Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

mark ames gunnin for u

http://shameproject.com/

...and yasha levine, who is another exiled alum i think

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-into-the-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist.html

didn't know any of this!

s.h.a.m.e. on u malcolm gladwell

theres some good stuff in there, itd be cool if they didnt use so much breathless conspiracy type logic all over the place tho, also a lil more context as far as how wide spread these types of behavior are

never read a gladwell tome myself; it's revealing enough to know that he was marinated in the same rightwing PR bootcamps that produced much more downmarket fox/radio/regnery types

gladwell is generally k a dubious character imho (although the s.h.a.m.e. people could def take some pointers from him as far as the efficiency of his prose) but im a lil bit skeptical of the guilt by association narrative they present here, couldnt you just as easily tell a young struggling writer attempts to break into industry story, and its not like they present a comprehensive biography of his formative journalism years so we can judge what % corrupt his upbringing was, also as far as his crimes in his present day media superstar manifestation there are like two sentences shown as proof of his utter debasement, i mean maybe theres more idk, i tend to think of his transgression as being more in the 'lightweight contrarian' tradition

it's a great piece if you're already predisposed to disliking gladwell, but i can't imagine it convincing any of his legion of fans

i dislike him, but i didnt think it was great, tho it did have some interesting facts

not only does he have an aesthetic style and fanbase that rankle me, but here's a bunch of evidence that show he's legit a bad human being!

1. he associates w/bill simmons

2. he wants our children to smoke cigarettes

The only MG book I've read was What the Dog Saw. It was obvious to me that he was not a reporter so much as an advocate, who began each piece with an pre-established thesis and proceeded to argue that this thesis was essentially the 'correct' way of thinking about the subject. Which is fine, in that the facts he gives most likely are genuine facts and they do support his conclusion, but you can be very certain that whatever he is presenting to you is carefully filtered to support his point of view and his rhetoric will enforce a tone of certainty that probably is not justified.

So, 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.

That's a nice way of reducing it, but when you get to that point, why even read what he writes?

Also re: guilt by association, the dude wrote a scare article where he advocates for people using a deadly product to save a government program. Imagine Swift writing A Modest Proposal with a straight face while on the dole of a human-meat-grinder company. How is his worst crime being a contrarian? Something serious needs to be missing in you to be able to write shit like that.

when you get to that point, why even read what he writes?

You'll notice I only ever read the one book. After that, I stopped. I prefer a reporter who trusts me enough to make up my own mind, when presented with the relevent facts. Gladwell doesn't. He stacks the deck in favor of one conclusion.

maybe the big problem with malcolm gladwell is that even if you like or are impressed by something you read in malcolm gladwell, when you try to tell anyone else about it all you can do is helplessly repeat what malcolm gladwell said and what malcolm gladwell said it meant, because like aimless says nothing else has been provided; there is not a lot of room to move or to grow your own ideas or to have fun engaging w/ him as a public intellectual and there is a chilly clarity to his pictures of things and an absence of contradiction that is suspicious regardless of who pays his bills. then because malcolm gladwell is so super popular you end up w/ this nightmare society where everyone's standing around in bars saying things malcolm gladwell thinks to each other. that's how you really know he's a propagandist.

Yeah, it's that aspect that annoyed me the most about his writing (without being able to put a finger on it) and I could rarely make it through anything he's written. Maybe people like being told what to think... independent thought is hard and leads people to the meaninglessness of life which can be scary. On a side note, I would love to meet Gladwell at a party just so I could flick a burning cigarette in his afro and watch it erupt in foul-smelling flames.

"the notorious National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization with ties to the tobacco industry and bankrolled by the biggest names in right-wing corporate propaganda funding"

Seriously? I can see why some people don't like Gladwell but that article is 95% hyperventilation: "OMG he quoted a research study in an article and that same research study was later found in the cabinet of a Philip Morris executive!"

Something serious needs to be missing in you to be able to write shit like that.

― Spectrum, Thursday, June 7, 2012 12:42 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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even if you like or are impressed by something you read in malcolm gladwell, when you try to tell anyone else about it all you can do is helplessly repeat what malcolm gladwell said and what malcolm gladwell said it meant

I don't think this is true at all -- one thing that's good about Gladwell (and other writers of roughly the same type like jonah lehrer, atul gawande, etc.) is that a lot of their pieces are driven not by "here's something a cabdriver said to me and what I think it means" but by academic research, which means that you can look at the papers yourself, and compare what they say with what Gladwell says they say. The actual research usually has tons of interesting stuff in it, only one little piece of which was used by Gladwell. I sort of think of that as Gladwell's purpose; he's not there to say "this is how it is," he's there to say "you don't just have to scratch your chin and call it as you see it, there are actually people around the world trying to answer interesting questions empirically and I'm here to give you a guide to some small part of that work."

Also re: guilt by association, the dude wrote a scare article where he advocates for people using a deadly product to save a government program.

Seems to me he wrote an article that's been written a thousand times in other contexts, which is to say that our ever-increasing ability to prolong life creates gigantic public financial expense. Those articles aren't saying "Kill Granny," they're saying "We have to take increasing lifespan into account when making fiscal plans." It's not exactly false that states drastically underestimated how much money they were going to need to fund pensions.

That's not in the article, and doesn't even make sense w/i the logic of the subject ... cessation of a life-shortening activity is what would cause the burden, not the additional extension of peoples lives in addition to the cessation. but w/e, I just like bashing dopey snake oil salesmen and their odd followers.

here's the article

That article says exactly what I said it said, right down to every single quote being a variation on "obviously we should keep working extremely hard to prevent smoking even though it costs money to do so."

I hope you don't really believe that.

Nevermind, a little switch-up ... thought you were referring to "ever-increasing ability to prolong life", which is usually about health advances as opposed to something like smoking. Second half of new comment, well yeah, that's what it's saying, but what's the effect of the article? It seems to take out one element of a cost-benefit analysis re: quitting smoking, and the way it's framed, that eliminated benefit is center stage as opposed to the benefits.

A frame is chosen consciously. It could have been benefit of quitting, harm of quitting, benefit of quitting. Much sunnier than harm of quitting, benefit of quitting, harm of quitting. This is totally hamfisted time killing shit, btw.

I agree with you (re timekillingness) and will only say that yeah, I really do believe what I say; I am a pretty hardcore anti-smoker and I found nothing to object to in that article. I certainly don't see it as the kind of thing tobacco companies would relish -- their spin has always been "our product isn't that likely to kill you and anyway IT SHOULD BE YOUR CHOICE," not "Our lethal product kills millions of Americans and passes the savings along to you!"

In the same way that a political campaign tries a variety of attacks on its opponent, in the hope that each attack will split off a few extra voters who were not touched by earlier appeals, any argument that tends to portray smoking as having benefits or quitting as having drawbacks will be welcomed by tobacco companies, even if they don't officially say it themselves. Political campaigns also use proxies for most of their less attractive attacks.

i am pretty pro malcolm gladwell but uhmmmmmm http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2012/10/video-malcolm-gladwell-on-the-civil-rights-movement.html

i wonder how photography figures into his theory of strong connections in revolutions

why would someone be pro gladwell? is it that you appreciate the artistry and manipulation of his storytelling?

Because his prose is good and he tends to report on interesting social science research with reasonably good fidelity to the source material. Isn't that enough? It already puts him in the top 5% of widely syndicated writers.

were that true then yes

i stand by that claim

"Why Come Black Guys Score Touchdown and White Man Kick The Field Goals" by Malcolm Gladwell

Lol

http://askakorean.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html

i feel like my defense of malcolm gladwell in this thread is tainted by my parenthetical defense of jonah lehrer

gladwell repsonds

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-reponse-to.html

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.