Who is Malcolm Gladwell? Oh yeah, he’s that Canadian dude whose books you don’t have to bother reading because enough other people have read them that their ideas have seeped and saturated into the consciousness of everyone around you, and into your own as well – a process described, inevitably, in one of his books.
Fellow Canadian Steven Pinker, the scholarly, academic and specialized version of Gladwell, has delectably cut Gladwell down to size in the New York Times:
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition…. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case…. The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle…. when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, [readers] should watch out …
On the other hand:
…the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents… Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist.
That’s pretty true. Like Hannah Arendt before him, Gladwell benefits from the harsh editing of New Yorker. He has now responded several times on his own blog, rather childishly. I thought I saw that Pinker was taking this throwdown to the Twitter, but I can’t find the retweets that I thought I saw last night (perhaps it was a dream).
I hope this continues and gets really, really messy!
No related posts.