Sunday!

James Hanley in reply to James Hanley says:

Tod,

Of course de Soto is something more than just a journalist, and he has a whole research team that actually does real research, and his writing is based on that real research.

Journalists rarely have a deep understanding of any field. They know an amazing number of facts about something, but the actual disciplinary knowledge that really helps a person sort through those facts and make real sense of them is usually missing.

Why are the best books on evolutionary theory written by real biologists, the best books on physics written by real physicists, and the best books on economics written by real economists? Because they know more than just a bundle of facts and have more than just a superficial understanding of the relevant theoretical bases for analyzing those facts.

(Politics has no actual good popular books: Everything written by journalists and political hacktivists are lacking all relevant theoretical knowledge, and political scientists for some reason appear uninterested in, or incapable of, writing popular works….or it could be that the field still has too little real knowledge on which to build a truly intelligent popular book.)

Gladwell, as I’ve noted here before, is an insanely good writer, one of the few of whom I’m actually feel-it-in-my-bones jealous. So good that fools the reader into thinking he’s saying something profound, or at least definitely true. On a closer reading and some reflection, his arguments are generally very superficial and based on very flimsy evidence.

I’m not opposed to all writing by journalists. Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why seemed pretty solid to me (although, admittedly, it’s not my field so I might have missed out on the weaknesses an expert would catch).Report

James Hanley in reply to James Hanley says:

Tod,

I have read some of his work, including the whole of “What the Dog Saw.” And that’s why I haven’t read “The Tipping Point.”*

As to my guess–admittedly a guess–about the book under discussion, I read the blurb at Amazon.
From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Matt Richtel, a brilliant, narrative-driven exploration of technology’s vast influence on the human mind and society … examines the impact of technology on our lives through the story of Utah college student Reggie Shaw, who killed two scientists while texting and driving. … Richtel interweaves Reggie’s story with cutting-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains, proposing solid, practical, and actionable solutions to help manage this crisis individually and as a society. … A Deadly Wandering explores one of the biggest questions of our time—what is all of our technology doing to us?—and provides unsettling and important answers and information we all need.

If that’s not a “sky is falling” blurb, I’ve never read one. If it doesn’t accurately reflect the book, then the blurb writers should be vilified for false advertising.

Assuming the world is always changing, what is the problem with noting how it is changing and taking stock of the things we are both gaining and losing?

Because we never really understand what we’re gaining and losing as it’s happening. That’s the journalist’s conceit, that they can explain things to us in real time. I’m on the historians’ side; it’s going to take a while to really make sense of all this.

Of course we want to try to understand, because it’s puzzling. And the journalists feed on that desire, as well as on their own delusions of being able to understand contemporary social change, to make a good living. Not that they’re doing anymore harm than the folks who keep telling me that drinking the right vodka will make me cool.

Look, I fully admit I could be wrong about this particular book. I’ll stand firm on my claim that I’m right about the genre in general. The nature of journalism is to swoop in, do some cursory reading that probably feels like serious research to the journalist but that doesn’t compare to the depth of knowledge a dedicated scholar has, write something about it, without knowing what their cursory research didn’t cover, and then move on to another topic to do the same thing all over again. There’s a reason they call it journalism, not scholarship, and the purveyors journalists rather than scholars.

__________
*Re: “The Tipping Point.” One of my habits is to read the bad reviews of books on Amazon before the good ones. I ignore the ones that are clearly ideologically motivated (“This author is a commie/socialist/fascist/market-fundamentalist,” etc.) and look for the ones making substantive critique. So just now I did this for TTP. Lo and behold, the first 1 star review begins:

This book has no substance. There is one central idea – if a phenomenon reaches a certain critical mass, it will grow exponentially. Gladwell then “backs up” this idea with anecdotal fluff that is mildly entertaining, but a waste of the reader’s time.

That’s pretty much how I’ve described him.

The third review contains this:

This is the second Gladwell book I’ve read, and unfortunately its as bad as the first (Blink!). His basic point is that little things can make a big difference. Gladwell’s problem, however, is that he doesn’t know what he’s writing about, and it’s a fatal flaw.

For example, early in this book he relates how a “small change” in Brooklyn policing strategies turned into a “large drop” in crime. In reality, Gladwell is wrong on both counts. “Broken windows” policing referred to by Gladwell was a large (not small change), and the “large drop” in crime Gladwell referred to had little or nothing to do with it. [This reviewer then goes on to explain that claim, which is well supported in the criminology literature.]

The fourth 1 star review says in part:

It was a series of assertions with promises to delight and explain, and the explainations and proof never came. Worse, the reader is left believing that these assertions are facts. …
Mr. Gladwell continually asserts that a statistical correlation implies cause and effect. …

These are not ideologically motivated reviews, but substantive critiques. And at that point I decide that the odds of my finding TTP worth my time and money are quite remote.

Anyway, I was familiar with Mort Grodzins’ and Tom Schelling’s original development of the concept of tipping points (well, the original concept was in physics, but their application to sociological questions) before Gladwell wrote his book.Report