What the Dog Saw (Review)
When people ask me what I’d like to be when I grow up, I reply, simply, “I wanna be just like Steven Pinker.” I want to be someone so obviously incisive, so obviously brilliant that other minds wilt in my presence.
Pinker, in the Book Review, reveals flaws in Malcolm Gladwell’s work:
The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings. For example, in many cases of uncertainty, a decision maker has to act on an observation that may be either a signal from a target or noise from a distractor (a blip on a screen may be a missile or static; a blob on an X-ray may be a tumor or a harmless thickening). Improving the ability of your detection technology to discriminate signals from noise is always a good thing, because it lowers the chance you’ll mistake a target for a distractor or vice versa. But given the technology you have, there is an optimal threshold for a decision, which depends on the relative costs of missing a target and issuing a false alarm. By failing to identify this trade-off, Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes about the limitations of pictures and the downside of precise information.
This is similar to what I’ve felt, previously, about Gladwell’s thinking. Entertaining as it may be, it’s just, at times, wrong.
Gladwell, Dogs, and Men
Malcolm Gladwell compares the suspected neurological consequences of American football to dogfighting in the latest New Yorker. Ultimately, the piece disappoints. Though highly entertaining (it’s standard Gladwell), the piece stretches too thin to make a connection between neuroscience and football and staged dog fights. Where he especially misses is in his moral comparisons; Gladwell believes the loyalty and dedication seen amongst pro players and their teams are tantamount to those seen amongst dogs and their handlers. (It fails not because the juxtaposition seems, intuitively, unequal, but because Gladwell seemingly assumes dogs are just furry little humans. Cesar Millan would not approve.)
What is truly disappointing, however, is that Gladwell, after having taken up his column at the New Yorker, seems to be stretching for big ideas. And that is sad to me. Because homework should be done in private.
Meeting Goliath
When I was an undergrad, I knew I wasn’t the smartest or fastest or best student. What I did know was that I trained with a world-champion Thai boxer and he taught me to be tough; tough enough to stay up all day and all night, studying.
Malcolm Gladwell explores this concept, of using effort to supplant weakness in skill, in his latest New Yorker article.
“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
What Gladwell is getting at is that you, as an underdog, cannot play by the rules of Goliath — doing so only ensures your loss. What you must do, instead, is exploit weaknesses — lapses in logic — within the context and apply effort in those instances (”look for strengths where things are naturally weak”). Wonderfully, Gladwell describes Rick Pitino’s (yes, the coach) use of frame control to dominate stronger teams.
Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo…
In effect, Gladwell is talking about intelligence. Why, then, does this sound so fresh and new? Because there is a dearth of intelligence in our world.