Outliers

“Traffic…” has an Amazon rank of 258. Is this a bestseller? It is #1 in Nonfiction>Transportation though.

I’ve seen a few interviews of Gladwell talking about this book (and hope to read it). Harry, I’m just curious how Gladwell squares what he says about the 10 000 hour rule (that to master something one has to spend roughly 10 000 hours fine-tuning one’s skills, be it the Beatles or Bill Gates) with his general thesis that circumstances (e.g. where people are from, etc.) greatly determine their success. On the one hand he seems to want to reject the notion of the “self-made person” (by focusing on the people around outliers), but yet at the same time the 10 000 rule, which outliers satisfy, seems to lend some support to the idea that effort and hard work are important.

Cheers,
Colin

I’ve not read the book but I did read somewhere (read, on a blog) that it relies heavily on the work of some other more scientific types. I’ve scoured the internet (just over two-hours now) for the rather critical blog entry but alas it is lost. For the future, I have recalibrated the history setting in my web browser and set it to store webpages for 365 days. That unfortunately doesn’t help me with today. Does anyone know where I might find some of the criticisms of Gladwell supposedly floating around out there. I do so want to be a good contrarian but all I can find are puff pieces to regurgitate. I’ve heard he references Picasso. I wonder if he looked at some of Picasso’s “early works”.

– Le port de Málaga, Picasso, age 8

I’ve just ordered it, thanks to your recommendation Harry …

Curious paradox about us political philosophers (well, academics generally really) – we purport to believe in the importance of circumstance rather than native talent, yet our hiring policies are far more geared to identifying and attracting stars than they are to producing them by creating the right environment. (cf also Premier League football clubs, their academies and their transfer policies.) Of couse, that might be because, though we can say, ex post, that circumstances were key, we aren’t able to act, ex ante, the organize the circumstances that will produce (the Owl of Minerva flying with hindsight only, so to speak).

I suspect that much of the antagonism is more about the repressed dislike of the emphasis on nuture in this book. People can be bastards about feeling that they are special in some way. Intelligent and so-called intelligent people tends to want to believe that IQ means something. Successful businesmen and petit bourguousie-type folks are rabid Republicans because they tend to believe that they *deserve* the wealth *over* some other dude.

Inserting a well, you’re just lucky is a good way to set off a grenade at a social function.

Not to mention all the ambiguity aversion that already fuels the personality testing industry and credentialism…

A bunch of review linked here.

One more.

“… They’re right, of course. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s reading Outliers for rigor. They’re reading it for comforting anecdotal evidence that success is a total crapshoot and Horatio Alger’s a wanker. We suspected as much, but it can’t be repeated too often to Americans who were all supposed to be rich and famous someday.”

My review? The same as the one I gave for Taleb’s books. “You like Woody Allen? You’ll love NNT’s books. ” Middle-brow to the core.

KIPP schools achieve their successes through attrition, they push out all the kids who are not doing well.

Harry,
You should be flattered if Brooks really is copying your choice of topic to write about. Though if that’s really what he’s doing, it doesn’t actually reflect well on him.

My guess — if I had to choose a conspiracy theory among others — would have been they are both following some important, “insider” source, though that doesn’t reflect especially well on Brooks as a professional column-topic-inventor either.

More likely, the number of people who will write columns about Gladwell this week is so large that the chances Farrell and Brooks would both write columns about Gladwell is very, very high (even close to one? who knows?). It seems plausible enough, given a rudimentary knowledge of statistics . . .

Though methinks Brooks could use a healthy dose of metaphysical pragmatism. Or Aristotelianism. Or something . . .

Found it:

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution on Outliers:

The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann’s ‘Capital and its Structure.’ The main enduring insight of both Lachmann and Gladwell is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability.

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton appear nor does the phrase ‘multiplicative model of human success.’ A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add. Everyone should read Simonton, noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics.

If you ask too much from Outliers it will fall apart. It is too easy to find contingency in the world and Gladwell doesn’t begin to look for a theory of which contingencies are interesting or not. For instance arguably Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been a great composer if:…

It’s still a good book and a fun book. You can order it here.

Oops again. You might ask what I thought about the comment headed “harry b” just before mine. You would be right to ask.

Zamfir — maybe that’s right about chairing meetings (I’ve encountered 2 genius chairs of meetings, one of whom may indeed have had several thousands of hours of practice, but the other of whom simply couldn’t have had by the time I watched him).

Jonny; the appeal is a winning writing style with a pugnacious and unfussy way of making the points he is wanting to make. I don’t know anyone who reads him uncritically (but then I wouldn’t, would I?), and if read critically I don’t see the problem pedagogically. I do use Lareau, who is wonderful, obviously, but what his first couple of chapters add are the stories behind real people who are, actually, recognised by the students as successful people and about whom they do have preconceptions that are usefully shaken. Well, I say that, but its only conjecture — I’ll find out by using it.

I wish more academics who really produce and have full command of ideas could and would write a bit more like Gladwell; not in journal articles but in books. Few do (Lareau, for example, doesn’t, even though one of the many virtues of Unequal Childhoods is that she eschews jargon and frequent references to theoretical frameworks while allowing them to shape the whole story in a sophisticated way).

I have a strong incentive _not_ to correct this common error, for all the obvious reasons. Also, for the record, Brooks does (or at least used to) read CT sometimes …

To save typing, I’ll just link to my explanation of why the thesis of this book is silly. Extremely short precis: “outliers” are by definition extremely atypical, and therefore have little to tell us about the kinds of success and failure that are relevant to the vast majority of the population.

I haven’t read the book, only some extracts and reviews, but I would be wary of attributing all the negativity directed Gladwell’s way to ivory tower snobbery and reactionary politics (although the latter clearly explains some of the bad reviews, eg. in the New York Times.) The fact is that his argument, such as it is, sounds pretty confused, a watery hodgepodge of Edison’s apercu about genius being ‘99% perspiration’ and the common wisdom that ‘it ain’t what you know, it’s who you knew’. The first of these doesn’t seem to have egalitarian implications at all, if anything the attribution of ‘success’ to ‘hard work’ must be one of the most commonly relied-upon strategies for legitimising inequality; and certainly seems to be a popular one among liberal political philosophers. As for the second, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone, even in America, would seriously claim that ‘success’ in corporate law, say, is determined by innate talent. And from what you say above Gladwell seems concerned to try to trace the success or failure of individuals to allegedly functional aspects of their cultural background; it’s not clear to me that this line of thought leads in a very egalitarian or edifying direction.

More generally, I think that Gladwell’s vague idea that ‘where you come from matters’ is sufficiently well-accepted by most people right now that it is unlikely to change their political views (this advertising campaign by Orange perhaps shows how innocuous it is.) Anyone who has ever witnessed an Oxford alumni event or public school Old Boys evening knows that acknowledging that upbringing and education ‘made me the man I am today’ is quite compatible a sense of entitlement a mile wide and the most vicious right-wing politics.

Good point, Chris. And on a related note, Malcolm Gladwell has been known to assert that condescension towards academics is quite unjustified, since the very best of them aren’t mere navel-gazing obscurantists at all, but in fact provide very useful, reliable information at times.