Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

haha i was rereading those slightly overheated exposes upthread and this excerpt from philip morris' list of "third-party messengers" made me lol:

Milton Friedman
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

Mike Fumento
Syndicated Journalist

John Fund
Editorial Page Writer
The Wall Street Journal

Penn Gillette
magician

ask a korean responds to gladwell's response

http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/my-thoughts-on-gladwells-response.html

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/david-and-goliath/ece560b4f11c7268bfa7b6258f6627fcd3110765/

Whatever you may think about Malcolm Gladwell, Yasha Levine is much worse.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/how-i-rediscovered-faith

Malcolm Gladwell's medical thriller project has reached a major tipping point: Fox has given The Cure a pilot order.

The official logline: "A provocative character-driven medical thriller about a young, impulsive African American neurologist who decides to take the law into her own hands in the cause of tackling a deadly disease."

I happen to have a neurologist right here.

"I read your script. You know nothing of my work. How you ever got to write a medical thriller is totally amazing."

https://theawl.com/what-if-these-ted-talks-were-horribly-unspeakably-wrong-c4b94e2c4824#.b0qkka6ag

“Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.”
Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk on Ragu’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce is the ultimate in TED’s inspirational contrarianism. There isn’t just one type of spaghetti sauce; there are hundreds. What you think you know about the most mundane thing isn’t really true; it’s the complete opposite. And the reality will amaze you.
His ability to spin that yarn is quite fascinating once you realize that this talk is really just about how there are different types of spaghetti sauce, something anybody with the most basic familiarity with Italian cooking might comprehend. It’s not about how marketing companies desperately try to pander to consumers in any way they can because they have no understanding of what connotes a good product. It’s about how Ragu uses horizontal segmentation to underscore how adept the marketing world is at grasping these concepts and then turning them into products like Ragu Zesty. Pure genius.
Gladwell’s marketing mysticism may not be on the same diabolical level as injecting massive amounts of sulfuric gas into the sky, but his prophetic insight into the nature of condiments particularly irks me because I vividly remember reading his New Yorker story on mustard, spaghetti sauce and ketchup that this talk was based on. In it, he details how Heinz perfected their recipe to the point that no other brand can compete. Their recipe of high fructose corn syrup and tomato paste is the best possible ketchup. Somehow tomato sauce can have an infinite spectrum of flavor but ketchup, which is pretty much just tomato sauce, has a platonic ideal. How can this be?

wait but that makes total sense. if there's many flavors of spaghetti sauce that makes it hard to say that one is better than another bc maybe they just appeal to different tastes. but if there's really only one kind of ketchup it should be easier to figure out which ones is the most ideal acc to respondents. i mean the whole thing is dumb as fuck but not bc of this partic quibble.

Well, that seems a little circular. Anyway it wasn't the main thing I was posting it for.

So basically his formula is (1) take commonsense thing that everyone already knows (2) make it sound like it actually goes against the "conventional wisdom," (3) extrapolate overbroadly from the phenomenon (4) assign pseudoscientific terms to thing (5) audience now feels both that it is smart and that it has learned something

any particular recent example?

I just got really irritated by his drawn out This American Life bit on the underhanded freethrow.

Like why do you think more people don't shoot that way? Manly pride, duh. But he takes about 15 minutes to get there, and goes through this not entirely relevant detour on how people think behavior in crowds is due to "mob mentality" but it's actually due to people having "thresholds" (based on some sociologist's work) for how many other people need to do something before you feel ok doing it. In the very end of the bit, we finally get to the obvious point that players don't shoot underhanded because it's embarrassing to do it, and this is tied in, perhaps dubiously, to the idea of the "threshhold" -- Rick Barry had a "low threshhold" (i.e. didn't care what other people thought), whereas most players have "high threshholds" (i.e. they feel like sissies if they shoot underhanded, but I guess presumably would shoot underhanded if everyone else did it?).

rereading thread: still think philip morris' 90s contact sheet for disseminating "third-party messages" about counterintuitive cigarette facts (also feat. gladwell) is the lolest

Milton Friedman
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

Mike Fumento
Syndicated Journalist

John Fund
Editorial Page Writer
The Wall Street Journal

Penn Gillette
magician

and reviewing the original document i also liked this one:

Ed Crane
President
Cato Institute
(note: expertise in liberty, freedom)

xp that piece was insanely stupid... he keeps setting it up for some big reveal but nope it's just more Captain Obvious bullshit for like 30 minutes.

I don't think he's very accustomed to having people disagree with him either. Last night on Bill Simmons' new show, Mark Cuban pretty well cleaned his clock regarding public financing of sports arenas. I think Cuban's wrong but Gladwell didn't seem to have anything more than a tiny handful of talking points to push back against him.

My Gladwell tipping point (to coin a phrase) came with his way back when New Yorker piece on pit bulls and why they are so disproportionately feared. iirc he doesn't make a distinction between dog bites and, I dunno, fatally getting your throat ripped out by a notoriously strong dog often bred to be aggressive. I want to say he also, in pursuit of a big picture, ignores or discards stats that pit bulls are overwhelmingly the most dangerous dog breed, in terms of attacks and fatalities. But, you know, it makes you think.

*waves hands*

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/07/15/bowdoin-in-food-fight-with-best-selling-author/

what a bozo

arguing that Bowdoin spends money on food at the expense of financial aid

this sounds like the laziest either/or argument he could make, and he has made some really lazy ones

hell, I bet they have hot water in their student residences, when you could easily shower and wash your hands with unheated water

“Atrocious fresh fruit is a small price to pay for social justice.”

trollin

Guy's a fuckin' douchebag who could get paid writing about a word cloud made from me saying he's a fuckin' douchebag

Thanks for ruining the word "maven" for the rest of us, douchebag

I listened to the podcast about Bowdoin v. Vassalr and it's not really about food. That's one of the elements in comparing schools with widely divergent levels of financial aid and how they allocate resources.

It is by far the least awful argument I've heard him make.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3SXJMCVMAAFKK_.jpg:large

http://gladwell.com/black-like-them/

saw a link on twitter to a 20 year old gladwell piece that i actually enjoyed a lot. about the different experiences of racism of west indian immigrants and american-born black people.

https://s33.postimg.cc/5y3df14bj/4_A1_CE56_C-89_C4-47_D6-8152-9_BB24963_C88_D.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/XLmqjDx/event-poster-10720454.jpg

look at this clown car

+ Beto O'Rourke

moderated by Jim Cramer

and you missed it!

because it was canceled

hahaaaaaa

it got cancelled due to the heatwave, so let’s all take a moment to say thanks to the ongoing climate catastrophe for its service

the surprise guest is

levar burton

"i just saw padma lakshmi by the price-waterhouse yurt"

I just want to see all these people biting the heads off of bats

the placement of Miguel on the poster is a pretty good punchline

😮

That poster is the shitty speakers' festival partner to this ILX fave

https://1075koolfm.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/hqdefault.jpg

lol actually came thisclose to putting it there

in that thread

“There is a reason why, when it comes to questions of whether someone is or isn’t engaged in pedophilia, we rely on experts. As far as I know, Joe Paterno never received such training.”

— The Daily Collegian (@DailyCollegian) January 30, 2020

Count me a Gladwell non-fan, but has anyone heard the Broken Record podcast he does with Rick Rubin? Looks like some good guests, but I dread his inevitably faux naive "I'm just a guy talking to folks about music, asking dumb questions" vibe, which I imagine will be similar to Terry Gross when *she* asks dumb questions of pop musicians. "So ... tell me about playing the guitar," or some such snooze that leans hard on the guests to provide the conversational momentum.

I understand that he doesn't meet the standards of intellectual rigor that some of you hold, but I enjoy his podcasts, and the Broken Record one is great. Most of them aren't him doing the interviewing anyway. I enjoy Rick Rubin's interviewing style, and he always has good stories to tell.

They did a fun one with Ezra Koenig where they were listening to FoTB a few months before it came out.

the guy's an absolute class a cunt. It was only a few months back he was lying his arse off about US healthcare on British tv in relation to a NHS "deabate", a fucking ridiculous corporate shill for private healthcare with zero credibility doesn't require that much intellectual rigour!

Way upthread I said "the best way to think about Gladwell is as a high class lawyer or public relations agent, where you don't know who his client is, and he pretends not to have one."

The Rick Rubin episodes of BR are consistently great.

There's a third guy, too, right?