Charlie Rose

worldwatcher  03/05/2011 11:57 PM Report

So, more on Malcolm Gladwell -- *another* one of those "hardworking", "successful", "experts" at Charlie Rose's PBS table:

"Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not an academic, and as a result his work does not meet the standard of academic writing. He has been accused, for example, of falling prey to a variety of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Critics charge that his sampling methods have resulted in hasty generalizations and selection biases, as well as a tendency to imply causation between events where only correlation exists.[28][29][30] One review of Outliers accuses Gladwell of "racist pseudoscience" due to "using his individual case studies as a means to jump to sweeping generalizations on race and class status",[31] while another review in The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".[32] Gladwell has also received much criticism for his use of anecdotal evidence and general lack of rigor in his approach.[33][34]

Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker[21][35] have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach. Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, Pinker sums up his take on Gladwell as, "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning", while accusing Gladwell of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise:[21] "I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."

A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.[36] The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented that Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding that, "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method." An article by Gladwell inaccurately referring to Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds as the "Norwegian hacker Linus Torvald [sic]" was referred to by the group as a typical example of alleged sloppy writing.[37] Gladwell's literary approach is spoofed on the Web site the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator. [38]"

-- Malcolm Gladwell's biography at Wikipedia

REMant  01/12/2010 10:21 PM Report

Selling via a narrative was the traditional form of advertising, which you can easily see by looking at old magazines, or listening to old radio programs. Just as with expository writing (tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them) and news writing (who, what, where, when, detail, supporting information), fiction and ad writing, once had a standard formulas long since forgotten except by some direct mailers, resulting in pointless ads, and movies and novels with no ending. Both good stories and good ads once had a purpose, to convey a moral or suggest a remedy. That was, of course, in a time when products actually were designed to do things, and ppl cared about conduct. The main problem I see with learning to write, as I said the other day, lies not so much with lack of practice, altho that is necessary, but with developing the self-confidence that will allow you to edit your work and produce those dozen drafts it takes to explore and develop a topic. Pride and associated jealousy gets in the way here, too. BTW, the DoD has long had labs concerned with the psychology of interpreting aerial photographs and the like.