Proof

“…you don't need to have had known or reported concussions to develop this brain disease. [chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)]. It really shows us that those multiple, repetitive sub-concussive blows to the head that are experienced by so many athletes in many different sports can bring on the beginnings of this disease."
Dr Robert Stern

A while ago, Malcolm Gladwell gave a public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania on the subject of “proof.” He asked: What do we need to know about the harmfulness of college and professional football before we take action? That may range from complete banning of the game to somehow taking steps to reduce the likelihood of injury, especially to the brain.

Gladwell began by discussing the very lengthy time it took for society to do something about the seriousness of black-lung disease among miners. Then he moved on to the matter of recent deaths that have occurred among football players

Not surprisingly what counts as proof for Gladwell are examples of players who have died as a result of brain injuries incurred during their playing days. It doesn’t take more than a very small number, perhaps only one, for Gladwell to “prove” the harmfulness of the game.

And then, in the light of that evidence, to take action, not waiting for more evidence, more deaths and if so how many. Rather doing something now to insure it will not happen again.

He pointed to the hazards of this hard-hitting game by citing several examples of players who had committed suicide and where autopsies of their brain discovered a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

They included Junior Seau who had played in the NFL for 20 years, Dave Duerson, Terry Long and Andre Waters who shot themselves to death, and the linebacker Jovan Belcher who killed his girl friend and then himself.

According to Liz Neporent, “Of the 34 former NFL players who have died and donated their brains to research, the percentage of them who have pathologically confirmed CTE is staggering – over 90 percent, a 2009 University of Michigan report found.”

And before an audience of Penn students, Gladwell brought up the case of 21-year-old Penn college football player Owen Thomas who committed suicide and whose autopsy indicated he had mild stages of the same type of brain damage seen in athletics who have played much longer.

These occurred in spite of continuing improvements in the design of helmets and modifications in the rules of the game to reduce these risks. But players today are bigger, stronger and faster than they used to be.

Gladwell confined his remarks to football. But what about all those other rough and tumble sports—hockey, rugby, wrestling and boxing, where the likelihood of major brain injury is just as likely?

In his lecture he argued forcefully for the complete elimination of the “brutal” game of football. “Brutal” because of the cumulative effects of blows to the head that almost all football players experience.

He argued that football has no place in colleges or university settings where something called an education is supposed to be occurring. (At Reed College, where I taught for many years, there was no football team. But “Ultimate Frisbee” was wildly popular.) In Gladwell’s view, the enormous financial benefit to the institution from all those well-healed alumni is no justification for continuing to maintain a football team.

Gladwell is a cool and effective speaker. If you’re interested in this subject have a look:

This Revolution Was Tweeted

Last year Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker about the role of social media in generating protest movements. He argued they have always emerged without anything like the contemporary forms of social networking. The revolution will not be tweeted was the way he put it.

As is his wont, he provided an example or two in support of his argument, those that emerged well before the Facebooks and Twitters of modern day networking. Most of his discussion centered on the civil rights movement in the South that depended on well organized, well planned protests by a group of friends.

Glawell asserted these and other pre-Internet revolutions occurred “without e-mail, texting, Facebook or Twitter.” He goes on to say that, “What mattered more was an applicants degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.” Here he is following the views of the Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam whose research suggested that strong ties among the activists are critical to the success of any protest movement.

In contrast, Gladwell argued that social networks are characterized by weak ties. “Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch.” He believes that such weak ties do not give rise to high-risk activism.

Here, as in his other works, Gladwell over-generalizes from one or two cases to a much larger population of other ones. In this respect, he ignores counter examples, ignores the fact that not all revolutions, or activist movements occur for the same reasons.

He also does not take into account that today’s world is not the world of the sixties or revolutionary France where different factors played a role and where other reasons motivated individual behavior. Martin Luther King did not need what the people of Egypt needed and he didn’t have the tools the protesters have in Egypt either. Every social protest movement is different. In this respect, they are the same as any other natural phenomena.

What is the evidence about the events in Egypt? Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was recently imprisoned there for twelve days credits Facebook for starting the revolution that resulted in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. It was Ghonim who created a Facebook page in honor of Khaled Said, who was allegedly tortured and killed in 2010 by Egyptian policemen in Alexandria.

A comprehensive article about recent events in the Arab world by David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger in the February 13th issue of the Times takes issue with Gladwell’s claims about limits of social networks. They write that Facebook groups were “part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world.” The evidence they review leaves little doubt that Egyptian revolution was a well-organized, well-planned movement that took advantage of the enormous power of social networks. They were by no means limited by their purported weak ties.

We know that thousands of Egyptians were galvanized by it to join the revolt. As James Glanz and John Markoof put it in Wednesday’s Times, “Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons.” We know that the movement did not spring de novo from a few people on the street, that there was a small group or organizers who were instrumental in planning and organizing the protest in Tahrir Square and elsewhere now in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and Libya.

We also know that shutting down the Internet and access to Twitter and Facebook was one of the first steps taken by the Egyptian government to quash the revolt. And we know that similar steps are now being undertaken in other Arab countries where the protests are gathering momentum.

In the light of recent events in the Middle East I thought that Gladwell would at least qualify his views. No, he hasn’t. Earlier this month he reaffirmed them in a short note at the New Yorker online News Desk saying that “the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Ah, the wonders of the confirmation bias.

To be sure individuals who have for years experienced oppression and whose rights have been abrogated will find ways to communicate with one another. But that rarely leads them to revolt. The tools that make revolutions possible are just as necessary as the reasons that motivate them. In fact, the tools of social networking may, in the final analysis, lead to the restoration of human rights at a much greater pace that has historically been the case.

Note: On Wednesday’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter. He spoke about the role the online service played in the Egyptian protest and how its leaders had been using Twitter as early as 2008.

Gnawing on My Kindle

There is a graphic in Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent collection of essays, What the Dog Saw, that says it all. Pinker’s review appeared in The Times Book Review of November 15th; the graphic is by Christoph Niemann. It is the clearest and the cleverest critique of Gladwell’s works I’ve ever seen.












On my reading, Gladwell’s essays and books are characterized by a maddening logic of beginning with a particular incident, an anecdote, usually a colorful one, and building step by step with succeeding series of equally amusing anecdotes a major priniciple of behavior.

From a thin slice of the pie, in combination with others in turn, he arrives at a conclusion that he claims to have wide generality. Oh, that it was so simple. Pinker, the author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, agrees. While acknowledging that some of the essays Gladwell has written are “masterpieces in the art of the essay,” he asserts that most include misleading definitions, faulty statistical reasoning, and only a limited understanding of research findings in psychology.

“The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience …. But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater”… it is demonstrably false.”

Pinker concludes by exclaiming that Gladwell's endless stream of cherry-picked anecdotes “had me gnawing on my Kindle.” Perfect.

While I don’t have a Kindle to gnaw on, I have read almost everything Gladwell has written, including his three books (The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, as well as almost all of his New Yorker essays). There is no doubt he is an amusing and extraordinary curious essayist with a rare talent for identifying fascinating, often ignored questions. I like his stuff a great deal.

However, his reasoning about these issues is another matter. I have blogged about his works here before, perhaps more often than any other writer. But nothing I have said or, indeed that Pinker has said, can quite match the critical perceptiveness of Christoph Niemann’s three-part graphic that accompanied Pinker’s review.

Full Court Press

In Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell suggests that talent and hard work are two of the factors responsible for outstanding achievement in any field. Neither one alone is sufficient to guarantee success but in combination with three other factors—opportunity, luck and timing—they account for the notable achievements of the likes of Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer and The Beatles.

However, Gladwell “switches gears” a bit in his latest essay, How David Beats Goliath, in the May 11th issue of The New Yorker. Here he asks why is it that the underdog so often defeats a superior opponent. He cites statistics that this occurs in over 25% of the wars fought in the past two hundred years, where weak combatants defeated more powerful opponents. And when the weaker army chose an unconventional strategy, their winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63%

To account for this “remarkable fact” Gladwell turns to the Biblical story of David and Goliath. He says that David defeated Goliath because he didn’t play according to Goliath’s rules. Goliath was clearly the stronger of the two and David didn’t stand a chance in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, he did the unexpected, “reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” Gladwell says this broke the “rhythm of the encounter” which in turn “must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target.”

He discusses the surprising victory of the Arabs, led by the Englishman T. E. Lawrence, over the Turks near the end of the First World War. Gladwell explains how Lawrence led the Bedouin warriors in an unheard of march across six hundred miles of blazing hot desert to the port town of Aqaba. The Turks were expecting an attack from the British fleet patrolling off the water off the Gulf. Instead, Lawrence’s masterstroke was to attack from the rear following their audacious march across the desert. Here again Gladwell concludes, “substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.”

The life of T.E. Lawrence, his relationship with the Bedouins, and the desert march he led them is vividly depicted in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence) and Lawrence’s own The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence, by profession an archeologist (“a dreamy poet" according to Gladwell) was never accepted by British Army officers; “The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider.”

Much of Gladwell’s article illustrates this point by way of yet another example of defensive strategies for overcoming superior opponents—in this case, applying a full court press in women’s basketball. He writes about Vivek Ranadive, founder of a computer software company, who decided to coach his daughter’s Junior League basketball team. Ranadive knew nothing about the game and couldn’t understand why teams retreated to the opposite end of the court each time they scored a basket.

Instead, he wondered why didn’t they defend the players who were inbounding the ball at the other end of the court. He reasoned that a full court press, applied consistently throughout the game would give weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger ones. This required considerable endurance and constant pressure on the part of the weaker players, like those on his daughter’s team.

Gladwell concludes his discussion of successful applications of this technique by Ranadive and other coaches with this generalization: “We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability…because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.”

He also suggests that underdogs not only work harder than the Goliath’s, “But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable…”

You might wonder why the full-count press is not more widely employed in college and professional basketball games. Perhaps it is too exhausting. Perhaps it only works against players who are poor ball handlers. Or perhaps a team that knows how to pass quickly and thereby move the ball rapidly up the court can easily counter it. No doubt that is true for most first-rate college and professional basketball teams today.

A Skeptical Eye

The central concern that Grayling expresses in his essay, Pressing Questions for Our Century, (discussed yesterday) is the responsibility that each of us has to keep abreast of developments in science and technology. To me, this not only means being well informed about scientific research, but also knowing what is required to evaluate the findings reported in the press and in the books that we read. This isn’t easy for a layperson to do. It requires considerable education and careful research.

So for example when you read one of Malcolm Gladwell’s extraordinarily popular book about decision making (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) or his latest (Outliers: The Story of Success) on the sources of distinguished accomplishment, you know how to approach his claims critically, judge their accuracy, and, determine whether or not the evidence that he cites or that you find on your own, is adequate grounds for his assertions.

This means knowing something about the methodology of scientific research and the techniques one employs to identify alternative accounts of research findings. The first step in achieving this is in asking the “right” questions, in knowing what questions to ask and what not to ask. This is always the hardest part. It is like composing the first sentence in a book or story you wish to write. Often a writer will struggle with that first sentence for months but once it clear what it will be, the tale often takes off on its own.

In Blink for example, Gladwell claims the rapidly made decisions (“in the blink of an eye”) are every bit as reliable and sometimes more so than decisions made more deliberately. However, that is not exactly the finding reported in the experiment he discusses in support of this claim. What is reported are judgments of teaching effectiveness made by female subjects only, from repeated video clips that lasted as long as several seconds each, and that the female students never actually rated the teacher’s overall effectiveness but instead a set of verbal behaviors that, aggregated together, were presumed to measure it.

Nor does he fairly describe studies suggesting that predictions of marital happiness can be accurately made after observing an hour of a couples’ interaction or that a decision-making algorithm for predicting cardiac arrest can be made on “very thin slices of evidence.” In fact, research in both areas developed after long and complicated testing procedures that involved sifting through a good deal of data and many hours of personal experience. These were not snap judgments or carried out in the blink of an eye.

So it isn’t only the reader has the responsibility to approach science critically. It is also the science writer who has an obligation to report accurately and know how to carefully evaluate the generality of the reported primary studies. A science writer also doesn’t create a very deep understanding of a phenomenon on the basis of a series of (unrepresentative) anecdotes, as Gladwell often relates, no matter how colorful they are.

In the press we often read about a relationship between what we eat and behavior, or between some type of experience and a disease. But we rarely read about the strength of the relationship or whether it might be due to any number of other factors. Nor do we read for whom the findings hold and for whom they don’t. And most such press reports are framed in the language of causality when it fact one can never presume there is a causal relationship from correlational data

No doubt I can say all this because of my research background and training. Nevertheless, I believe any reader can approach press reports and books about science with a critical eye. It takes a certain style of thinking and of questioning to do this. But with practice it can become “second nature” to anyone. Just keeping asking questions, read with a skeptical eye, and be mindful of how the findings were derived and for whom they do and do not hold.

Exceptions to the Rule

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers currently ranks number 2 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list; it has been high on the list for the past 15 weeks. As I noted in my February 6th blog, the popularity of Gladwell’s books is a matter of concern to me, as I believe his arguments are only superficially credible. When considered more critically, they are often, in my view, seriously in error.

The best that any reader can do is to approach them with some degree of skepticism. Look for the exceptions to his claims and to the flaws in his logic. That is the only way a reader can go beyond their apparent validity to know if they are genuinely sound. One of the few reviewers who have done that is Joseph Epstein in his Weekly Standard essay, Jack-Out-of-the Box.

At the outset Epstein makes it clear that Gladwell has a practice of setting up straw men as the “received opinion and conventional wisdom” of the day. For instance, Gladwell’s central point is that “personal explanations of success don’t work.” Whoever claimed that was all there was to explaining success?

Gladwell claims that the magical 10,000-hour rule of practice is required to achieve any degree of success. How bizarre! Whoever believed that success in any field does not come without countless hours of dedicated practice? But 10,000 hours? Who can ever know how many hours any genius devotes to his or her craft?

By identifying several exceptions to Gladwell’s arguments, Epstein exposes the major limitations of his account. Any reader might best approach Outliers in a similar fashion. Think of an exceptionally successful person and try to explain his or her success. Is their life history consistent with Gladwell’s view?

Regarding the very considerable success of Bill Gates, Epstein says “Gates wouldn’t have been the success he is today if he hadn’t been born wealthy and sent to a private school that could afford him unlimited time to work on a mainframe computer…” He then points to Steve Jobs, who Epstein claims came from a broken home, grew up with adoptive parents, and had none of the advantages that Gates did. Exception number 1.

Gladwell seems to discount the importance of natural talent, the kind of talent you are born with (leaving open the question of how that occurs). For example, he argues that the time of the year a person is born is crucial for athletic success in hockey and soccer. Epstein counters by saying that over time athletic ability tends to even out and so will physical gifts.

Here, he points to Michael Jordan who reached his full height rather late in his youth. He mentions Brett Favre who is possessed of “physical courage of a kind that date of birth, culture, or anything else can’t explain.” In turn, I will mention Roger Federer whose genius on the tennis court is a matter of “mystery and metaphysics” as David Foster Wallace put it. Exceptions 2, 3, and 4.

Gladwell argues that people born between 1935 and 1945 benefited from belonging to an extremely small birth cohort that in turn led to smaller classes and less difficulty in getting in to the college of their choice. Epstein adds: “…this generation, of which I happen to be a member, has never put a president in the White House. Go figure.”

Gladwell discuss the Beatles at some length and attributes their success to the many long hours they spent in their early years playing all night in the bars and strip clubs of Hamburg. Again, he ignores the natural musical talent that surely played a role in their enormous success. As Epstein says: “But they also happen to have had, in Paul McCartney and John Lennon, two immensely gifted songwriters, along with a fortuitous—and no doubt fortuitous—combination of personalities and talents…” Eliminate Lennon, eliminate McCartney—poof! The Beatles are just four more working-class kids hoping to win the rock’n’roll lottery.” Score another exception or two.

Lastly, Gladwell spends a good deal of time comparing the fortunes of two men of very high intelligence—Chris Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He claims Oppenheimer became the success he did because he, unlike Langan, had the benefit of a superb education, a cultivated, wealthy family, and a “sense of entitlement,” none of which was available to Langan. In response, Epstein writes that Oppenheimer “…was a man of such suavity, subtlety, and layered complexity as to be quite beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s ken and comprehension.”

In his effort to discount the role of natural talent, a keen sense of desire, and distinctive personality, Gladwell simplifies throughout his treatment the incredible complexity and variability that govern the course of anyone’s life. Yes, culture, date of birth, effort, social class, ethnic background, etc are all important. But so are chance, merit, gumption, and all those unknown factors that combine in totally mysterious and unpredictable ways to give rise to extraordinary achievement.

Explaining exceptional accomplishment is surely not as straightforward as Gladwell implies. There are limits, boundary conditions, if you will, for each of the factors he identifies. It is his failure to acknowledge these constraints and to make any effort to deal with them that make Outliers so misleading and presumptions to me. Epstein is to be praised for making the effort to confront these realities squarely.

Outliers

I have admired the articles and books that Malcolm Gladwell has published ever since he began writing for the New Yorker. At first, I was deeply impressed by the way he wrote. He is a story-teller, a good one and is able to bring alive the abstract findings of large and important areas of social science. His essays in the New Yorker are entertaining, instructive, and more often than not, concern issues of consequence.

But as the years went by, I began to worry about their appeal. I began to ask What are the special responsibilities of a science writer, one whose work is widely read and much admired? Is it enough that he popularizes the science, in most cases, findings from social psychology that he writes about? Or does the popularity of his work also call for a more critical approach to the material?

As a social scientist with a good deal of applied research experience, I thought Gladwell often simplified issues that were far more complicated than he acknowledged. I worried about the studies that he didn’t talk about and the qualifications they would place upon his claims. I was troubled by his tendency to over-generalize, as I knew his claims did not apply as widely as he implied. And then most of his essays and books consist of a series of anecdotes or case studies with little in the way of analysis. A writer doesn’t create a very deep understanding of human behavior from a cascade of entertaining anecdotes.

This has been true of his previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, as well as most recent work, Outliers: The Story of Success that at this time ranks Number 1 on the New York Times List of non-fiction best sellers where it is likely to remain their for the rest of the year.

In Outliers Gladwell proposes the five-factor theory of success. He never gives an explicit definition of success. But in a very general way, it is clear what he means by the examples of extraordinary achievement he discusses--Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer, The Beatles, etc. According to Gladwell, the factors responsible for success these and other extremely success individuals are Talent, Hard Work, Opportunities, Timing and Luck.

Neither factor alone is sufficient to guarantee success. Nor is success necessarily preceded by any single one. But Gladwell wants us to appreciate the powerful role that past experiences, family background, and cultural traditions play in determining success. At the same time, he wishes to counter the tendency in our society to overestimate the role of ambition, determination, and personality traits in accounting for these cases.

At a later point, I will discuss in detail this very entertaining book. Here I would simply like to point out that Gladwell commits one of the major inferential errors that I mentioned in blogging yesterday about Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think, namely the Confirmation Bias.

In every case of exceptional achievement that he treats, Gladwell cites exclusively evidence in support of his views. Nowhere does he mention instances that might raise doubt about his views or evidence that would limit their generality. Rather, he selects cases (almost always anecdotes) that conform to his claims. In this respect I find Outliers and almost everything else Gladwell has written quite misleading.

To mention briefly one example: In writing about the considerable advantage young Canadian hockey players have when they are born early in the year (they gain additional experience playing and practicing due the January 1st eligibility cutoff date for age-class hockey teams), he does not acknowledge that six of the thirty-three the players on the championship team he discusses were born in the later half of the year and, thus, are exceptions to the general claim he makes. How can their excellence in hockey be understood and would such an explanation provide an alternative account for the relationship Gladwell reports?

Recently someone asked me if in light of my concerns, I thought Outliers was worth reading. I really had to pause before answering. Yes, I said, it is surely worth it to Gladwell to write these kinds of books. And they are certainly very amusing and very well written. But unless a person approaches his works with a more critical eye, I would hesitate to recommend them.