

Gladwell, on creeping determinism - staticshock
http://www.gladwell.com/2003/2003_03_10_a_dots.html

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anatoly
I can't, dammit. I'm trying to read the article, but all I'm seeing is "igon
value igon value igon value". Damn you, Steven Pinker! I will never enjoy
Gladwell again.

~~~
xiaoma
I listened to the audio version of _Outliers_ a while back. One lengthy
section was about how Chinese children have an advantage in learning math over
English speaking children due to the regularity and brevity of the number
words.

Gladwell gave examples in which he absolutely murdered the pronunciation of
the number 7. I'm not talking about tone problems. He pronounced it as "kwee".
It was clear that he hadn't even bothered to listen to the number words that
he devoted a section of his book to.

Of course I don't expect someone who isn't a student of a language to speak it
well, but he could have at least gone to wikipedia or chinesepod and
_listened_ to the numbers once or twice!

~~~
carbon8
Here's the section in question:
<http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html>

Personally, I find it incredibly strange for someone to criticize an author
for mispronouncing a single syllable word from a language he presumably
doesn't know while reading an excerpt of a book he didn't write. He doesn't
claim expertise and acknowledges his sources, who are experts, and he
explicitly states that these are their arguments. What's the problem?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
It's like saying that Star Track is one of your favorite shows. In the scheme
of things, it doesn't matter but goddamn is it annoying to people who care.

~~~
carbon8
_"It's like saying that Star Track is one of your favorite shows"_

No, it's not. It's like someone who doesn't know english mispronouncing a
single syllable english word while reading an excerpt of a non-english book
written by someone else that he quoted in his non-english book. And criticism
of it would be just as silly.

~~~
xiaoma
There are degrees. This error isn't like an English speaker discussing French
pronouns and commenting on the pronunciation of "moi" and saying it as "moo-
ah". Gladwell's error was like saying it as "moy", rhyming with "toy".

The first error is completely understandable. The second one can't help but
change one's perception of the writer... if one has any familiarity at all
with the topic being discussed. For those who know nothing about it, it would
seem like a triviality, much like "misspelling" the word igon values.

~~~
carbon8
The only thing this is analogous to is the mispronunciation of a single
syllable english word by a chinese author who doesn't speak english quoting a
chinese language passage from another author while discussing their work. And
it wouldn't make any sense to criticize that either.

 _"For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality"_

English is my first language. If a speaker didn't speak english, was quoting a
non-english passage from someone else and mispronounced the english word "two"
as "swoh" I wouldn't think any less of him or his work, but I would think less
of someone who thought it worthy of this kind of criticism.

------
cstross
Shorter Gladwell: "if you seek certainty, and someone gives it to you, sooner
or later you'll trip over a rounding error and fall flat on your face."

~~~
wicknicks
Seems to me that he talked about two things:

1\. We have sooo much data, its just too hard to ask "what is the useful
information"? 2\. The second problem is more deeply rooted in the system and
that is with the people. More the number of people, more the difficulties in
managing them.

------
billswift
In a bunch of mostly uninteresting detail, he basically says that although
hindsight can pick out missed facts, at the time they are lost in a sea of
data with no reason to favor them over other, useless facts. This has been
know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that
makes it worth the time to read.

~~~
benmathes
That's all Gladwell does -- he spins yarns around widely accepted knowledge in
a subfield into stories for "everyone".

~~~
edj
Isn't this actually useful to everyone not an expert in or associated with
these subfields?

~~~
benmathes
Sure it's useful -- in a world of ever-increasing specialization it helps to
have a few people who take breadth-first approaches to learning and to
effectively spread the knowledge of subfields to masses. But I've always had
the feeling that both (1) he often musses the message for the sake of the yarn
and (2) he might be trying to play it off as if he were more than a reporter.

