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

Gladwell claims to have revolutionised our view of the world by showing
us, how little things make a big difference.  From the scientific point
of view, there is nothing new to it.  In science, it is called an
unstable equilibrium of a system.  Such a system makes a huge leap when
it gets even tiniest "push" in a proper direction (theoretically, the
leap is infinite).  Gladwell claims to discover, HOW this can be done
in a specific situation.  Had he really done so, it would have been a
remarkable discovery.  The reality is that his entire book reminds me
an old anecdote, which was popular among scientists about 30 years ago.
 The anecdote goes like this.  A physicist-experimenter comes to a
theoretical physicist with a graph, depicting his results and asks the
theoretician to explain it.  Theoretician starts the explanation, then
the experimenter notices that the theoretician holds the graph upside
down and tells him about it.  Without a shred of embarrassment, the
theoretician turns the graph the right way and, as if nothing happened,
starts explaining a totally opposite relationship.

Here is one example.  In Chapter 2, Gladwell describes the trip of Paul
Revere with a warning that British were coming.  He claims that the
trip was so successful, because Revere travelled at night, everybody he
needed was at home and they understood that if somebody wakes them up
during the night, it must has been very important and they hurried into
action.  I am pretty sure that, if the Revere trip was not successful,
Gladwell would have easily explained it as follows: nobody likes being
awaken during the night, their brains did not work properly and they
could not appreciate the importance of Revere's news.  Revere should
have travelled earlier in the day.

Yet another example of this kind can be found on page 96.  Gladwell
describes an experiment to convince students to take tetanus
vaccination.  There were 2 groups: one was told regular information
about tetanus, while the other was shown some very scary pictures of
tetanus complications.  None of these influenced students: only 3% took
vaccination.  Then both groups were given another pamphlet, where there
was a map of the campus with Health Centre marked and its schedule
attached.  After that, 28% of students took the vaccination.  Gladwell
proudly declares that this was the "Sticky Point".  I am sure that if
something else worked, he would have equally proudly declared that one
to be the "Sticky Point".  Well, how to find that "Sticky Point",
without knowing the answer?

Then Gladwell discusses how everybody is eventually connected to
everybody else in relatively few steps (six degrees of separation).
Again, this is valid only in certain conditions.  If you try to connect
someone from, say, Albania, who never went out of his village and does
not know anyone, who did, to Kevin Bacon, the chain will stop then and
there.

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
bystanders, the less is the probability that someone would try to help.
 He describes experiments of psychologists, who discovered that when an
emergency was watched by one person, the help was given in 81 % of
case, while in the case of 4 bystanders, the help came only in 31 % of
times.  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
just one experiment.

Last, but not least, in the case of Genovese, the people watching had
no idea, whether somebody else was watching and whether somebody else
called police or not, so they were not "bystanders" in the sense of the
experiment.  I can tell you though, what would have happened in Russia
of 1964: nobody would call police, but 38 men would be running after
the assailant at the first Kitty's shout and if they got him, he would
never assault anyone again.

On page 74, Gladwell discusses a totally nonsense experiment by
psychologist Mullen.  He showed to some people excerpts of broadcasts
of Brokow, Rather and Jennings, without sound, when they were talking
about Reagan and Mondale in 1984.  They scored Brokow and Rather the
same, while Jennings was scored higher when he spoke about Reagan and
lower, when he spoke about Mondale.  Guess what, this is why Reagan won
the elections!  ABC was showing most negative pieces about Reagan, but
Jennings was sending subconscious positive messages to viewers; people
subconsciously took these messages and voted for Reagan.  What could be
more stupid than that?  I was watching Jennings at that time, and there
was no doubt in my mind, where was Jennings on Reagan: he most
certainly was against Reagan, so if electors were influenced by
Jennings, Reagan would have lost.

If you think, you saw the top stupidity, here is even more.  Three
groups of students were asked to listen to an editorial arguing for
increase of their tuition.  One group was asked to listen still, the
other was asked to nod their head while listening and the third was
asked to shake their heads from side to side.  After the listening,
they were asked whether they were for or against increase in their
tuition.  Guess what was the result.  The group, which was not moving,
wanted to leave the tuition unchanged, the nodding group wanted to
increase it and the shaking group wanted to decrease the tuition.  Here
is my suggestion to anyone: who doubts this to be a top nonsense: make
an experiment yourself.  I guarantee you, you will not get even close.

On page 119, Gladwell discusses a girl Emily, who spoke to herself on a
much more advanced level than she spoke to her parents and comes to the
conclusion that all children can do it, and reproduces a story which
Emily told at the age of 32 months.  Well, Mozart was writing
symphonies at the age of 5, so all children can write symphonies at the
age of 5. Later in this chapter, Gladwell makes yet another discovery:
everybody thought that children like watching animals, guess what,
according to Gladwell, they do not.  I have a problem with it: all zoos
exist mainly because of children.  Myself, I always liked watching
animals, I am 66, and I still do.  Is there any way to brake it to
Gladwell that he can not make conclusion from just one experiment?

On pages 152-154, Gladwell describes the Zimbardo experiment where he
made a mock prison at Stanford University and discovered that normal
people due to circumstances all of a sudden became hard-rock sadists.
The very first night, they woke prisoners in the middle of night and
made them do push-ups.  This is such a nonsense: I do not believe for a
second that normal people would do it on their own.  Most probably,
they were told to do so by the experimenters.  I have been in jail 13
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
circumstances.

This is just not so: even in Abu-Ghraib, there was one individual, who
decided to risk his life to expose what was going on there.  Even
during Nazi terror, there were people ready to risk their lives to save
Jews.  Character does exist: DIFFERENT people act differently in the
SAME situation.  Gladwell's error was that he instead saw that the SAME
people act differently in DIFFERENT situations.

On page 159, Gladwell is trying to show that we are not very good at
solving abstract problems, while we are much better at solving ones
that are more specific.  His logic though is not very strong.  Here it
is.  I quote: "Suppose I give you four cards labelled by letters A and
D and the numerals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a
vowel on it always has an even number on the other side.  Which of the
cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?"
Gladwell claims that the answer is two: the A card and the 3 card and
that majority of people do not give the right answer, answering either
just A or the A and the 6. He blames for this our inability to process
an abstract information.

He is wrong.  Strictly speaking, the correct answer is 3 cards: the A,
3 and D cards.  Indeed, since we have to presume that all combinations
of labels are permitted, then it means that we might have cards marked
A on one side and D on the other, as well as A-3 and A-A.  This means
that the only card, which does not need to be checked, is the 6 card.
The remaining 3 have to be turned over.  If we presume that the card
A-D does not exist, then Gladwell's solution becomes correct.  If we in
addition presume that all A cards are the same, then the correct answer
is 1 card A.

The real reason for the confusion is the ambiguous formulation of the
problem.  It is not clear, what is given and what needs to be verified.
 Different people presumed different additional conditions and gave
their answers accordingly.  Gladwell did not understand this, so he
continues to prove his point: he gives a specific example.  I quote:
"Suppose four people are drinking in the bar.  One is drinking Coke.
One is sixteen.  One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five.  Given
the rule that no one under 21 is allowed to drink beer, which of those
people's IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being
observed?" Gladwell claims that here everyone gets the answer easy: the
beer drinker and the sixteen-year-old.

Not so fast.  Nobody told us that all 4 people were described to us.
What if the 16 year-old and beer drinker is the same person, the
25-year-old and Coke drinker is the same person, and 2 people were not
described at all?  Obviously, we need to check totally different IDs.
Gladwell claims that these 2 problems are equivalent.  They are not:
while we can imagine a card A-A or A-D, we can not imagine Coke
drinking beer.  All these psychological paradoxes are usually result of
some poorly formulated problems.  Gladwell just does not get it.

On page 176, Gladwell claims that humans are capable of distinguishing
seven (magical number) things and this is why Bell made local telephone
number of 7 digits.  I do not buy it at all.  With the area code, we
have 10 digits and even more to call overseas.  We can remember several
telephone numbers, but majority of them, we need our address book.

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
Mennonites.  Hello, what about aunts or bees?  They function quite
successfully in much greater congregations.  As a business proof,
Gladwell describes a company called Gore Associates.  All their
factories are about 150 people, everybody is an Associate and nobody
knows, who is the boss.  Excuse me, they need to sell their products,
they need to take a big order from another company.  Who has the
authority to sign cheques or contracts, anybody?  Gladwell is taking
reading public for stupid.  Has he ever heard about big and successful
plants, which employ thousands of workers under one roof?  If yes, what
about the magical number 150?  Whatever does not fit his argument, he
usually ignores.  Sad.

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