Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Despite a panning review in the New York Times and scoffs from Joel Spolsky, I really enjoyed Outliers: The Story of Success
and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
The premise of the book is this: the circumstances that make people successful have as much to do with culture, when you were born, and your class as it does with luck and persistence. Gladwell writes,
[P]ersonal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all 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. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
Gladwell looks at what it takes to become an expert (10,000 hours of practice) and the “practical intelligence” that gets passed down from more affluent families to their kids. He notes that people who do a particular thing become hugely successful if that thing becomes huge in the profession. He examines the legacy of cultures and the affect our cultural and social heritage have on our abilities and ways we communicate.
One of the criticisms of this book has been, basically, “Well, duh.” Of course our circumstances affect our chance of success. Of course it takes a lot of practice to become good at anything. Of course our culture matters. But what Gladwell does is peel back some of these obvious bits and show us some examples of them (and occasionally the facts or an expert to back them up).
This is the other criticism of the book: that it’s all anecdotal. Gladwell puts together the story of Robert Oppenheimer with an unknown genius named Chris Langan simply because he thinks some parallels can be drawn between them. And there are. But the criticism is that Gladwell is handpicking examples to make his case, and that might be fair, I don’t know. But Gladwell certainly makes compelling cases for his arguments. One of the things he’s underrated on is his storytelling abilities. I remember details and anecdotes from Blink and The Tipping Point now still, years after I read them, and I expect the same will be true of Outliers. If nothing else, even if you don’t believe the conclusions he draws, there are some interesting stories to be told here.
In some sense, Gladwell thinks like a user-centered design researcher, which is probably why designers like his work so much. He takes qualitative data of observations and interviews and extrapolates from them models of how the world works, and this is exactly the process design researchers do. The criticisms Gladwell is getting are the same ones designers who do user research hear all the time. Truth, even if it may not be scientifically-provable truth (although Gladwell has extensive research notes, I should add), can be gleaned through insight gained qualitatively. Connections between individual examples can provide ways of looking at the world, and Gladwell (like the best researchers) does this (as well as persuasively presenting his case) brilliantly.
Just as an end note, one thing Gladwell doesn’t do is draw one obvious conclusion: there is a lot you can’t control in life. You have no control over the year you were born, the culture you were born into, or the lucky accidents that happen. In fact, chances are, all those things will work against you. No matter how hard you work, no matter what you do, you probably won’t be an outlier. But that kind of nihilism doesn’t sell books, now does it?
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2 Comments
I think Dan Seligman’s book “A Question of Intelligence” does a better job explaining the performance of East Asians on math/science subjects. Essentially, if you look at the group average, they do particularly well on the non-verbal component of psychometric tests.
This is consistent with their performance on math/science subjects. Seligman also notes possible explanations of this including:
“Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile “selection pressure” for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn’s 1987 paper refers to “the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain.” These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world’s best visuospatial abilities.”
Also, Gladwell’s explanation for Jewish legal success on working in the garment industry in NYC isn’t convincing. Seligman notes jewish performance on the verbal component of psychometric tests is above average. The Cochran/Harpending paper on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence suggests this is partly genetic. See Charles Murray’s commentary on the paper:
“Assessing the events of the 1st century C.E. thus poses a chicken-and-egg problem. By way of an analogy, consider written Chinese with its thousands of unique characters. On cognitive tests, today’s Chinese do especially well on visuo-spatial skills. It is possible, I suppose, that their high visuo-spatial skills have been fostered by having to learn written Chinese; but I find it much more plausible that only people who already possessed high visuo-spatial skills would ever devise such a ferociously difficult written language. Similarly, I suppose it is possible that the Jews’ high verbal skills were fostered, through secondary and tertiary effects, by the requirement that they be able to read and understand complicated texts after the 1st century C.E.; but I find it much more plausible that only people who already possessed high verbal skills would dream of installing such a demanding requirement.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/…/jewish-genius-10855
Outliers is a good book simply because it provided body to concepts of success that are already out there. Gladwell has provided both rational argument and solid data to show how cultural conditioning plays a crucial role to a person’s success. That is really nothing new. But in this book, Gladwell exposes it to the point of conclusiveness.
However, I find that the book got a bit more predictable and dragging a little past the halfway mark. I felt he dwelt too much on what was already obvious by that time.