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Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
Apr. 20th, 2010 11:46 amI find Gladwell entertaining but frustrating and irritating, and his books seem to be getting worse. This one told me a lot of things I already knew and followed them up by drawing erroneous conclusions.
Okay, one thing I didn't actually know was that the way league hockey players are chosen in Canada, by having a cutoff date of Jan 1 and picking promising players when they are relatively young, privileges those who are born right after Jan 1 (since for small kids, a differential of months in growth and strength is pretty large). So that was interesting. However, Gladwell then goes on to say that if Canada only had two hockey leagues, one of which had a different cutoff date, say, July 1, it would have twice as many hockey stars! Uh... well, that's true, but so would it if it had two hockey leagues both of which had the same cutoff date, or if it had two hockey leagues where the players were chosen by, I don't know, hair color. The point is, having that artificial cutoff date makes it unfair for wanna-be hockey players born later in the year, and means the hockey league isn't utilizing the inborn Canadian hockey talent in the best way, but the number of hockey stars is a constraint artificially imposed by the size of the league.
The whole book's like that: sloppy. We learn to our vast surprise that you have to practice to be good at things, who knew? And that kids with parents who nurture their kids' skills turn out to be better at those skills in general than those who aren't that lucky! Bill Gates was not only smart, he was also lucky! (And yet another inconsistency: Gladwell asserts that everyone in Gates' computer club had the same opportunities Gates did, yet at the end of the book he bemons that Gates was the only one who had these opportunities. Uh, which one is it?)
And then there's the summer vacation thing. Gladwell has this argument that Asians are better at school than US students because they don't have summer vacation, and they don't have summer vacation for deep-seated cultural reasons: because working in a rice paddy means you work all year, unlike wheat farming where you have large down periods, which gave rise to the idea that students should also have large down periods. Uh, what? Maybe it's because Gladwell isn't a girl, but anyone who's read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books knows that winter wasn't exactly people sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And kids worked all year round. When they weren't in school they were working in other ways. (Laura, when not in school, got jobs sewing and so on.) His thesis just Makes No Sense At All.
And yet I will probably keep reading his books. They're the book equivalent of Cheez Balls. Not particularly good for you, probably not real cheese either... but addictive.
Okay, one thing I didn't actually know was that the way league hockey players are chosen in Canada, by having a cutoff date of Jan 1 and picking promising players when they are relatively young, privileges those who are born right after Jan 1 (since for small kids, a differential of months in growth and strength is pretty large). So that was interesting. However, Gladwell then goes on to say that if Canada only had two hockey leagues, one of which had a different cutoff date, say, July 1, it would have twice as many hockey stars! Uh... well, that's true, but so would it if it had two hockey leagues both of which had the same cutoff date, or if it had two hockey leagues where the players were chosen by, I don't know, hair color. The point is, having that artificial cutoff date makes it unfair for wanna-be hockey players born later in the year, and means the hockey league isn't utilizing the inborn Canadian hockey talent in the best way, but the number of hockey stars is a constraint artificially imposed by the size of the league.
The whole book's like that: sloppy. We learn to our vast surprise that you have to practice to be good at things, who knew? And that kids with parents who nurture their kids' skills turn out to be better at those skills in general than those who aren't that lucky! Bill Gates was not only smart, he was also lucky! (And yet another inconsistency: Gladwell asserts that everyone in Gates' computer club had the same opportunities Gates did, yet at the end of the book he bemons that Gates was the only one who had these opportunities. Uh, which one is it?)
And then there's the summer vacation thing. Gladwell has this argument that Asians are better at school than US students because they don't have summer vacation, and they don't have summer vacation for deep-seated cultural reasons: because working in a rice paddy means you work all year, unlike wheat farming where you have large down periods, which gave rise to the idea that students should also have large down periods. Uh, what? Maybe it's because Gladwell isn't a girl, but anyone who's read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books knows that winter wasn't exactly people sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And kids worked all year round. When they weren't in school they were working in other ways. (Laura, when not in school, got jobs sewing and so on.) His thesis just Makes No Sense At All.
And yet I will probably keep reading his books. They're the book equivalent of Cheez Balls. Not particularly good for you, probably not real cheese either... but addictive.
