Book Review Time: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

[WhatsHisNuts]

For those of you that actually read books, I highly recommend Outliers. I've read the other two books by Malcolm Gladwell (Blink and The Tipping Point) and I think Outliers is the best of the bunch. This is very much along the lines of Freakonomics.

The part that hooked me was about junior league hockey. He starts by explaining that junior hockey is the perfect meritocracy. Kids play against kids in their own age group and the best are filtered into travel leagues and the like until you end up with the best kids playing in a league of the best players in their late teens. It makes perfect sense. Only the best kids get "promoted" to the higher leagues....then he starts looking at the birthdays. How come the majority of kids playing at the highest level of amateur hockey were born between January and April? It's because the cut off date for each age group is January 1st. The kids born closest to the beginning of the year are more physically mature than those with late year birthdays.....that means they are more likely to outperform them and get promoted. Then they get put into leagues with better coaching, more ice time, etc. The kids with late birthdays get left behind at an early age and don't have the opportunity to ever catch up.

It's good stuff.

 

[BobbyBlueChip]

(Blink and The Tipping Point).

:mj02:

 

[WhatsHisNuts]

:mj02:

You're kidding, right?

 

[Woodson]

Substitute hockey with baseball and you have what was a good summary of my first 17 years on the planet...

BBC -------------->:142smilie

 

[WhatsHisNuts]

Substitute hockey with baseball and you have what was a good summary of my first 17 years on the planet...

The point of the book is that there are all sorts of "hidden" advantages that successful people have. Nobody comes from nowhere to become successful. In the case of a lot of sports where there are several tiers of talent leagues (baseball, hockey, soccer), your birthday is one of the most important factors in your success....that's kind of crazy when you think about it.

Another great section talks about Bill Gates. Sure the guy is super smart, but he grew up in a town that had one of the first computer labs in the country and he happened to live close enough to a university that allowed him to use their computers in the summer and on weekends. There were only a few dozen kids in the world that had that kind of access. Almost all of the guys that are responsible for the computer programming boom were born during the right three year span and had access to computers that most people didn't.

 

[BobbyBlueChip]

Seems to me that you've finally found an author that substantiates your belief that you'd have had an illustrious athletic career if not for your December birthday - so I'm probably not going to be able to change your mind.

Blink and Tipping Point in a sentence -

Make a point and have 3 examples of when it worked, and then state that sometimes it doesn't work as in this example.

But Oprah loves him, so I obviously could be wrong

 

[The Sponge]

being born in early Jan makes me realize why i have scratched and clawed all the way to the middle.

 

[dawgball]

I agree with BBC about Gladwell. I think his books are primarily hogwash. Just about any occurrence can be supported by "evidence" when positioned correctly.

Greats Birthdays:

Tiger - December 30th
Jordan - Feb 17th - didn't really make it in the junior leagues
Gretzky - Jan 26
Bonds - Jul 24th
Kobe - Aug 23rd
A-Rod - Jul 27th

These were just the first "greats" that came to my head.

I think Gladwell is a great researcher that has a talent for finding evidence to support a belief he has.

He is no Steven Levitt.

 

[Woodson]

Feb. 5th... :SIB

It's been a cakewalk I assure you.

 

[rawli007]

Feb. 5th... :SIB

It's been a cakewalk I assure you.

:mj07: :mj07: :mj07:

 

[Terryray]

Certainly no Levitt, Gladwell is a good journalist and not research specialist in areas he covers.

Gladwell's books are fun to read for all the facts he digs up and thinks about.

Like many folks not carefully trained in logic, rational thinking and research, most his arguments suffer mightily from confirmation bias. The hockey piece is a classic of this. He just triumphs the confirmatory evidence, and makes a lot of it. Anyone trained in scientific thinking would first ask, when confronted with his hypothesis, is "How many kids born early in the year didn't make it to the high levels of play later?". That's the first thing you look at to test the theory, and it isn't even the last with him.

But as I said, I read him knowing you're not going to get this, so I just read his stuff for lots of the fun bits you find. His sweeping conclusions, extrapolating from small examples, you don't see carefull researchers doing--that's what journalists are for.

there are superb books for general public out there by genuine and fine specialists, covering some of these topics, like Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" and "Unequal Childhoods" by Annette Lareau.

Gladwell's books are very good conversation starters, as you can see from this thread. I do recommend him to some folks.

 

[WhatsHisNuts]

Certainly no Levitt, Gladwell is a good journalist and not research specialist in areas he covers.

Gladwell's books are fun to read for all the facts he digs up and thinks about.

Like many folks not carefully trained in logic, rational thinking and research, most his arguments suffer mightily from confirmation bias. The hockey piece is a classic of this. He just triumphs the confirmatory evidence, and makes a lot of it. Anyone trained in scientific thinking would first ask, when confronted with his hypothesis, is "How many kids born early in the year didn't make it to the high levels of play later?". That's the first thing you look at to test the theory, and it isn't even the last with him.

But as I said, I read him knowing you're not going to get this, so I just read his stuff for lots of the fun bits you find. His sweeping conclusions, extrapolating from small examples, you don't see carefull researchers doing--that's what journalists are for.

there are superb books for general public out there by genuine and fine specialists, covering some of these topics, like Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" and "Unequal Childhoods" by Annette Lareau.

Gladwell's books are very good conversation starters, as you can see from this thread. I do recommend him to some folks.

Love the passive aggressive last two lines Terry.

Have you read the book? I've read Freakonomics twice, and don't see how your argument against Gladwell doesn't apply to Levitt?

You're interpretation on the hockey issue and how it should be studied is flawed. How can you talk about logic and rational thinking and say that the best way to test the theory would be to look into the kids from that age group that didn't make it? The question is, "Why do the majority of upper level hockey players have birthdays from Jan 1 - April 30?" not "Why didn't the kids with birthdays from Jan 1 - April 30 make it?" That's asinine.

As for your lesson on confirmation bias, thanks, but I've read Freakonomics too. I think you can search this site and find me accusing the God Squad of this very same line of thinking. Perhaps an example of confirmation bias could be found in your own post.

All that said, I know Gladwell doesn't have the credentials of Levitt, but you can't simply dismiss his arguments without bringing some kind of counter argument using facts. I'm open to it, but I can do without the sweeping generalities.

 

[Terryray]

Sorry about that line which comes across as passive/aggressive!

I mean that I recommend Gladwell's books to folks that are sophisticated enuf in their thinking to critically see past the flaws and find the good nuggets.

You are clearly one such person, as all of us can tell from your posts! As you know, don't comment on lotta them 'cause they are beyond me...

I just get my dumb mind stuck on certain narrow piss-ant things. The hockey hypothesis - if child has birthday from Jan 1 - April 30, then he has better chance to play upper level hockey. Classic "affirm the antecedent and deny the consequent" to test it.

For example, if full moons cause hi criminal behavior, how would you test that? Not by looking up all the nights of full moon and see if there was hi criminal behavior (80% or more folks take this wrong and merely confirmatory option) - but by looking up how many night there might be full moons with low criminal behavior.

finding lottsa full moon nights with hi criminal behavior, you merely confirm the proposition. Could be lotta full moon nights with low criminal behavior too - those would deny the proposition.

Similarly, don't look at the kids with birthdays from Jan 1 - April 30 who make it to upper level hockey, that merely confirms the proposition - but look up how many kids with birthdays from Jan 1 - April 30 who didn't make it - those would deny the proposition if similar to percentage of later birthed kids.

The larger representation of early birthed kids in upper level hockey could be do to sheer larger numbers of them getting in program, or something else - who knows. Correlation is not a cause, you need to test the theory of cause. The height/leadership correlation is another example of this, and you'll find lots more. Bill Gates had lots of cohorts in his situation. What are they doing today?

Now of course, I doubt it there is another big reason early birthed kid in upper levels hockey -- there is most probably something to this causation Gladwell proposed - but point is - affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent is only valid way to put theorem to test (i.e. "prove it"). We should all do the Wason and Johnson-Laird test over and over until it sinks in - and then still fat chance of always being in that little 4% of correct people.

I'm sure I've fallen to this bias in posts here. I'm human. The best logicians and scientist do to, tho less than we do. Hard to keep these all to human biases away and look at world clear, logical and skeptical all the time.

but I know you'll keep me in line!

"the God Squad" :mj07:

now my brain is wore out and I'm moving to the sportsbar thread...