

The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell - JacobAldridge
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/10/malcolm_gladwell_critique_david_and_goliath_misrepresents_the_science.html

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JonnieCache
Let us not forget the Igon Value Problem.

 _" He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and
“power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s
eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who
likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value
Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an
expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat
wrong."_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?_r=2&)

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vukmir
"Malcolm's a very good storyteller. He reads a few quirky scientific studies
done on very small samples and weaves them into a myth about how if you blink
for 10,000 hours you'll end up dyslexic but people will give you lots of money
anyway."

[1][http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/06/david-
goliath-m...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/06/david-goliath-
malcolm-gladwell-digested-read#comment-27696051)

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hingisundhorsa
Really? Comments like this seem to be intent on setting up a strawman (ie: not
anything close to what Gladwell attempts to communicate) and then knocking
down that strawman.

~~~
ubernostrum
From TFA:

 _This leads to my last topic, the psychology experiment Gladwell deploys in
David and Goliath to explain what he means by "desirable difficulties." The
difficulties he talks about are serious challenges, like dyslexia or the death
of a parent during one's childhood. But the experiment is a 40-person study on
Princeton students who solved three mathematical reasoning problems presented
in either a normal typeface or a difficult-to-read typeface.
Counterintuitively, the group that read in a difficult typeface scored higher
on the reasoning problems than the group that read in a normal typeface._

 _In my review, I criticized Gladwell for describing this experiment at length
without also mentioning that a replication attempt with a much larger and more
representative sample of subjects did not find an advantage for difficult
typefaces. One of the original study 's authors wrote to me to argue that his
effect is robust when the test questions are at an appropriate level of
difficulty for the participants in the experiment, and that his effect has in
fact been replicated “conceptually” by other researchers. However, I cannot
find any successful direct replications—repetitions of the experiment that use
the same methods and get the same results—and direct replication is the
evidence that I believe is most relevant._

 _This may be an interesting controversy for cognitive psychologists, but it
's not the point here. The point is that Gladwell makes absolutely no mention
of any uncertainty over whether this effect is reliable. All he does is cite
the original 2007 study of 40 subjects and rest his case. As I mentioned in my
review, in 2013 this is virtual malpractice for a sophisticated writer whose
beat includes social science, where the validity of even highly cited results
has come into question. Readers who have been hooked by Gladwell’s prose and
look to the endnotes of this chapter for a new fix will find no sources for
the "hard stuff"—e.g., the true state of the science of "desirable
difficulty"—that he claims to be promoting._

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Robin_Message
Hey, I said this 1216 days ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420913))
Can I get a column in Slate now please? ;-)

~~~
polymatter
Well, all you need to do is do your 10,000 hours and ask the Collectors in
your network for an introduction.

~~~
gasda
You want to also get this to your mavens.

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JacobAldridge
Sorry - should have posted the single page link
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/10/malcolm_gladwell_critique_david_and_goliath_misrepresents_the_science.single.html)

