Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

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.

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