{"id":231,"date":"2008-12-18T13:38:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/?p=231"},"modified":"2021-06-12T03:36:55","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T03:36:55","slug":"gladwell-tasty-but-not-nutritious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2008\/12\/18\/gladwell-tasty-but-not-nutritious\/","title":{"rendered":"Gladwell – tasty, but not nutritious"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell and his new book.\u00a0 And everyone now includes me.<\/p>\n

Gladwell and excellent writer.\u00a0 He is one of the very best storytellers you’re likely to read.\u00a0 But telling a great story and revealing great insight are two very different matters.\u00a0 And\u00a0I\u00a0have never experienced any real\u00a0insight from reading anything Malcolm Gladwell has written.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Josh Kaufman at Personal MBA<\/a>\u00a0says<\/a>, he writes abundantly interesting, but functionally useless stories.\u00a0 Of course the problem isn’t his lack of useful insight–its\u00a0the pretense to useful insight\u00a0.<\/p>\n

In his own words:<\/p>\n

“People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience.” (New York Magazine<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This of course is prefaced by some faux humility bullshit like:<\/p>\n

When I wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTipping Point,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put it to waste<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just for your mom.\u00a0 uh-huh.<\/p>\n

The reality of Gladwell’s work is that he writes a kind of intellectual entertainment.\u00a0 It make you feel\u00a0smarter.\u00a0 Sort of like the way people buy gym memberships but never go–simply buying the membship has made them feel like they’re doing something without the strain of actually doing anything.<\/p>\n

I liken him to the WWE’s sport entertainment, or to the Ted conference’s intellectual entertainments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And speaking of Ted…\u00a0I’ve never been myself, but I’ve watched dozens of presentations online.\u00a0 At first I was blown away by all the smart people with smart ideas.\u00a0 But with each presentation I found myself a little more unsatisfied.\u00a0 Until I realized there there was nothing nutritious in them.\u00a0 They are like eating a bowl of Cheerios–the box says they’re part of a balanced breakfast and\u00a0contain\u00a011 essential nutrients and vitamins, but on reflection the stuff is empty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ted presentations are little more than intellectual performance art, displaying all the outward appearances of communicating great insight (making\u00a0everyone feel smarter)\u00a0without\u00a0delivering any\u00a0meaningful insight (so no one actuals becomes smarter).<\/p>\n

I’d like to leave with a few words from Michael Pollan<\/a>\u00a0(one of Gladwell’s colleagues) which curiously come from a completely different subject, but relate to the exact same problem.<\/p>\n

Eat food.\u00a0 Not too much.\u00a0 Mostly plants… That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell and his new book.\u00a0 And everyone now includes me. Gladwell and excellent writer.\u00a0 He is one of the very best storytellers you’re likely to read.\u00a0 But telling a great story and revealing great insight are two very different matters.\u00a0 And\u00a0I\u00a0have never experienced any real\u00a0insight from reading anything Malcolm Gladwell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-3J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}