Malcolm Gladwell Wants Your to Wear a Mental Straitjacket

I like Malcolm Gladwell. I've bought all his books. And I will continue to do so. I know some critics don't like him. But I think he does a good job, his job, translating scholarly research into readable prose. Here's a recent bit he has allowed to be videoed:



I disagree with the above. Or more correctly, I think some people should follow the above advice, but I won't and I feel that a substantial minority of us should disregard this advice. I made my career by being a generalist. I worked with a lot of highly trained technical people, mostly with PhDs. But I found that while they were immensely useful in their narrow specialization, they were mostly fish out of water when it came to problems and ideas outside their narrow expertise. My function in the company was to deal with problems that the specialists couldn't solve. I did a good job and was seen as quite valuable to the company. They would trot me out with their PhDs and confer on me an "honorific" PhD in front of customers. I didn't have a PhD. I was the odd guy out with a philosophy degree in a company of engineers and computer scientists.

His argument that if your job is to sell soap you should ignore everything but "selling soap". But that is silly and/or tautological. How do you know whether something is relevant to selling soap unless you explore it. There has to be a fruitful tension between focusing on getting the job done and poking your head up from time to time to see if there is a tool, a technique, or an idea that can be fruitfully used to advance your current task. So, "selling soap" may require you to take a course in human psychology or take time off from "selling" to do a focus group on how consumers view soap to talking to early adopters to find out why some new aspect of "soap" is exciting them and not yet the broader public.

His call to "zero in" can be useful to some, but I'm going to defend the "jack of all trades" role. Somebody has to hold "the big picture". That requires you to be able to cross disciplines. That requires you to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone in a narrow speciality. Gladwell is ignoring this important reality.

Messy brains are good. There is value in knowing many things. There is real power in having the "big picture". An amazing about of "new creations" are simply re-applying a technique or insight from one field in another field. Gladwell is completely ignoring this fact.

And what he calls "messy" is the ability to recognize ideas in different fields that can be productively brought together to create a new, bigger "whole".

Some people need to be "messy brains" while others need to be narrow specialists. We need a panoply of "types" to have a productive, creative society. Anybody calling for a "one size fits all" society is marching us off jackboot style into some dismal future.

So... while I like Gladwell, I reject the above. It may be useful for those who are scatter-brained and notorious procrastinators. But otherwise it really isn't that useful as an "insight".

Social Change

It is funny. The academic theorists and the firebrand "revolutionaries" get all the press about "changing society". But in the real world, it is people. Individuals who sense a change in the air and act on it. And it spreads like wildfire. The academics and the radicals come and feast on it and claim it as their own, but the reality is that it is simply individuals acting in their own inscrutable way and in accordance with their own rhythm. It comes bottom up. It is symbolized by "leaders" but the reality is that ultimately it is individuals making individual choices that powers change.

Here's a wonderful article on the great American Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker:

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Go read the article to find out Gladwell's theories. He looks at this and other uprisings and considers the role of Twitter and social media. Fascinating stuff. But remember...

He's playing the role of an academic and theorizing. Ultimately change comes from below and utterly mysterious in its timing and its direction. The Green Revolution in Iran last year got me excited, but it fizzled. You simply don't know what will catch and burn and what will flare up and die out. The civil rights movement in the US was over 100 years old in 1960. Why it finally "took hold" in the early 1960s is a mystery. Don't let academics fool you. Their theories are rationalizations after the fact. Nobody was predicting the social change, at least not predicting it in detail, in timing, and in scope.

Malcolm Gladwell digs a little deeper and puzzles over the depth of determination of the activism in the 1960s in the face of brute violence:

GGreensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. ...

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

Gladwell's assessment of "Twitter-led revolutions" is that they are a fizzle. He argues that history shows you need personal contacts, real contacts, with other committed people. In other words, a social revolution requires real sociability, real social relations, deeply committed social connections:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Gladwell goes on to argue that successful social change is the result of carefully organized, mounted with precision and discipline. I disagree. Planning may make leaders feel effective, but ultimately it is what happens on the ground at the individual level. I agree with him that previous activism creates a matrix in which a spark can catch fire, but ultimately the spark was a unique event planned by four students but the contagion and imitation wasn't "planned". I disagree with this claim:

In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

I don't disagree on facts. I disagree on interpretation. Planning went on. But the contagion was only hoped for. There was no explicit "plan" for it and no central directorate who were saying "here now, then here, then here". There was a lot of spontaneous communication in prepared social networks and it suddenly "caught fire".

I agree with his point that Twitter revolutions don't have the level of commitment and social connections to succeed. But I don't agree that groups like the NAACP "planned" the Greensboro contagion. They hoped for it, but had no real control over it. It just happened because the time was right and the individuals threw themselves into it.

I guess nobody wants to hear about history as "spontaneous events" lacking a cohesive "story" behind it. But in fact that is the world we live in. Just like nobody likes to hear that the quantum world is random and not fathomable by any deterministic models. Science as simple models is now long gone. We are in the age of complexity and disordered aggregations whose "story" only makes sense after the fact. The stories are still useful, but they don't predict and they don't really explain, but they help us find comfort in a very cold, very dark, very large, very indifferent universe.

The Malcolm Gladwell article, like all of his work, is thoughtful and interesting. He has pulled it from researchers and presented it as a "story" with meaning and direction. It is to be enjoyed.

The History of Ketchup

I ran across a reference to an old Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker in 2004. I'm always happy to read anything by Gladwell. And I wasn't disappointed. Here are some key bits:

Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation—the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe, and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half. On one side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the amounts used. On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved with the application of culinary science. The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which add body to a sauce. But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. The renegades argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting. They offered a money-back guarantee in the event of spoilage. They charged more for their product, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right. The benzoate ketchups disappeared. The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J. Heinz.

...

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar—so now ketchup was also sweet—and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating—about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

You need to read the whole article. Gladwell noodles around a subject finding all kinds of interests facts and connections. His article is a good example of a diligent application to Gladwell to the topic of food invention, food marketing, and ketchup.

Making it Big

The NY Review of Books has an article by Sue M. Halpern that reviews three books on what it takes to be a success:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
  by Alice Schroeder


• Outliers: The Story of Success
  by Malcolm Gladwell


• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
  by Geoff Colvin

These three books have very little in common. The Buffett book is a standard biography. The Gladwell book is a brilliant thought piece in the tradition of his other books. I haven't read the Colvin book but I suspect it is a fairly pedantic book that looks at factors that contribute to success. The first two books are a lot of fun to read. Here's a bit that Halperns includes from the Gladwell book:

Consider, as well, Chris Langan, whose astronomically high IQ—around 195, 45 points higher than Einstein's—does actually make him a statistical anomaly. In Gladwell's estimation, though, the poor fellow—who lives in relative obscurity on a midwestern horse farm—is a great failure:

He'd been working for decades now on a project of enormous sophistication—but almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value.

Gladwell writes:

Here he was, a man with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world. He wasn't holding forth at academic conferences. He wasn't leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious university. He was living on a slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cut-off T-shirt. He knew how it looked: it was the great paradox of Chris Langan's genius.

"I have not pursued mainstream publishers as hard as I should have," he conceded. "Going around, querying publishers, trying to find an agent. I haven't done it and I am not interested in doing it."

It was an admission of defeat.

Really—says who?

Gladwell's explanation for what he believes is Langan's epic failure goes to the heart of his main thesis about success—that it cannot be explained by understanding what a person is like but only by where he or she is from. It's not clear, precisely, why Gladwell considers this is a revelation, not a tautology, but he does. The social science bookshelf is filled with studies linking achievement to background. Most recently, the economic mobility project of the Pew Charitable Trusts found, for instance, that nearly half "of those born to parents in the top quintile [income] who have a college degree remain at the top, [which is] nearly triple the percentage of college graduates born to parents at the bottom that make it to the top of the income distribution." In any case, all stories of success or failure are construed after the fact and the same set of circumstances often leads to fundamentally different outcomes, the explanation for which typically invokes those circumstances. (For example, one man's inherited wealth leads to the revolving door of the Betty Ford Clinic, while another's leads to the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.) To claim, as Gladwell does, that "extraordinary achievement is less about talent than opportunity" overstates the obvious while letting the rest of us, who are not overachievers, off the hook. "People don't rise from nothing," he writes.

We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

Chris Langan, the oldest son of a woman who had four boys, each with a different father, the last of whom was an abusive alcoholic, was raised with none of the advantages that might have allowed him to prosper. Though he won full scholarships to the University of Chicago and to Reed College, and enrolled at Reed, he left before the end of freshman year, a crew-cut kid among long-hairs whose mother forgot to fill out the financial aid forms. Then he went to Montana State, and his car broke down and a professor wouldn't let him change a morning class for an afternoon class, and Langan left there, too.

If Langan had had what Gladwell, citing the psychologist Robert Sternberg, calls "practical intelligence"—knowing what to say and who to say it to—he might have graduated from college, gone to graduate school, become an academic, written peer-reviewed articles, sat on innumerable committees, and made something recognizable out of his life. But lacking the kind of family background from which, Gladwell says, such knowledge comes, he was doomed to failure.

For some reason, the Langan story makes Gladwell think of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, another young prodigy ("Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,") who was also a depressive and a miscreant: at Cambridge he tried to poison his tutor. Rather than being sent home or to jail, Oppenheimer was set up with a psychiatrist and allowed to continue his studies, a turn of events that Gladwell attributes to his practical intelligence:
Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

The sad tale of Chris Langan resonates with me. It is very hard to rise above what you know no matter how "bright" you are. The story of Oppenheimer is the opposite. It is hard to fall from grace when your parents are affluent and well-connected. That's the friction that means that the "meritocracy" claimed by our society will never really honestly work.

How to Play to Win

Malcolm Gladwell has written yet another delightful article. This one is in the New Yorker and deals with strategy and tactics when you are an underdog. As usual, Gladwell builds his argument from little nuggets, stories, that relentlessly make his point:

Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

...

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

...

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. ... George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

...

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

You really should read the whole article. It is delightful. It is typical Malcolm Gladwell.

However, for me the killer bit was this throwaway comment Gladwell made about central bank financial policy:

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

In the context of the article this comment was simply pointing out another example where the insiders define the rules, and therefore they ignore other viewpoints and thus lose the chance to creatively deal with a situation. The good news is that Ranadivé software company is thriving. The bad news is that they guys who define the rules, the central bankers, don't see that the underlying game has changed and they need to change the rules to accommodate reality. We need a David to take on the Goliaths of central banking.