
They could do Matthew Walker next, except that it wouldn’t require an hour. I guess that 5 or 10 minutes would be enough.
Good. I do most of my podcast listening before bed, and I don’t want to stay up all night listening to a podcast criticize Matthew Walker.
The podcast just mentioned (by sentinel chicken) regarding David Brooks is worth listening to. Quite amusing and shows that once a famous person goes public and someone actually takes note of the general snarky/shallow remarks, said famous person can look ridiculous, unreliable and (especially) snotty. Nevertheless, the podcast is overloaded with “like” and unnecessary obscenities. In fact, the podcast itself could be satirized in much the same vein. Nevertheless, fun to listen to.