Finally- People calling BS on Malcolm Gladwell
I liked Malcolm Gladwell's initial book Tipping Point . I also like his long form essays at the New Yorker which make you think differently about most issues. But when they are converted into a book form, things started going haywire. Anecdote on anecdote to disprove or prove theories.
Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, 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.
...The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings... Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes...
More criticism:
David Cowan- Gladwell's Igon Value Problem
Earlier on From Joel on Software
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