Interviews: Ask Malcolm Gladwell a Question 111
Malcolm Gladwell is a speaker, author, and staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. Gladwell's writing often focuses on research in the social sciences and the unexpected connections or theories made from such research. His books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Outliers: The Story of Success, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants are all New York Times best sellers. Malcolm has agreed to give us some of his time to answer any question you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
Are you space jesus? (Score:1)
Well, are you?
Questions for Malcolm Gladwell! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Questions for Malcolm Gladwell! (Score:4, Informative)
Ten-thousand hours (~3.4 years if a regular job)
Where did that come from? 10000/3.4 = 2941 hours per year. Nobody works that. The average full time *American* works less than 1800 year, and has since the 70s. Other countries full time work even less.
A 2000+ hr work year is a fiction
If you are working 2000+ hrs for someone else your probably being exploited. Take a good hard look at what you are doing and whether its worth it. Most people do NOT have to work that much. And they probably get paid just as well as you. The average full time employee works 1700 hours. (They get PAID for another 200-300 though for holidays, vacation, sick/personal days etc. So the work year might still add up to around 2000... but you shouldn't actually be working that. (This is just one reason, (along with medical and other benefits) why contractors need to charge more... they're not being paid for those 200-300 hours.)
If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and just making ends meet, (ie its not a choice) then you need to take a hard look at your business.
If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and making out like a bandit, well... good on you... you can afford to life a more balanced life, and you probably should, but the choice is yours.
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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Plenty of people work 60+ hours per week without taking holidays off.
Yes. Its not really something to be proud of.
I worked >3000 hours last year and I am not alone.
I didn't say you didn't exist. I said you were probably being exploited. May you, in particular, aren't, but most people working much over 1800 hours for someone else or so are. doubly so if on salary.
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I'm guessing a minor mental error.
10000/365/8 = 3.4, but very very few people ever work 8 hours a day, every day of the year with no time off.
Except for moms. *high five*
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Genetics (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, your continued belief in the Tabula Rasa myth seems increasingly outdated and contradicted by a wide variety of research from many notable evolutionary psychologists and genetics researchers. How do you continue to believe that intelligence and ability is not significantly genetic despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
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How do you continue to believe that intelligence and ability is not significantly genetic despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Because Political Correctness says so. This statement, while likely true, would be deemed racist and bigoted if you actually started to quantify it by any specific means.
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Broken clock???? ROFL
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Sharpshooter fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The areas you work in focus on very small sample sizes: software billionaires, major cultural shifts, and cases where the most improbable result happened.
Within these areas, you've developed mental frameworks off of shared elements between each. This runs into a problem, the Texas Sharpshoot fallacy. You pick out some characteristics that are shared by the things you're looking at, and then the only available data to confirm your hypothesis is the data you extracted your predictions from.
How did you address this when researching your books?
Re:Sharpshooter fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not.
Confirmation bias is a problem for this sort of thing too, but the sharpshooter fallacy comes from the fact that any given random dataset will have random relationships between variables. Real measurable ones. Especially in small data sets. It's like if I rolled a 6 sided die 6 times, it's very likely some numbers would show up twice and some no times.
let's say they came up 5,5,4,2,1,1
A reasonable person, from that dataset alone, might conclude that 5s and 1s are more likely on these dice. If you take that hypothesis, and validate it on the same set, you'll be right.
You don't have to come in with a preconceived notion that 5 or 1 is somehow special, that you're confirming to yourself, willfully ignoring other data, if those are the only die results you ever see.
It's a separate class of error.
Did you expect the impact? (Score:3, Funny)
Firstly, I'm a huge fan of your work.
Secondly, when preparing for your breakout role in 'A Clockwork Orange', did you, at the time, expect it to have such a long-reaching impact?
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And did you enjoy working with Mary Steenburgen?
Opinion On Basic Income (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious to know what your take is on a basic income for all US citizens versus our current 'conditional' welfare system. What do you think short term and long term outcome would be? Would the increased tax burden on the upper classes result in a total collapse rendering a basic income useless? My personal opinion is that it is necessary given the increasing rate of job automation coupled with our increasing population size (not to mention aging). Am I delusional? If so, why?
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My personal opinion is that it is necessary given the increasing rate of job automation coupled with our increasing population size. Am I delusional? If so, why?
You might not be delusional, but in order to prove that it is necessary, you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant (ie, within a range unrelated to the amount of automation or population growth).
If your hypothesis doesn't deal with those two facts, then it's in the realm of fantasy, not reality.
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Good points. However, both the population increase as well as the increase in automation is happening at an exponential rate, not linear as I infer (perhaps incorrectly) your statement to be.
This would also address more than solely unemployment though. It could lead to the abolishment of the minimum wage, which expecting people to live on is sort of a joke anyhow. It could provide a means for a single mother to actually be around enough to raise her kid(s) which has all sorts of positive societal benefit
Re:Opinion On Basic Income (Score:4, Interesting)
However, both the population increase as well as the increase in automation is happening at an exponential rate
It has been growing exponentially for a long time. There's been no correlation between either population growth and unemployment, or automation and unemployment. If your hypothesis is correct, then you need to explain the lack of correlation.
It could lead to the abolishment of the minimum wage, which expecting people to live on is sort of a joke anyhow.
Almost no one lives on minimum wage. Look up the demographics of a typical minimum wage earner some time, almost all of them live in a nice middle-class income household.
Honestly though, I think it'll remain firmly in fantasy land
Don't. Base your worldview on facts. That is the only way we'll ever get the cheap energy, because people are looking at scientific facts and how we can use them.
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... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising
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Globalization, not automation. (Score:3)
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
Accelerated, more sophisticated automation didn't by itself led to a shrinking of the middle class. It is not even the primary factor. Globalization did that. A middle class that was not educationally prepare to move out of what I call "manual/rudimentary" manufacturing, and a national difficulty to operate efficiently, those two played a significant role.
Remember, middle class used to denote blue collar jobs.
But those jobs started to go bye bye quite some time ago. It even preceded 2000's globalizat
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1) We have always been faced with "increasing automation" from the moment we first used animals to till soil rather than doing it ourselves. The increased automation frees us to do more interesting work.
2) Basic income? How defines how much is "basic"? The problem here, is that it is a slippery slope of incremental definitions. Poor used to mean selling your pee to earn money ("piss poor"), now it means ObamaPhones, $100 Nike Shoes and a flat screen TV.
3) What makes you think that anyone is entitled to some
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I am a libertarian. So most of what you say is meaningless in my case. However, the way the left uses terms like "Welfare to big corporations" I laugh. And when they say things like "GE didn't pay any taxes", I laugh harder. You see, it is the LEFT that creates "welfare" loopholes for things like Green Energy (Solyndra et al) used by big corporations like GE to avoid paying taxes.
Then they equate "Tax deductions" as "Subsidies", which would mean that almost all Americans are "Subsidized" by deductions (Stan
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No, what I am saying is if you kill off Big Oil, you kill off a huge source of revenue to Big Government. It is very much like the attacks on "Big Tobacco" from the 90's where we increased taxes to the point of impacting cigarette sales, and the sudden loss of revenue the taxes raised (see Laffer Curve) that were being used by Big Government for programs, that suddenly no longer have funds to drive them.
Liberals (and NeoCons) love big government, but don't have the guts to admit that the very enterprises th
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Have you done a study of loopholes and who proposed them? I suspect you'll find them proposed all over the political spectrum. Or what income "government" (which ones?) gets from Big Oil?
That aside, a "subsidy" may be viewed as a tax break that similar entities don't get. The Standard Deduction isn't a subsidy, because everybody gets it who doesn't have more deductions. The mortgage interest deduction might be regarded as a subsidy of homeowners. If Big Oil doesn't pay the taxes that you'd expect be
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Oi, I realize this will woosh right over your partisan-baked brain, but I'll bite:
"What makes you think that anyone is entitled to someone else's money?"
How did they get that money in the first place? Through a societal system they are able to take advantage of. Never completely on their own like libertarians are want to believe. Our current monetary system is based on debt leveraged on debt based on a promise. It's purely imaginary, fiat, whatever. The real deal is the cost of energy, resource extrac
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How did they get that money in the first place?
Lets assume that it is legal. To coin a phrase "What difference does it make!!!!!!"
Money is just a convenient shorthand.
Yup, but you still haven't made any case that it is any business of government to take money from one person to give to another, under threat of a gun. The thing people like yourself are missing, is that government at its best is mutual consent, and at worst is tyranny. You're making the argument tyrants make, and not liberty.
A good place to start is being able to eat real food and have a stable place to live.
A good place to start is to realize that we already have a large number of programs that provide serv
Re:Opinion On Basic Income (Score:5, Interesting)
1) A vibrant middle class is an aberration of history. I don't think we can look to history and find meaningful examples of what exponentially increasing technology will do to our current social structures.
2) Our society determines what basic income is. Just like we determine our laws.
3) Living in a society that respects property rights has its costs. Almost the only difference between the relatively peaceful western world and places like the unrest in the middle east is that the vast majority of our population has a lot of opportunities. You take those away and we will have the same unrest here.
I tend to agree with Thomas Paine, who believed that all citizens have a natural inheritance created by the introduction of the system of landed property. So in return for society recognizing property rights those property holders owe society some of its proceeds. He explicitly stated this should not be considered charity.
4) He never said he thought there would only be positive results. He did say he thinks it would be a good idea, but plenty of good ideas still have consequences. And he was openly asking for other opinions while merely offering his own; there is no need to jump down his throat.
5) No one is saying people would be paid not to work. All people would just be told "you don't have to work to meet your basic needs." Once that burden is removed, people would still be free to work to better their lives further. Very few people would just sit around all day doing nothing, and those that do really would be the ones we want removed from the workforce anyway.
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1) Indeed. And was a result of industrious people who were rewarded for their hard work and ingenuity. The Elite Ruling Class is opposed, and therefore regulates commerce to the point of killing the middle class, in the name of "social order" and "group rights" of course.
2) "Our Society" doesn't do any such thing. The ruling class does so only to gain economic control from those it rules. But then again, we are "too stupid" to know what is in our best interests, so we must all those smart MIT professor type
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1) It was also the result of the government funding a massive push to educate the workforce in the post-secondary education system. If you look at 1910, which was an era where big business was running things, 2.7% of the population was college educated. By 1990 it was almost double that.
The notion that industrious people created the middle class is laughable. It was clearly a partnership between the public sector which educated the workforce and the private sector that took this new workforce and created a
Are you delusional????? (Score:1)
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Am I delusional?
Maybe we should ask Hazel Bennetton.
My question (Score:2)
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Long term effects of filter bubbles/silos (Score:5, Interesting)
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Is there anything we can do to stop or slow this process?
I can tell you my hypothesis on this topic (which may not be worth anything, but hey, that's what you paid for).
Before the internet, people were still in rather small silos, they got tv news maybe (which isn't worth much), or newspapers if they were better informed; but they mostly had their viewpoints matching the people they lived around (kind of like people favor different sports teams still today). So in a way, nothing has changed, not because people were placed in silos, but because opportunities for
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So there are two competing pressures, on to put us into news silos, and the other the pressure of the wide open internet to liberate information. My guess is the second pressure will effectively counteract the first pressure (for the same reason that AOL couldn't keep people in their little content-world, even if they did try to redefine the URL).
As much as I would like to agree with your somewhat outdated view of what "being online" is, balkanization is being aided by FB. The more people interact only via social media(FB), the more of a "crafted" worldview people have, merely by thier likes/friends on FB. They get a mirrored view of things, and unless, like you said, they leave the walled garden and venture out into the "wide open internet", their world views get even more stagnant.
FB is the new AOL.
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FB is the new AOL.
That's a good analogy.....FB would definitely like to keep people in their little garden, but as much as they try, they are unable to.
Even if Facebook manages to reach their goal though, and keep people there.....still on Facebook you are likely to run into more opinions on a regular basis than you used to, unless you actively censor people who disagree with you. But if you actively censor people who disagree with you, then there's no hope for you no matter how the world is shaped.
I read Malcolm Gladwell books for 10,000 hours... (Score:2, Informative)
...and now I'm an expert at cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies. -Peter Lynn
How (Score:4, Interesting)
Where to get started (Score:1)
I've recently self-published a book dealing with society, technology, and the overused concept of Innovation. I had a great deal of fun writing it, and would like to contribute to a magazine or newspaper on a regular basis. I'm curious though, with so much "stuff" out there now - what's the best way to get a foot in the door and start writing content to broader audiences?
BTW Saw you speak in Seattle Town Hall - loved your talk
What is the next/current Black Swan? (Score:1)
Success! (Score:1)
...comes from being able to distract the guard. Any party crasher would know that...
Interest in science (Score:4, Insightful)
Recent religious topics (Score:4, Interesting)
How to become world class (Score:2)
Your book "Talent is Overrated" is misquoted and misinterpreted in many places, but seems to say that anyone can become a world-class expert with enough effort and time.
What should someone do to become a world-renowned expert?
Can you give us a plan or list of steps to take - something that's not garbled by news media reporting?
Can you clarify a summary of the books conclusions, so that others can embark on that journey?
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Deliberate practice [wikipedia.org] seems to be the best advice from what I've been able to find out.
What Would You Do with Your Money; (Score:2)
Increasing automation (Score:2)
David and Goliath and Soccer (Score:2)
Why are you a corporate shill? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://shameproject.com/report... [shameproject.com]
Why did you, after college, attend the National Journalism Center, a corporate-funded program created to counter the mediaâ(TM)s alleged âoeanti-business biasâ?
Why, as someone who is half-Jamaican, have you repeatedly associated yourself (and apparently continue to do so) with the white supremacist organization EPPC, which fights activists for economic justice?
Why did you write for American Spectator, which churned out anti-Clinton conspiracy theories?
Why did you recycle tobacco industry propaganda and quote lobbyists for Washington Post articles you "wrote"? Why did Phillip Morris consider you, according to their internal documents, to be a "friend" who could be counted on for pro-tobacco-industry stories?
Why did you clearly promote drugs for treating ADHD in kids, in which you heavily quoted researchers who were paid heavily by the pharma industry?
Why did you cite a pharma-industry cited study and defend the industry when it was attacked for high drug costs?
Why did you blame the victims in the Enron collapse, defending executives who committed gross fraud?
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This is what I came here to write. Please moderate up.
What meta-monkey said above. (Score:2)
And to Slashdot, just count each request for modding up and each +1 as a "1 question per post".
No need repeating the questions that SuperBanana has already made.
We could, but then what's the point of moderation, right?
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Seconded. I had no idea about his background. He was just downgraded from 'windbag' to 'shitbag' in my book.
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'..Why did you..."
because he's an idiot. And one of the most overrated, over-hyped idiots of the last 20+ years. It's hard to think of anyone who comes to mind even comparable.
Gladwell has a gift to take something that *easily* can be explained in a few pages, and turn it into an entire book, full of the same repetitive idea, chapter after chapter.
How he has become so popular is beyond me. The only thing I can guess is that he deludes people into thinking they are smarter for reading his stuff. I read a
How fast a mile with 10000 hours training? (Score:2)
Congratulations on your 4:54 in the Fifth Avenue mile.
http://www.runnersworld.com/ce... [runnersworld.com]
How fast do you think you could run a mile if you spent 10,000 hours training for it?
Simpleton. (Score:1)
FYI: Gladwell?????? (Score:2)
Why /.? (Score:1)
Poor Artie (Score:1)
Why did you steal Art Garfunkel's hair?
Why ask Slashdot of all forums?! (Score:3)
what is good research? (Score:2, Troll)
Mr. Gladwell, thanks a bunch for taking questions from us! I read you book 'Blink' and it was definitely value-added, esp. the story about war games...and how they gamed the war games.
My question: How do you, personally, evaluate research science? How do you differentiate the good research from hype? What is your process for evaluating scientific research?
I ask because everyone in media is quoting "research" now..."pop science" is a thing in our culture...I'm interested in how *you* a person known for writi
what do you consider your tipping point? (Score:1)
are all New York Times best sellers (Score:2)
>are all New York Times best sellers
Can we have information on what books are best sellers without the result being interfered with by a crappy newspaper?
The future of Nomadistan? (Score:2)
Job migration vs worker migration vs robots (Score:2)
Reduced lead leading to reduced crime? (Score:2)
In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
"Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number
In re: Your former editor's comments (Score:3)
Boyce Rensberger [harvard.edu], your erstwhile editor at the Washington Post, said this a year ago in the comments section of this article [mit.edu]:
Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.
When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.
What's your response?
What did your dad say (Score:2)
Transatlantic diversity (Score:2)
Jargon (Score:2)
Why do you substitute jargon for logical analysis. Do you think bullshit sells more books?
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Writing & Research Methods (Score:1)
Left-Right dichotomy vs Compass (Score:1)
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Come back if/when you grow up.