Holy shit that’s a deep cut
Am I remembering correctly that a chief complaint about Gladwell was that he fudges statistics and case studies to make points that don’t actually manifest from the referenced data? The fact that he uses statistics and case studies has done a lot to validate his perspective to mass audiences while leaving much to be desired from those who specialize in the act itself of research. This is somewhat to be expected given that neither Gladwell nor Lewis are scientists. They’re journalists.
In that regard, I agree that they’re both intelligent. To me, their intelligence largely manifests in their storytelling ability. Both excel at disseminating and reframing complex concepts and clusters of information into a compelling narrative. But both are also journalists, not scientists.
A person could almost be forgiven for thinking they’re the same kind of journalist, too, but there’s a key difference to me.
Take, for example, Moneyball. Lewis said hey, aren’t baseball statistics fun?! And he made them fun, but that’s because the story was never about the actual numbers, nor does he turn to them to ever validate his story. His storytelling relies on a concept called “narrative fidelity,” wherein the numbers could be 100% bogus, but readers don’t care because the story feels true.
Gladwell, at least in my perception, might seem similar, because his storytelling style compels us to accept his stories as true. In some instances, we as readers might not even realize we’re massaging the data if we look into it because now we have an emotional attachment to the story being true.
The difference, though, is that Gladwell is pointing to his statistics as the point. Yes, isn’t this narrative fun and interesting, and now that he’s got your attention, just so you know, everything he said is true because of the data it relies on.
It’s one thing to be like here are a bunch of numbers to support the narrative, but if you look into them and I’ve made any errors, I accept that, because the numbers were never the point. The story, the events, the people, the reporting, those are all true regardless of whether he got the numbers wrong.
Gladwell is offering a very different kind of book where you have to accept the numbers as the premises his entire narrative is built on, and if those don’t hold up, it’s hard not to feel like the entire book was a giant waste of time. Indeed, it’s not even that he gets the numbers wrong, it’s that he uses them to generate different and sometimes completely unrelated claims. The reader feels like a rebel, like we’re digging deep underneath the surface no one else ever looks beyond. Maybe that’s enough for a lot of people.
So to me, the comparison is Michael Lewis is Michael Crichton for nonfiction narratives (Jurassic Park era). No one is attacking the dude for using cutting edge science to posit what would happen if we cloned dinosaurs just because that science has now been shown to maaaaaaaaybe not work the way he thought, but then Crichton never said and from this, we can know all of these things about the world and what would really happen if we cloned dinosaurs. He was just telling a cool story. Ray Bradury’s Martian Chronicles is a great book, as is Andy Weir’s The Martian, even though both utilize science that we can happily discard now as false.
Malcolm Gladwell is Michael Crichton for nonfiction narratives from State of Fear onward, where suddenly he’s a climate change denier. He makes all of these claims as though what he’s saying is predictable or falsifiable because he based them on hard numbers, while in the same breath saying don’t question or judge him for any bad science, he’s just a journalist.
