Outliers (Why Louis Pasteur is 6,000 times better than Malcolm Gladwell)

Dec 17, 2010 by Michael    No Comments    Posted under: Soapboxing

So a good friend of mine recommended that I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. And because the recommendation was tied to a conversation about raising your kids and giving them the best chance at life, I listened to her, and I read the book.  And then I remembered why I avoid popular non fiction books like the plague.  Except for photography books, and books on how to cheat at bridge, or course.

That’s not to say that Outliers is a bad book; it’s not.  It is well-written, contains interesting stories, and I could finish it in 2 bathtubs worth of reading time (during the summer months, this could possibly be finished in a single bathtub, due to a lower rate of heat dissipation), which gives me a good excuse to burn some propane and take two long and extraordinarily hot baths.  So Malcolm Gladwell’s pretty much on my good side for that alone.

But… there’s a few problems.  The first is taking 200 pages or so (the type is big so I’m guessing at most there’s 30,000 words here, its the nonfiction equivalent of the typical Y.A. novel; you could read this book or “Are you there God, Its me Margaret”) to say “Be at the right place at the right time”.  Which could have easily have been said in 9 words.  Pasteur used thirteen French words to say it quite elegantly way back in 1854: “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” In English we can get it down to five: “Chance favors the prepared mind”.  So there we go, with only four more words than the title, Louis Pasteur has summarized Gladwell.  To me, this means Pasteur is something like 30,000/5 = 6,000 times more awesome than Malcolm Gladwell.

So, okay, we heard a lot of personal stories about successful people and we learned that gasp successful people aren’t magic meta-humans born with the supernatural power to bend the world to their will.  They’re well, people born of a certain culture that pre-disposes them to certain things.  i.e., people from a work-hard-plant-your-rice-and-tend-to-it-or-die-when-you-have-nothing-to-eat culture are more likely to succeed when the world transitions to an economy based on hard work and math prowess than people from an economy based on picking your nose and updating your Facebook status 25 times a day.  Also, because the world is going to make that transition in 2025, you better have been born in 2006-2007, because only 18 year old when the magic time comes is important.  So Elliott is set for life!  He’s got the magic age and I’ve turned his Buzz Lighyear pool into a rice paddy and as far as I’m concerned, my job as a parent is done.

Except now what to do with Grady, right.  I mean, the little guy was born 4 years too late.  I’d better start wondering what’s going to big in 2028-2030.  Transplanting human brains into dogs? Sounds about right.  Sascha!  Molly!  Come! … Sit!  Down!  Good dogs.  Now take this pill, hold still while I apply the saw.

Wait, this was supposed to be a critique of Outliers.  OK, sorry.  So, the whole thing is that if you ever took a graduate course in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, this shouldn’t be surprising.  Wait, you didn’t?  Well what the hell did you do in college?  Marketing management?  feh?  What’s that good for?  Really?  You’re making what!?  You’re business is growing that much each year!?!  Really!!?!!!  Can I have a job? Please?

Dammit, I lost focus again.  OK, the whole point that I’m getting at is that the idea that circumstances and chance matter as much as will and drive, etc., is nothing new.  Its old.  Its not even very interesting.  I mean, yes, Randroids will tell you that the Howard Roarkes and John Galts of the world can bend the universe to their will, but sane people understand intuitively that the baby born in a hut in a Bangladesh in 1684 is less likely to become a computer genius that a a baby born in Palo Alto in 1982.

In some ways, Outliers is a individualized take on, but there’s a holdover here from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was a much thinkier and heavily researched type of book that basically said that societies and cultures arose and propsered not because of any inherent awesome traits of their peoples’ genes or philosophies (like Jesus, or rule of law, or let your women work in the fields), but rather by a series of completely unlikely and uncontrolled factors of development like the black plague and iron ore.  And because of that western society came to dominate the world.

So I think that Diamond and Gladwell would agree that everything is basically where you’re from and timing, etc. You need to be in the right place.  You want to be a Broadway star, its better to be born in New York with  couple of high-powered producers as parents.  Got it.  Paulie Shore didn’t become a great actor in Peoria IL, he did it in Hollywood.  Got it.

So there’s the first problem.  We all pretty much get it to begin with that circumstances matter.  we probably don’t agree with Gladwell/Diamond that they’re the ONLY thing that matters, but most sane and rational people would intuitively understand that the circumstances of your life matter as much as what you put into your life.  And here’s where we get to my second problem with Outliers, which is that Gladwell makes no attempt to quantify or explain the extent of “circumstances matter”, or to even prove it exists (and yes, I’m saying that he should prove the existence of something that is intuitively obvious.  Because, otherwise, the sun would still revolve around the earth).

Gladwell never, ever supports his ideas with anything that even remotely approaches statistical validation.  Everything is raw data and “did you look at those numbers and see the trend?”  And  ”almost 50% of the students on this roster were born between Jan1 and April 30. Less than 20% were born after October 1″.

Let me take the Canadian Hockey story, which is what prompted my friend to recommend the book to me in the first place.  Although there is what looks like a selection bias in Canadian hockey toward players born on Jan 1, Gladwell never takes any means to explain how severe that selection bias actually is and to quantify it based on any kind of serious analysis.  A real analysis would take into account the birth distributions by month of canadian children.  From what I know of Canadian reproduction, their pods hatch in intervals, and those tend to cluster around November (because February is so cold in Canada that nobody can go outdoors.  They must stay home and make their pod-babies).  This might actually help Gladwell out, but he is either unable to appreciate the purpose of real analysis or unable to package it in a way that appeals to his demographic, so we don’t really know if this is meaningful insight or just a pile of spit.

He actually, at one point, tells  a story about someone who can’t get his data published in a journal because it’s “too weird”.  No, it’s not “too weird”.  The scientist just hasn’t consigned himself to a 2nd- or 3rd-tier journal yet.  Or he hasn’t sufficiently blown the editor of Nature.  Or, maybe, just maybe real statistical analysis proves that the amazing effects in his “weird” data don’t actually exist.

Then again, it might.  Gladwell doesn’t possess the intellectual curiosity enough to learn basic stats or explain them to his readers.  If you don’t understand the nature of basic stats and probability, which most people don’t, it’s very hard to understand when something is real and when it’s BS.  It’s much easier to glom on to cool-sounding terms from statistics and nonlinear systems theories (Tipping points!  Outliers!), and then try to build a coherent thesis around them; but for all his skill as a narrator, and the interesting nature of his subjects, his theories aren’t backed up with anything but his magicians tricks.  Its not to say he’s wrong, its just that he fails to quantify and prove his theories.  There’s also the niggling point that he’s forgetting that of all the Canadian babies born on Jan 26, there’s only one Wayne Gretzky (actually, he does recognize this fact, there’s at least half a dozen times in the book where he says “that’s not to say that hard work doesn’t matter, it does”, but those statements are easily tossed aside  and ignored because they don’t fit the thesis and thrust of his book).

Monty Python has a brilliant line of reasoning in the Holy Grail that reasonably convinces that we burn witches because they weigh the same as a duck because they float in water which means they’re made of wood and which can be burned because they’re witches!  The scientific method and statistics are necessary to keep nonsense away.

So, the judgement here is to read Outliers if you want to take 1-2 hot baths and hear some interesting stories about Hockey and Jews in New York and a burn out from Reid College and Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he uses the end of the book to plump up his own family story, a hypocritical ego-boosting way to say “I, the amazing Malcolm Gladwell, am really not so amazing after all.”).  Don’t read it for new poignant insight into the human condition, or for any attempt to proof or quantify said insight.

[Also, the cover has some really poor and obvious Photoshopping going on; or maybe I've just spent too much time in Photoshop lately that I notice such things]