Kahneman/Gladwell etc are selling attractive and novel conceptualisations and stories, not complete science.
A lot of what they are saying attracts attention and becomes more likely to be researched further. This is important and great and sometimes leads to disproofs such as the example here.
There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study. It's not that the ideas are necessarily more likely to be false - this is an important distinction and I think the article misses this point.
But, even when disproven, the popular science books still remain on the shelf and the wrong ideas from them still get repeated widely. On forums including HN.
The authors still want to sell their old books, even when they contain ideas now known to be wrong. And the stories they tell are still attractive, even if they are misleading a whole generation of people.
> There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study.
If you're a researcher are you going to pursue Malcolm Gladwell's latest crackpot associations simply b/c they're popular or a substantive problem that appears and stands on its own merits.
Just because one story in his book was wrong, it doesn't invalidate the whole book. That's like saying evolution theory is wrong because you have found some paleontologists wrong interpretation of a random artifact.
I suppose science is never really complete, that's what people should keep in mind.
Funny thing is Gladwell admits he doesn't think coherency or consistency matter, he just wants to sell books:
"As I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things." - Malcolm Gladwell
Edit: I stand by my interpretation. Gladwell's books aren't useful sources of knowledge, but they ARE a commercial gem. He takes a clear intuitive idea, and wraps enough text around it to fill a book. So high-concept that anyone can discuss his books at a cocktail party, even if they havent read it. Maximum virality. It does sell a lot of books.
He says readers are indifferent to those things, not that he doesn't value them. So you could draw that conclusion, but he doesn't state that explicitly.
That quote doesn't support your claim. "Writers and critics value X, readers don't" doesn't necessarily* imply "X doesn't sell books", and it definitely doesn't imply "and selling books is all I care about".
*Readers might not care about X, but they might care about what critics think of a book. This makes sense: as a reader, I'm probably not capable of critically evaluating the arguments in a book, so I have to rely on critics to find out whether or not the arguments are solid.
You're being snarky towards Gladwell, and yet you're constructing a narrative around him that is simply not supported by the evidence you've provided.
> I stand by my interpretation. Gladwell's books aren't useful sources of knowledge, but they ARE a commercial gem. ... Maximum virality. It does sell a lot of books.
None of this means that Gladwell only cares about selling books.
It was something of an exaggeration. I'm capable of doing many things that realistically, I'm not going to bother with.
But I don't think "clear thinking" is a solution to this problem. I can read a book and say "the facts as presented don't fit the narrative", which is what I did with paulsutter.
If I'm really dedicated, I can look up references. I can bypass the paywall, read a journal article, and see that the author has misrepresented the results.
But I can't read a book and say "wait, you're completely ignoring the effect that in-fighting in the Roman senate had on politics in Britain circa A.D. 50", because I don't know anything about that subject. I don't even know that it's relevant. Unknown unknowns.
I can't know everything, so I have to rely on other people.
This is close to how the food industry operates. It intentionally builds products get superficially resemble known good food, but without expensive nutritional qualities or sustainable or ethical production practices , and then says that it's OK because non-expert consumers don't directly observe any problems..
Whenever something becomes mainstream it's because it has been stripped of deeper context to appeal to the consuming masses. Pop Science will inevitably piss off scientists just like art critics will scoff at inexperienced amateurs or public commentary. Bite-sized feel good scientific content fashioned for larger audiences can come across more concrete than it should - you're right on that. If it comes at the expense of a more "scientifically minded" public, i'm fine with that. We're better off in the world of TED than we were before it.
I think a better world would be one in which TED talks were nuanced and full of maybes and the audience loved the lack of certainty, saw it as opportunity, and many of them were even prompted to labor and take their part in resolving those uncertainties.
Are we really? The social patterning is the religious revival meeting, and that's precisely the wrong way to frame science if you want to give outsider a realistic impression of what it means and how it works.
Pop-sci has a terrible flattening effect. It gives the public the mistaken impression that their opinion is worth as much as a professional's, because it's not so hard really after you've read about it in a cheap paperback.
It's the mindset of "evolution of just a theory" and "climate change scientists are only in it for the money" and "my opinion of string theory is just as valid as that of a PhD working at the Perimeter Institute of Princeton - and what is a perimeter anyway?"
I'm not suggesting we should return to the happy era of pipe-smoking public science paternalism of the 40s and 50s.
But the alternative meme - that's it's all just a point of view - is just as destructive and stupid.
Gladwell, Godin, TED, and the rest are enablers of that mindset, whether or not they agree with it personally.
There should be a word for pop science that teaches people to think rationally and run good experiments in their own lives, separate from the junk Psychology Today or Gladwell vomit out.
I get the criticism because I imagine most of us work in a field other people do not understand the complexity of and would like to over simplify. However, I would rather they have a cursory understanding of what I do, what problems I am trying to solve and the challenges I face than have none. I feel the same about many areas. I think that environmental change is a problem, but I can do little to actually solve the problem other than attempt to understand it and influence policy with my votes or money. I am interested in various scientific fields, but hardly an expert, so I follow them at a surface level. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than nothing.
Nor was I saying that "nothing" was the argument. I am simply pointing out that TED, science journalism and "storytelling" is generally a societal good, despite their flaws. Should we approach all things critically? Of course. I'm not a big Gladwell fan myself and I can't stomach Godin on a good day, but my view of the TED culture is much more positive for the reasons I outlined above.
The greatest enduring benefit of having studied and trained as a journalist is the experience gained as 'the gatekeeper' of information, and therefore the ability to interpret news more thoroughly. That, and the fact most news is depressing garbage as nutritional for your brain as sweetener is for your gut, is why I only skim the news these days.
Most journalists / writers are decent people aiming to communicate as much as they can, as clearly as they can, with overly tight time-frames and (less so online) limited news-holes.
They won't write "may be X" if they can write "is X" - therefore, "may be" (and related modifiers like could, perhaps, up to, close to etc) mean "not definitely" and are usually safe to ignore.
They won't paraphrase someone if they have a direct quote just as specific - therefore, any general comments have been created to attempt to fit what someone said into the narrative angle of the piece. They may be inaccurate (and few things frustrate me more than the outragists of the world turning a newspaper story into somebody's direct quotes).
If the headline / lede seems outrageously unfair and Occams Razor suggests there must be more to the story, then there will usually be additional information in paragraph 5 that makes the story less outrageous and more normal. Genuinely shocking stories (whistle-blowing, massacres, genocide) don't need to lead with the outrage. Genuine stories also stick around for days with new information or different angles - therefore it's safe to conclude outrageous headlines are burying the mundane facts and can be ignored, until they show up many days in a row.
Obviously these are generalizations, they don't account for truly terrible writing like the Daily Mail, gossip magazines, and current affairs television, and anyone who reads enough news with a critical eye probably comes to the same conclusions (ie, nothing special about me). What this awareness gives you of course is the ability to unwind a complex narrative out from a simple story.
So don't "Beware Simple Stories" - rather, develop your own expertise in interpreting them.
TED sells tickets. Malcolm Gladwell sells books and appearances. They won't do that as well as they do now if they didn't embellish their stories with facts and points that the general masses relate to. On the bright side - Anything these people do to shift the attention of this generation from cars, hoes and money is a step closer to a somewhat brighter future for all of us.
> We can measure the rate of learning. Google scholar counts the number of times a paper is cited by other papers. I believe that well-informed scholars who cite the original paper ought to cite the subsequent papers.
Possibly related, but Google and the very concept of PageRank was born out of Page and Brin's work on Backrub, which attempted to surface the importance/relevance of an academic paper based on which other papers cited it.
What the author seems to miss is that before he could describe decay pathways he had to learn what an isotope was. We shouldn't mistake the simplestory-tellers for tenured scholars - their job is not to render dissertation. It is to provide insight appropriate to the audience's level of understanding.
I think everyone should know of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. To quote from Michael Crichton:
> Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Is this affected by reader feedback, e.g. article comments on the publisher site, or off-site comments like blog posts or HN? If domain experts regularly critique journalists, will this influence future articles on the same topic?
I think this happens in reddit sometimes when people pick out nuances in the comments. It's also lead to the meme of "I come to the comments to see why the headline is wrong."
So yes, this effect can be mitigated, but I doubt it affects the credibility of the publisher much at all.
Is every article written by the same author? Is that author known for having many wrong articles? Is the paper accurate in other topics that you have an understanding about?
There's a bit more to it than "if one article was horribly wrong - they all are".
Avoiding this problem (and it is a problem) is largely why I perform my own research across an aggregate of sources rather than rely on a single source for a topic I'm not already familiar with.
Rather ironic, considering that Michael Chrichton thought Global Warming wasn't a big deal[1]:
> At the end of the book, Crichton gives us an author’s message. In it, he re-iterates the main points of his thesis, that there are some who go too far to drum up support (and I have some sympathy with this), and that because we don’t know everything, we actually know nothing (here, I beg to differ). He also gives us his estimate, ~0.8 C for the global warming that will occur over the next century and claims that, since models differ by 400% in their estimates, his guess is as good as theirs. This is not true. (...)
> Finally, in an appendix, Crichton uses a rather curious train of logic to compare global warming to the 19th Century eugenics movement. He argues, that since eugenics was studied in prestigious universities and supported by charitable foundations, and now, so is global warming, they must somehow be related. Presumably, the author doesn’t actually believe that foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is left.
Kind of makes me wonder how much I can trust Crichton on anything. :)
I suspect that what Michael Crichton actually objects to is when the media publishes things that contradict his personal and political biases. Obviously any paper that would do so is either entirely incompetent or outright deceitful.
I don't see how this criticism has anything to do with his point. But if you must, and if you would like anyone else to take your criticism seriously, I suggest citing Crichton's work and addressing it directly. Here's a lecture that touches on the subject:
Well, the whole point of Crichton's thesis quoted by bdhe was (paraphrasing) "You can judge how much you can trust somebody, by first observing how much you can trust them on some topic you know about."
It's only fair that I get to apply his own point to himself. A fine novelist he may be, but climate expert he isn't.
Ah OK. In the quote I think the word "consistently" is significant, and I've not seen folks from the mainstream take issue with anything else he said other than the environmental skepticism stuff.
> They are wrapped with a crudely drawn distribution curve on the cover and published to a tourism market...
This reminds me of the lessons of Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan/Antifragile) who makes similar points about naive interpretations of statistics and their naive applications to most areas involving decision making.
I did really enjoy Blink though... I'm ashamed to say that I've barely started Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman's more scientific take on the same stuff) still.
42 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 94.7 ms ] threadKahneman/Gladwell etc are selling attractive and novel conceptualisations and stories, not complete science.
A lot of what they are saying attracts attention and becomes more likely to be researched further. This is important and great and sometimes leads to disproofs such as the example here.
There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study. It's not that the ideas are necessarily more likely to be false - this is an important distinction and I think the article misses this point.
But, even when disproven, the popular science books still remain on the shelf and the wrong ideas from them still get repeated widely. On forums including HN.
The authors still want to sell their old books, even when they contain ideas now known to be wrong. And the stories they tell are still attractive, even if they are misleading a whole generation of people.
If you're a researcher are you going to pursue Malcolm Gladwell's latest crackpot associations simply b/c they're popular or a substantive problem that appears and stands on its own merits.
I suppose science is never really complete, that's what people should keep in mind.
Each of them have the goal of selling books.
"As I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things." - Malcolm Gladwell
Edit: I stand by my interpretation. Gladwell's books aren't useful sources of knowledge, but they ARE a commercial gem. He takes a clear intuitive idea, and wraps enough text around it to fill a book. So high-concept that anyone can discuss his books at a cocktail party, even if they havent read it. Maximum virality. It does sell a lot of books.
*Readers might not care about X, but they might care about what critics think of a book. This makes sense: as a reader, I'm probably not capable of critically evaluating the arguments in a book, so I have to rely on critics to find out whether or not the arguments are solid.
That does perfectly identify the target market for Gladwell books.
> I stand by my interpretation. Gladwell's books aren't useful sources of knowledge, but they ARE a commercial gem. ... Maximum virality. It does sell a lot of books.
None of this means that Gladwell only cares about selling books.
That, my friend, is a skill you can acquire and grow.
Since we're on the topic of popular science books, here's a reasonable read that can help you start improving:
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Thinking-Clearly-Rolf-Dobelli/dp/0...
But I don't think "clear thinking" is a solution to this problem. I can read a book and say "the facts as presented don't fit the narrative", which is what I did with paulsutter.
If I'm really dedicated, I can look up references. I can bypass the paywall, read a journal article, and see that the author has misrepresented the results.
But I can't read a book and say "wait, you're completely ignoring the effect that in-fighting in the Roman senate had on politics in Britain circa A.D. 50", because I don't know anything about that subject. I don't even know that it's relevant. Unknown unknowns.
I can't know everything, so I have to rely on other people.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/04/29/beware-the-too-comp...
Pop-sci has a terrible flattening effect. It gives the public the mistaken impression that their opinion is worth as much as a professional's, because it's not so hard really after you've read about it in a cheap paperback.
It's the mindset of "evolution of just a theory" and "climate change scientists are only in it for the money" and "my opinion of string theory is just as valid as that of a PhD working at the Perimeter Institute of Princeton - and what is a perimeter anyway?"
I'm not suggesting we should return to the happy era of pipe-smoking public science paternalism of the 40s and 50s.
But the alternative meme - that's it's all just a point of view - is just as destructive and stupid.
Gladwell, Godin, TED, and the rest are enablers of that mindset, whether or not they agree with it personally.
Most journalists / writers are decent people aiming to communicate as much as they can, as clearly as they can, with overly tight time-frames and (less so online) limited news-holes.
They won't write "may be X" if they can write "is X" - therefore, "may be" (and related modifiers like could, perhaps, up to, close to etc) mean "not definitely" and are usually safe to ignore.
They won't paraphrase someone if they have a direct quote just as specific - therefore, any general comments have been created to attempt to fit what someone said into the narrative angle of the piece. They may be inaccurate (and few things frustrate me more than the outragists of the world turning a newspaper story into somebody's direct quotes).
If the headline / lede seems outrageously unfair and Occams Razor suggests there must be more to the story, then there will usually be additional information in paragraph 5 that makes the story less outrageous and more normal. Genuinely shocking stories (whistle-blowing, massacres, genocide) don't need to lead with the outrage. Genuine stories also stick around for days with new information or different angles - therefore it's safe to conclude outrageous headlines are burying the mundane facts and can be ignored, until they show up many days in a row.
Obviously these are generalizations, they don't account for truly terrible writing like the Daily Mail, gossip magazines, and current affairs television, and anyone who reads enough news with a critical eye probably comes to the same conclusions (ie, nothing special about me). What this awareness gives you of course is the ability to unwind a complex narrative out from a simple story.
So don't "Beware Simple Stories" - rather, develop your own expertise in interpreting them.
Given a choice between thinking hard and an easy answer we tend to prefer the later until it no longer meets our needs or becomes clearly wrong.
Possibly related, but Google and the very concept of PageRank was born out of Page and Brin's work on Backrub, which attempted to surface the importance/relevance of an academic paper based on which other papers cited it.
> Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Very intriguing when you think about it.
So yes, this effect can be mitigated, but I doubt it affects the credibility of the publisher much at all.
There's a bit more to it than "if one article was horribly wrong - they all are".
Avoiding this problem (and it is a problem) is largely why I perform my own research across an aggregate of sources rather than rely on a single source for a topic I'm not already familiar with.
> At the end of the book, Crichton gives us an author’s message. In it, he re-iterates the main points of his thesis, that there are some who go too far to drum up support (and I have some sympathy with this), and that because we don’t know everything, we actually know nothing (here, I beg to differ). He also gives us his estimate, ~0.8 C for the global warming that will occur over the next century and claims that, since models differ by 400% in their estimates, his guess is as good as theirs. This is not true. (...)
> Finally, in an appendix, Crichton uses a rather curious train of logic to compare global warming to the 19th Century eugenics movement. He argues, that since eugenics was studied in prestigious universities and supported by charitable foundations, and now, so is global warming, they must somehow be related. Presumably, the author doesn’t actually believe that foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is left.
Kind of makes me wonder how much I can trust Crichton on anything. :)
[1] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michae...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCCvOv3qZY
http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?id=111
It contains one of my favorite observations:
"...most people make the assumption of linearity in a world that is largely non-linear."
It's only fair that I get to apply his own point to himself. A fine novelist he may be, but climate expert he isn't.
Anyway, I do recommend watching the lecture.
> They are wrapped with a crudely drawn distribution curve on the cover and published to a tourism market...
This reminds me of the lessons of Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan/Antifragile) who makes similar points about naive interpretations of statistics and their naive applications to most areas involving decision making.
I did really enjoy Blink though... I'm ashamed to say that I've barely started Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman's more scientific take on the same stuff) still.