Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

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?

yeah but he's not around all the time - bit of an outlier

lol

I once saw him at a restaurant in NYC with a tall, blond younger model type and thought, "She must be dating him for his looks."

"She must be dating him for his looks takes."

No doubt he'll get wheeled out on the BBC to give us some evidence based factoids about how cheap our prescription drugs will be when what is left of the NHS is paying four times the price for them from one of his US big pharma pals. Very funny and charming fellow though!

most of these intellectual snake-oil salesmen are exactly the same

I can't stand Gladwell most of the time, but I wish I'd been around for that Bowdoin discussion upthread. I went there for a year and they never stopped telling us how good the food was and how lucky we were to have such nice dining halls. (It was pretty mediocre food, just fancy mediocre.) They spent outrageous amounts of money on outdoor equipment so that you could do any kind of trip you wanted, with as many people as you wanted. The freshman dorms were all suites. And yet there were very few people there on financial aid, and those that were felt hideously out of place. Almost everyone seemed to be a child of multi-millionaires or billionaires, and even my roommate, the daughter of a multi-millionaire, felt out of place because her dad owned casinos and thus was definitely New Money.) I left because I feared that if I stayed I would begin thinking of that kind of wealth and luxury as normal.

Gladwell had a whole podcast which I enjoyed where he railed against giving any money to universities that already have massive endowments .

Lily Dale, I think that kind of college is a special case, because... why would you send your kid there unless you were very, very wealthy? If your kid can get into Caltech or Chicago or Yale or whatever, you can get a much better education for that amount of money (and those schools are much richer and offer more financial aid to families that need it.) Whereas if your kid is not getting into Caltech or Chicago or Yale, they can get as-goood-as-Bowdoin education at their state university for much less. Which means it's not clear why it makes sense to send your kid there except as a kind of prestige good, or because you know other kids-of-the-rich go there. I don't see why a family of normal means, or for that matter a family in the top 10% but not top 1% of household income, would make that choice.

people go to expensive private universities so that they can work at places that only hire graduates from said schools, or to meet other people with money so they can network with them and reinforce social structures

not knocking anyone who went to them who isn't rich, but the idea that mixing in kids on scholarships to break social barriers doesn't work nearly as well as they pretend. I think the amount of support for students when it comes to smaller class sizes, individual attention, etc. might be a little better

that is to say, Lily Dale otm

So you see, Sean, if you look into the patterns of history, you’ll find…whew, that one snuck up on me, could you pass the milk?…you’ll find that age of consent laws are pretty consistently cyclical, and we’re overdue for a correction

SEAN: Let’s talk about your Gram https://t.co/MB8in2bryq

— NBA on CorncobTV (@killakow) July 16, 2021