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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Why are Gladwell's stories more vapid than any other story? Is it because he doesn't have enough data to corroborate the narratives?

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The criticism isn't that his stories are vapid, it's that a) his conclusions and wider narratives amount to borderline-meaningless just-so stories dressed up as "deep thoughts" and b) the evidence he uses to build his narratives collapses under even the slightest scrutiny.

Mix in his habits of open disdain for anyone outside of the creative class (see his comments on remote work), his books' occasional cultural supremacy issues, and his recent apologia for strategic bombing, and Malcolm Gladwell has hit the jackpot for distasteful writers.

He is, however, as others have noted, a very compelling storyteller.

Or, for me, anyway: He often doesn't deliver what he promises to deliver. I still find his writing enjoyable and he is a captivating speaker, but his stuff seems to go… nowhere.

does Robert Greene get this type of criticism?

I don't think Greene is treated anywhere near as seriously. Especially since his books tend to fall into the category (in my mind, at least) of "self-help" rather than scientific non-fiction. The Laws of Power, Strategies of War, etc. are clearly advice books, so him presenting anecdotes for examples and drawing lessons from them makes more sense than someone doing it with explanatory intent of a deeper and more fundamental phenomenon.

I consider him the Graham Hancock (see Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse) of pop culture topics. Gladwell is trying to do for pop culture which Freakonomics did for economic topics which draw from seemingly disparate elements to provide a correlation and explanation.

I'm not sure vapid is the right word. Truthy is probably more like it. Or, less superficially, he tends to cherry-pick data and observations to come up with a compelling narrative and headline that isn't really supported by the evidence.

That's correct. He ignores and sometimes intentionally misconstrues the evidence in order to tell a compelling story. He makes bold claims that are not really backed up by anything.

Take the 10,000 hours claim? Based on very little. There's nothing special about 10,000 hours. And the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims.

> the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims

Do you have more information on this? I know lots of social science studies have not stood the test of time, but I didn't know Anders Ericsson's paper had big problems.

Ericsson wrote a pop science book to set the record straight. There's a whole chapter on what Gladwell got right vs wrong.

From Ericson: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...

It's not that deliberate practice isn't a big factor and very important. It's the idea that it's massively and overwhelmingly decisive.

For example, this meta-analysis of sports performance found that deliberate practice was important but not overwhelmingly so, accounting of 18% of performance on average.

It seems like there is a lot of plasticity in human performance, and it may be the case that many of us can get pretty good at a lot of things, but there also appear to be many factors distinct from practice that make substantial contributions to performance.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161663559...

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