Stray Hawkeye

So, not too long ago, I finally got around to reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (the guy who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink). I’ve read his other two books as well on the heavy recommendations of several people who insisted I would love them. Overall, I thought they were interesting, but there was something about them that I didn’t really like. Something about his writing style that annoyed me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

In reading Outliers, by about 20 or 30 pages in, I found myself getting mad, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the intended effect, so I started noting some of the things that made me mad. I think most of it is around the fact that everyone seems to treat his books as scientific works of fact, and with the way he presents things it’s easy to get that impression.  But, at the same time, it’s so, so, so wildly not scientific.  Later in the book, I started writing down some of the things about him and his writing style (and to some degree the wide acceptance / praise of him) that sets me off.  So, in no particular order or pretense of being scientific or anything other than one person’s rant, here’s a bunch of little pieces that in my mind add up to disliking Malcolm Gladwell.

- His language is extremely flowery, and tends to appeal strongly to the sense and to the emotions. It reads more like the script to an episode of 60 Minutes than science.
- He starts every argument with an isolated incident that is narrative, engaging, and make you sympathize with the character, and then generalizes wildly.
- The book isn’t really about outliers at all. In fact, it focuses more on large groups, patterns, and what shapes entirely average people.  He just tends to use the extreme cases as his attempt for proof. It’s like a sociology text written in the language of a political campaign speech.
- The title could just as easily be (as it is his main argument) “Nurture’s important too”. The basic premise of the book is, when you get right down to it and strip away the flowery language, that the culture you’re raised in and how people treat you is as important in determining who you are, and therefore where you end up and what you end up doing, as are your genes or personal effort. In short, an entirely unoriginal argument that’s been going on for centuries in science. At the same time, he alternates wildly between tying personal effort / perseverance to genes (nature) and then portraying it as a cultural trait (nurture) to be absorbed (as in his scientific *gafaw* attempt at explaining why Asian kids are good at math – because their culture teaches them to have more effort and determination in problem solving).
- He doesn’t provide references, he just says “there was a study that proves this” and moves on. There is a short section in the back that references scientific papers (again, giving the appearance of being scientifically rigorous), but they – 1) are buried in the back, 2) don’t have any actual footnotes, to both discourage tying a specific piece of text to evidence so it could be supported / refuted 3) never gives more than a passing, dismissive reference to any studies or works that could counter his points.  I think this – the lack of any sort of balance at all is what really sets me off.
- Because of all of the fawning adoration of him, I feel like I’ve read most of the book before I ever opened it. I had lots of moments of deja vu because it’s been quoted so heavily everywhere. Again, with everyone presenting it as fact and some sort of mild scientific break through.
- For each of his points, he claims basically all success in life can be attributed to one particular environmental factor. However, that factor varies from chapter to chapter. If we try to tie all of his “logic” together, we would find that the world should currently be ruled by Asian people from wealthy backgrounds who were born on January 1st, who lived near a computer lab growing up and have never interacted with Scottish people. Which is obviously totally supported by realit… oh wait, no, it’s not, at all.
- He loves juxtaposing things as desperate as possible to create an effect and impact in the reader’s mind, even if it’s at the cost of a logically coherent argument or understanding.
- He writes to be talked about, but not to say much.
- He uses a single quote, from a single individual, with no evidence that it speaks for a whole time (or even anything beyond just that individual’s opinion) to create broad, sweeping explanations of entire cultures.
- He places enough unrelated examples close enough together, and uses anecdotal evidence (at best) to tie them together, to make it seem as if he has created an encompassing theory of all existence, and also implies that he know how to fix it all, but never present his actual conclusion in a clear manner.  This has two results, after someone reads it, they feel like they’ve learned something really important, but they can’t quite articulate it (because he doesn’t articulate it, and if they did so accurately, it wouldn’t seem so profound anymore), which leads them to 1) tell other people they should read it, because they can’t say exactly what it was about for sure, just that it was good, and 2) makes you think that if you had just a bit more time with him, he’d either put it all together for you, or at least give you all the other wonderful pieces that didn’t quite fit in the book, so you could finally figure it all out.  In other words, he sets himself up for speaking engagements.  Each individual example is also quotable / summarize-able enough that it both gives him something to talk about (rehash) on talk shows, and lends itself easily to being quoted elsewhere (again, felt like I read half of it before I opened the book), so it spreads.  In short, he’s perfected using the points from his first book (The Tipping Point) to make himself hit a tipping point, even though he’s really just been an old set of hush puppies since then.  The strange part is that, in a way, each of his books sets up every point needed to call him out, he spells out exactly what he’s doing, as he’s doing it, and no one calls him out for it.
- The subtle, detailed, well researched and cited argument that rationally addresses its critics is dead in our society.
- He bases his arguments on sweeping groups in ways that feed on (and feed into) stereotypes.
- He leaps up and down on scale – from an individual, one school, an isolated study, to a stereotype of a whole region based on one study, a whole culture / the whole world and all of human history – gives a grand sweeping feel, but gives basically no evidence.
- It’s emotional, you feel for the characters.  Science doesn’t have characters. Even in psychology, you have patients, not protagonists.
- Not only does he only focus on environment as the sole predictor of success, he picks and chooses which parts of the environment to focus on. In his example of schools, he points out that at his personally relate-able, focused on, emotionally engaging school protagonist, everyone does orchestra, they have much much longer days, they have strict rules, but Gladwell only focuses on one thing as the solution- having 3 extra weeks of school in the summer. He argues that if we could just have kids go to school year round, it would fix everything, but ignored that maybe it’s not just the 3 extra weeks, maybe it’s the orchestra. What if every student had to take band? What if not sleeping enough is what’s actually helping them?  He focuses on the environment for causes of things, but then ignores massive portions of the environment to further his specific argument.
- He puts up as an example of the way the world should be as including a 12 year old running on 6 hours of sleep each night, every night. Six hours.
- He seems to always propose a single right way to do things- train pilots this way and you’ll always be safe, raise children this was and they’ll be hockey stars.
- He continually argues that anyone who was given the correct opportunity succeeds – but he leaves out the many, many cases of people who may have been in the right situations, but still failed. He talks about one failure in the whole book.
- In particular, a certain paragraph on page 268 took me from mildly annoyed to “must rant to the internet about this”. Let me quote it here at length:

The lesson here is very simple.  But it is striking how often it is overlooked.  We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth.  We looks at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur.  But that’s the wrong lesson.  Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.  If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?  To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determines success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.  If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.  Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession.  The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.

Ah, the wonder!  The soaring rhetoric! The potential of a brighter future for all!!  This grand utopia if we would just listen to this one man’s wisdom!!!  Oh wait.  Fuck.  It’s chock full of more examples of logical fallacies than than a textbook on Socrates.  Let’s hit just a few of the high point of “are you fucking kidding me” in there.  “Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.”  Really?  That’s strange, because in your example of this earlier in the same fucking book, on page 51, you tell us that every single kid in Gates’ school had the ability to have the exact same access he had, and you refer on numerous occasions to “Gates and his friends” spending all this time on this very same computer.  And you really think absolutely no other school in the world had a similar set up?  Are you sure there weren’t actually a ton of them?  Are you sure it’s not just that you haven’t heard of all the others, or even looked into it, because it might hurt your argument?  Because they didn’t happen to produce an equally famous individual despite a similar environment?  Or that someone who, oh say wasn’t even born until the next year could create software that’s currently run on multiples more computers than anything Gates ever touched? Or that with any research you would find that it never really was Gates’ technical ability that set him ahead but rather his business skills?  My, all those MBA’s out there shall be great programmers one day.  “If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”  One.  Exactly fucking one.  Microsoft is only a worthwhile example because it’s a huge monopoly.  You know how many monopolies you can have in a particular market?  Here’s a hint, it has to do with the prefix “mono”.  Perhaps you meant “How many really successful companies could we have with huge market share?”  Again, the same number.  There’s only so much room in the market.  Could they have been headed by other people?  Probably.  But that’s not going to make for a million more $260 Billion market cap companies.  Aside from that a million kids spending all their time in a computer lab to produce a million Bill Gates would mean a million kids not out spending all their time in hockey leagues.  Or playing guitar.  Or student government.  “If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.”  No, it fucking wouldn’t.  It would have exactly as many, they would just have birthdays bunched up in January and July instead of just January (that assuming we take Galdwell’s general argument here as being valid in the first place).  Instead of screwing kids with November and December birthdays, we be screwing the ones with June and December birthdays, and spending twice as much on coaching and facilities for the opportunity.  And hey, why not make 4 leagues?!!  Then we could have 4 times as many adult hockey stars!  Hey, why stop there?  Let’s have twelve!!   How about 365?!!  Why not one for every hour of birth time?  8,760 hockey leagues and the world’s problems will be solved!!!  But wait, 8,760 hockey leagues will only give us 8,584,800 NHL level players.  With a mere 6,632,653 hockey leagues every person on the planet will be playing hockey at an NHL level.  Cripples will be able to skate!  The blind shall win shoot outs in overtime!  Infants and the elderly alike will check one another into the boards!!  All praise be to Malcolm Gladwell!!!

Booksthatmakeyoudumb by Virgil Griffith is a nice info-graphic that uses the books that people list as their favorites on Facebook, tied to the school they go to, tied to the school’s average SAT score to determine what books are the leading cause of stupidity/genius.  Amusement ensues.  Apparently smart people like solitude, at least when they’re not sleeping with underage girls, while dumb people prefer to ponder a purpose driven life and Oprah movies while reading the Bible.  My favorite on the list is a book I’ve yet to come across- “I Don’t Read”.

I’m not entirely sure why, but it strikes me that The Big Lebowski and The Catcher in the Rye have a fair amount in common.  I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is, and I may be off as its been several years since I last read The Catcher in the Rye.  Sort of a wandering, semi-aimless main character / protagonist who is easy to relate to, but not necessarily look up to.  He’s both profoundly self assured and entirely shake-able.  Quirky and largely driven by impulse and outside influences.  A certain reoccurring metaphorical theme around falling or feeling like you’re falling.  Brushes with the sex industry and art/artists.  Unfulfilling / odd sexual encounter, include ones centered around a certain voyeurism and also one night stands.  An attempt at denying or avoiding responsibility for the majority of the piece, but ultimately sort of accepting it, but mostly meditating on it.  Questions about identity and the inability to correctly identify it and phonies both real and perceived.  Being beaten and left curled on the floor by a stranger.  A conflict between the real and ideal worlds that the character imagines himself in.  Lots of religious overtones that are never really directly addressed.  Lots of profanity, to the degree that it occasionally seems purposely excessive.  And as much as all of that, the fact that I really like them both, but always end them feeling like I didn’t totally get it.  Like there’s something I missed, or that even though I pretty much know what it’s about, I can’t really put my finger on it or explain it.

It occurred to me recently that the plot and theme of The Sneetches by Dr Seuss and Black No More by George S. Schuyler are basically identical. (Lots of spoilers ahead, all from my best memories of having read each 5+ years ago.)

The Sneetches is a children’s story about creatures called Sneetches.  Some have stars on their bellies, some do not.  The ones with stars look down on the non-star bellied and leave them out of their games and such.  A man comes along with a machine that can put stars on the bellies of non-star belly sneetches, for a price.  All non-star bellies get stars.  Sneetches who originally had stars want to get theirs taken off, to be different from the newly star bellied.  Our entrepreneur informs them that his machine can do that too, for a little more money.  Eventually, all the sneetches are going through the machine at various settings, until there’s such a mix of number of stars on bellies that no on can tell who was who any more.  They all play together and decide belly stars are a dumb thing to divide people up over.

In Black No More, a Harlem Renaissance book, a German scientist invents a way to turn black people into whites (yeah, the book doesn’t really clarify what exactly that means).  This then slowly sweeps the country until nearly everyone is white, and the book ends with rumors that rich white people are now paying for a process to turn them black and race starts breaking down as a social category in America.  Granted, Black No More also has more of a main protagonist, who mostly spends his time aimlessly wandering and whoring about, which isn’t so much in Dr Seuss’s version, though Schuyler did fill a couple hundred more pages than Seuss.

Anyone else have childhood books that they’ve found echoed in another piece of not so child oriented literature?

A charming and wonderfully quirky story about an enormous book store located in rural Wisconsin.  It doesn’t advertise, it’s open one day a week, and probably has more books than Amazon.  More than a little OCD, but quite endearing.

The story starts about a minute in.

Via The Obvious?

I just finished reading Requiem For A Dream (yes, it was a book before it was a movie), and I must say, it’s really good.  It’s a challenging read, for instance, Selby doesn’t separate what the characters say from the text around it with quotation marks, it’s just huge blocks of text, which takes a while to get used to.   And the subject matter is every bit as depressing as the movie, though in a sort of different way.  It’s one of the better things I’ve read in quite a while, though, have I mentioned depressing?

The reason I bring this up is not just to brag about still reading books occasionally and choosing challenging books (a little for that, but not enough for a post on it’s own :) ), or to recommend a book, but to point out a couple parallels between this and another work on the same subject matter of heroin addicted junkies in New York.  The musical Rent.

This is mainly because the morning after I finished reading Requiem For A Dream, I happened to have the soundtrack for Rent in the CD player in my car, and was listening to it on the way to work (irony of listening to Rent on the way to my corporate job aside for the moment).  As it so happened, I was near the end of the first disc, and some of the first lyrics were, in ultra upbeat, cheery musical theater style:

I’m Willin’
I’m Illin’
I Gotta Get My Sickness Off
Gotta Run, Gotta Ride
Gotta Gun, Gotta Hide — Gotta Go
And It’s Beginning To Snow

First I was struck by the absolute tonal dissidence of these two takes on the same subject matter.  Like a Sound of Music / Schindler’s List contrast.  (Okay, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, but if you makes you want to die for about a week after watching it, we’re on the right track.)  Especially that song from Rent versus the chapters of pain and agony in Requiem of “trying to get one’s sickness off”.  I was a little clueless on some of the lingo and allusions in Rent as well, but Requiem expounds on it pretty well.  For example, “getting one’s sickness off” is taking another dose of heroin to stop the sickness caused by withdrawal symptoms when a junkie has gone too long between fixes.  From Requiem‘s description this sickness is gut wrenchingly nasty.

After getting past the style difference, and I started to notice more and more overlap in language and slang, it started to strike me that for the huge difference in tone and style, how many plot points the two works had in common.

A sampling of what I have picked up on so far, in roughly order that I noticed them rather than any sort of theme I’m trying to develop.  Note- there are lots and lots of spoilers in here:

• Both features heroin addicts living in New York struggling with addiction.
• Both feature somewhat prominently the phone calls (and lack there of) around rather one sided parent child relationships.
• The main protagonist is a male.  He has a love interest who is also a junkie.  The female has some amount of involvement in activities bordering on or venturing well into prostitution.  The male protagonist is fairly aware of this but generally turns a blind eye to, except for the isolated moments where it particularly sets him off into a sort of festering rage.
• The main protagonist has a male friend who is also featured rather prominently, who has a generally detached/ambivalent view of his friend’s love live / involvement, but generally tries to take some amount of care of the female.  This friend tends to be slightly more detached and unemotional in general.
• The main characters have dreams/plans of starting a dining establishment which will serve as an escape from their current situation and as a long term source of financial well being.  Slight attempts are made at getting started on the establishment of this restaurant, but are generally abortive early on and the goal is more or less forgotten by the end, clouded out by drugs and love (and lack there of).
• One main character is teetering on the boarder of death at the end, and has a near death experience where he/she goes towards and then come back from a white light.  His/her exact status of life/death is somewhat unclear at the end but it is likely safe to assume he/she is not long for this world.
• A trip to a distant, southern portion of the USA is planned as part of their long term financial success, though any sort of real though or plans are entirely lacking.
• There is a brief period of excitement and optimism just before exactly half way through, which leads to a long, slow decline over the second half.
• The events take place over almost exactly the course of one full year (slightly less in Requiem)
• The ability to pay the rent is featured as a prominent driver of action.
• The ease/challenges and burden/benefits of surviving with or without one’s significant other feature very prominently.  Especially as they relate to one’s own drug addiction.
• A fair portion of the action takes place in/around abandoned and dangerous areas of New York.  Only briefly does the city seem particularly alive.  For the most part it is closer to a battle field.

There may well be others, but that struck me as a whole lot of similarities for two works that are so different on the surface.

A while back I was talking to a guy who lives on a fairly remote farm, and who has been working for a long time to get as far off the grid as he can.  I only talked to him briefly (a friend of a friend whom I’d just met) and he was a really interesting and really nice guy.

He has a horse drawn buggy that he takes when he goes into town when it’s nice (still has a car), has ducks and chickens, and has been working on restoring some old farm equipment that’s powered by draft horses.

While we were on his farm, he mentioned a book about how farm work was done before gas engines (which in his opinion also reflected how it would be done after we run out of gas), which we could read if we were interested in the topic.  (All discussions of energy density, labor time, specialization, and efficiency aside for the moment.)

I only kind of remembered the name of the book, but I looked it up on Amazon and was able to find it.  However, I think they could have given a bit more though to the layout of the cover:

I wouldn’t believe it was a real book either if I hadn’t seen it at his place.  You can pick it up on Amazon here.