🚀 go-pugleaf

Fabrikant wrote:
> Book review: M. Gladwell, The tipping point,, Little, Brown and Co.,
> 2000

Some of your objections are OK, but some are unduly harsh on the
author. A book cannot be pure gold from cover to cover, because in
between the author and the reader, there are 20 imbeciles with Lit and
Marketing degrees.

> Gladwell claims to have revolutionised our view of the world by showing
> us, how little things make a big difference.

I'm not sure (from reading your examples) that he's shown this, but
authors have been known to make bigger claims from less (for instance,
the Freakonomics book by the UChicago author).

> Gladwell describes the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, when 38
> neighbours watched from their windows for over 30 minutes and nobody
> called the police.  He explains this as a "bystander problem": the more
>... First, these experiments really prove nothing: if you take a
> different group of people, you get different percentage, different
> nations would react differently, it is impossible to generalize from

Actually this apathy has been pretty well established, some well known
studies were done in subways ad bus stations. Look up the Piliavin
study.

> of Brokow, Rather and Jennings, without sound, when they were talking
> about Reagan

A collection of completely useless people. Anybody influenced by any of
the above is an imbecile.

> On pages 152-154, Gladwell describes the Zimbardo experiment where he
> ... people due to circumstances all of a sudden became hard-rock sadists.
> ... years, no guard would do it on his own.  This could be done in
> Abu-Ghraib, but again, it was ordered from above.  From this
> experiment, Gladwell comes to a false conclusion that there is no such
> thing as character, since "good" people become "bad" in proper

No, the conclusion is correct. There again are many studies that show
the same thing, the first one probably was Stanley Milgram's. Abu
Gharib may have been ordered from above, but it was also low grade
human beings acting on their own motivation too.

> Yet another equally stupid magical number is 150.  Gladwell claims that
> this is the optimal size of a factory or group of apes or group of

Maybe ths problem is that in trying to cover all these various topics,
Gladwell has spread himself too thin.