Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"
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Michael. Peter. Have you ever read a book by Malcolm Gladwell? Uh, I have read one of his essay collections, if that counts. It does count, because that is what his books are.

I'm going into this with complicated feelings because I actually think that some of his early work is pretty good. I'm also very aware of the difference between the fact-checking standards at The New Yorker, which are legendarily high, and the fact-checking standards at major book publishers, which are non-existent. That's great analysis for someone who has never read a Malcolm Gladwell book. I'm trying to predict what you're getting me into with this. Okay.

Well, you know, I went into this thinking Gladwell was just sort of a bog standard pop science hack. I left it thinking that he is possibly an actual psychopath who doesn't believe in anything other than his own need for fame and approval. Now that you've spent 10,000 hours reading his work, you're an expert on it. So he's a journalist. He goes to the New Yorker in his early 30s. I think it's 1996. And he's just

chugging along at the New Yorker until the year 2000 when he publishes The Tipping Point. Right. So in The Tipping Point, he posits a theory of how ideas spread across society. It says that they spread similarly to epidemics.

His primary idea is something he calls the law of the few, which claims that a small number of people are responsible for the promulgation of ideas across society. Oh, this is his thing where he makes up a capital letter name. Yes. Like the law of people.

Yeah. And what's interesting about Gladwell doing this is he's often repackaging another idea.

Right.

This is also the first time, the first indication we get that Gladwell is maybe a little bit obsessive about like the exceptional people that live among us. Maybe the 20% are really good for the other 80% of us.

So the tipping point blows up. People love it. It ultimately ends up spending eight years on the New York Times bestsellers list. No way. And catapults Gladwell to, you know, he's chattering class royalty at this point. Yeah. In 2005, he drops Blink. The thesis of Blink is...

It's essentially that human intuition is such that our split-second impressions and decisions are often more accurate than more informed, thought-out decisions. So the book starts off with an example of an ancient Greek statue that was brought to a museum in California, and various experts had an initial impression that it was an…

forgery. However, after closer study for several months, the museum determined that it was genuine. Now, it took a long time to prove it, but it turns out that the initial impression was probably right. It was likely a forgery. Woo!

Gladwell uses this and some other data and anecdotes to weave together this idea that first impressions contain these valuable bits of wisdom. And not just that, but that first impressions are in many cases more useful than conclusions drawn after careful thinking.

It's so perfect. It's such the perfect idea for that era, too, because I'm sure that if you go around the world and history looking for anecdotes that illustrate this principle, you'll find a lot of really good stories. Yeah. But it's like you can find a million good stories that illustrate that principle. But I'm sure if you looked for the exactly the opposite conclusion that we should never trust our first instincts, you would also find a bunch of really good stories. Yeah.

So it's like it's not clear that there's actually a universal rule for on either side. It's just a bunch of stories. Exactly right. I mean, it's not that there's nothing to this. It's that Gladwell overstates this thesis like brutally. Yeah. So Blink hits the top of the bestseller charts.

But this time, like the criticism from the scientific community is a little bit more aggressive. Yeah. The Daily Telegraph publishes a review calling the evidence for the thesis flimsy. The New Republic publishes a scathing review by federal judge Richard Posner, behavioral economist.

Daniel Kahneman, I believe I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, but whatever, criticizes the book publicly for fostering the implication that human intuition is magic. And that last bit is important because I read this book when it first came out and I don't remember much about it. But what I remember is that although he's often drawing on like

what feels like reputable science at least a bit he's also sort of hinting at something that's almost paranormal right by the way that statute story like when you when he asked the experts why their first impression was that it was a forgery they were like well it's not dirty enough you know statues come out of the ground so it wasn't right enough and i was like is that that's the that's the brilliant intuition you're making your book around whatever

It's also – I mean that's also such an interesting example too because these are people who are experts. It also seems really obvious that like my first impression of a statue would be completely worthless whereas the first impression of somebody who's been looking at Greek statues for 30 years –

So theirs might actually be better than my considered response, but that's as a result of all of the training. So it's like, well, yeah, it just it depends. Exactly. That's the only real rule you can pull out of it. Right. And he does. I mean, he does talk about that, right? Like it matters that they were experts. But by the time this is a Gladwell thing that I'll talk about a bit more. By the time he adds all of his qualifiers. Right. You're sort of like, well, yeah, well, then it doesn't mean anything. Right. Then this thesis doesn't matter. It's not interesting. And I blink is great because I just.

I'm just imagining someone living by this thesis, you know, rolling with their gut instinct for everything. How quickly would you die? You're driving somewhere and your buddy's like, hey, I'm going to pull up Google Maps. And you're like, no, man, I'm just going to blink it. Right. I almost wish that I had had the energy to go back and read Blink for this because...

It's by far of his major books. It's got to be the dumbest thesis. Like you read it and you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, how is that? I'm a little bit disappointed in myself for not doing it. But at the same time, I, it was the right move. I know it was. It's funny that your first impression of the book blink was actually incorrect. And it's only after reading it that you learned that it's full of shit. Yeah.

All right. Outliers. In 2008, Gladwell releases Outliers, the story of success. This is the book that this episode is about. And I'm going to present you with my best effort to sum up the thesis of Outliers. Here it is. Success is driven by a combination of luck and hard work.

Meryl Streep voice, groundbreaking. Hold on. I am going to send you the back of the jacket and I just want you to read the first two sentences. I feel like it's going to be a pull quote from like Oprah or something. It says,

Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Oh, so it's like some fucked up genetic shit. We will be taking a very dark turn towards the end of this episode when we get to the...

Let's say genetic legacy portion. Oh, we're we're two for two on dark turn for this podcast. So, you know, the initial pitch is just like you thought that rich and successful people 100 percent earned their social and economic position. But Malcolm Gladwell is here to tell you that that's not entirely true. And it's like, well, yeah, no one fucking thinks that. Yeah. I'm going to read to you a quote from early on his book where he sort of defines the thesis.

In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage.

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves, but in fact, they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. I mean, on some level, this sounds like something I agree with. Yes. Jeff Bezos is not rich because he's like an extraordinary man. He's rich because he had all kinds of invisible advantages that he himself refuses to acknowledge. Right.

So on some level, it's like, yeah, there's like structural wind at the back of rich people. Yeah. I wanted to like this thesis. I'm very sympathetic to the basics because America is a very individualistic culture that lionizes people for their achievements. And it's nice to see pushback of any type against that. Right. But on the other hand, the ideas he's debunking are ideas that like no one to the left of Ayn Rand actually believes. Right. Right.

Like I mentioned, his books are essentially a series of discrete essays. So I want to like walk through the chapters. The first chapter is about how star Canadian hockey players almost all had birthdays in the first few months of the year.

This is explained by the fact that the cutoff date for Canadian junior leagues was in January. Right. So what was happening was that at a young age, being a few months older is a big advantage. So the older kids in leagues were outperforming. Then in turn, they'd be selected for better teams, receive better coaching, have more resources dedicated to their development. Right. So if you've heard this before, it might be because…

Outliers popularized it. Or it might be because this research has been around since the 1980s. And by the time Outliers came out, it's something that was like so widely known that many schools factor it into how they evaluate students. Oh, interesting. So right off the bat, I felt like I hadn't learned anything in chapter one. And that feels weird. And then you get to chapter two. Chapter two.

is called the 10,000 hour rule. Oh, this fucking thing. This is the big one, right? The central claim in this chapter is that for anyone to be an expert in something, they need to have practiced for about 10,000 hours. Gladwell expressly states, quote, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise, 10,000 hours.

But he doesn't present any sort of like meta analysis of research or anything. Right. There's no evidence of a purported like consensus among researchers because there is absolutely no such consensus. Yeah, that's a weirdly round number. Yeah. From all the researchers that I've interviewed, a more researchy thing would be like somewhere between 8000 and 12000 hours. And like this school of thought disagrees with that. And this school of thought says it's 4000.

Like this just doesn't sound like the way that researchers quote unquote conclude things. I would also say that the concept of expertise is unbelievably imprecise. Right. Like I believe that I'm about as good at Wordle as you can be. The person who's the best in the world at Wordle is only a little bit better than me.

Right. Because the ceiling is shockingly low. Right. Whereas something like basketball or something or like cello, you really do need like tens of thousands of hours, like an incredible input. Yeah. Or some skills like, I guess, checkers or something is probably not as complex as chess.

So to master chess, you just need a lot more hours than mastering checkers. Good instincts. Because he does talk about both chess and basketball in an essay. I think that he is, you know, to his credit, talking about things like that where practice will improve you over the course of thousands of hours.

Now, he's extrapolating mostly from a single study about elite violinists that found that they averaged about 10,000 hours of lifetime practice by age 20. He quotes one neurologist who cites the 10,000-hour claim as well. That neurologist is Daniel Levitin.

Quoted as saying, no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. Okay. Which is a statement that just rings of bullshit. Right. You know, like it's just way too sweeping of a claim to be reliable. No one has ever found a case. Yeah. Right. I mean, what does that mean? Right. It's a weird thing to say. It's weird that a scientist said it. Right. Yeah.

Now, adding to my suspicions that perhaps the case is being overstated here.

On the very next page, Gladwell says, to become a chess grandmaster seems to take about 10 years. Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time. As a chess fan myself, that immediately jumped out to me as incorrect. Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, was a grandmaster at age 13 and started playing at age 5. Eight years. Okay.

So he's basically, he's saying that the only person to ever become a chess grandmaster at that

young age, without these years and years of practice, is Bobby Fischer. And then it's like, yeah, five minutes on Google, and there's three other people that have done this. So it's really not... He's not a huge...

Outlier is one way to say it. So this is the first specific example of the rule, and it is demonstrably false. I checked the end notes to find the source he used for this, and I was sort of assuming that he was using a very outdated source because most of those guys are fairly recent at the time of Outlier's publication. Sure enough, he's using a study done in 1996. Now, I couldn't find a copy of that study,

But I'm pretty sure that Gladwell misrepresented it regardless because it was still untrue in 1996. Right. And from what I can tell has been untrue since 1994. So, you know, when you mentioned the fact checking standards of the New Yorker versus the big publishers. Yeah. This is when it first hit me. You know, Gladwell and his editors were at all times one Google search away from figuring any of this out. Right. And to be clear, I'm just a casual chess fan.

And as soon as he mentioned something that I'm a little familiar with, it was incorrect. Yeah, that's a bad sign. That's a red flag, right? Yeah. There's also, okay, because this factoid has bounced around the culture, of course, for like more than a decade now. And you come across various versions of it. And the version of it that I've always kind of appreciated, it illustrates that there isn't a huge distinction between like inborn talent and practice.

that I think what he's kind of trying to debunk with this, or at least the way that I remember it, was he's saying that like, okay, you have an idea of like, yeah, Michael Jordan's this like amazing basketball player. He was born with these incredible skills. But actually like that dude is like working his ass off, you know, four or five, six hours a day for years before he gets to that skill level. Doesn't he have the dumb thing about the Beatles playing shows in Hamburg? Let's talk about the Beatles thing. So the Beatles got their start as the house band in a strip club.

Right.

They were playing covers, too. And like a lot of cover bands have not become the Beatles. And, you know, even if you're using aggressive calculations, it looks like these gigs totaled somewhere between one and two thousand hours. OK. And maybe a good time to note that Gladwell's claim here frequently switches between being a very specific statement about the importance of like ten thousand or ten thousand ish hours of practice.

And a general statement that like a lot of practice will probably make you very good at stuff. Right. Right. And his ability to like seamlessly move from one of those claims to the other is what makes it feel like you're actually sort of learning something because you're not paying attention to the fact that the basic claim here is like, if you practice 10,000 hours or so, you're going to be pretty fucking good. And it's like, yeah, man, I know. I did not need a book about this. It's almost a surreal chapter to read because like,

In hindsight, we know that this is the most influential chapter of the book. But there's not an ounce of insight in this, right, for anyone who even thinks about it for a second. It's bizarre. The last thing I'll say about this on the merits is that the guy who actually did the violin study that Gladwell essentially relies on to develop this, he calls Gladwell's chapter a provocative generalization. Oh.

Which I thought was... He still wants to get invited to Davos, whoever that scientist is. He's like, I don't want to burn any bridges, but this is bullshit. Right, right. I have this big picture complaint about the 10,000 hours idea because if you read the back of the jacket and the thesis that Gladwell is pushing in the early chapters...

It sounds sort of progressive. He's pushing the idea that successful people are often the product of circumstance. And you can see a progressive angle to this chapter too, like you mentioned, right? That it's not just about innate talent, right? It's about hard work. But a lot of the framing in this chapter is that successful people are extraordinarily hard workers and –

You realize that big chunks of this book are actually a statement that we do live in somewhat of a meritocracy, right? Or at least highly successful people tend to have earned their success in some way. And that's more than just like a statement about how much practice you need to be good at a fucking violin, right? It's a statement about the fairness of the system, about whether rich people deserve their wealth. You know, Elon Musk put in his 10,000 hours. Did you? It also feels like another one of these concepts that sounds so...

Right. Right.

So even if you believe in the 10,000 hours thing, you're still going to have to go on a case by case basis to be like, oh, well, is this an interesting standard to apply? And by the time you've done that, you're just doing it on a case by case basis anyway. I think that's that's well put. I mean, this chapter has like a hallmark of Gladwell's books. They're marketed on the back of what sounds like a flashy and compelling thesis. But then when you get into it, there's a lot of

Right. It's clickbait. Right.

One is presented to the general public. It's meant to draw in readers with like a punchy headline thesis. And the other is like this more holistic and scientifically defensible version of the book, which isn't really marketed. But Gladwell can fall back on it when his headline thesis is criticized. So there's often a big gap between what the conclusions of the book are and what the average reader thinks the conclusions of the book are. There was an interview in 2019 with him.

Right. Right.

is itself predicated on oversimplified conclusions. And that is why it sells, right? So he claims he's correcting these critics, but those critics are largely reacting to the thesis that Gladwell himself is sort of pitching to the public.

I mean, on some level, I actually feel a little bit of sympathy for Gladwell. I do think that he probably has nuanced beliefs on all of these things. And on some level, you can say that authors are not responsible for how the fucking airport markets their books.

But then I also think that the book itself doesn't have the kind of rigor that you can really fall back on. Yeah. So there was a 2013 essay published in The New Yorker responding to critics called Complexity and the 10,000 Hour Rule. There were various critics that pointed out that this is a rough average, very imprecise. And it's.

Gladwell sort of hastily admits that's true. He just responds by saying like, well, sure. But my real point was that the biggest difference between people who are good at something and people who are great at something is the amount they practice, which like, OK, but if that was your real point, why do you name the chapter the 10,000 hour rule? Right. Some of his critics pointed to studies showing that people became chess masters and pro basketball players in other countries.

With far less than 10,000 hours of practice. And Gladwell says, okay, well, but chess master is a lower rank than chess grandmaster and international basketball is easier to get into than the NBA. So they're not really experts. You're starting to see the development of like a circular logic, right? Takes 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert. And what defines an expert?

10,000 hours of practice. Right, right, right, right. So the next couple of chapters are actually, I think, the chapters that I liked the most. They are both called The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1 and Part 2. The first chapter is essentially about the limits of the usefulness of IQ based on various findings that once you hit a certain threshold, the ability of IQ to predict your success in life starts to rapidly plateau. Oh, that's actually kind of interesting.

Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. The second part is the same basic thesis, but it focuses on the plight of super high IQ guy Chris Langen. Gladwell sort of highlights this guy and...

points out that he lacks a sort of practical intelligence, which from what I can tell is sort of the same thing as emotional intelligence, the way that Gladwell presents it. The basic premise of this chapter is that this guy hasn't really done anything with his life and Gladwell's trying to figure out why. Why is the smartest guy in the world just sort of fluttering about?

He sort of cites a single study about parenting styles across different income groups and concludes that wealthier families tend to have more successful kids, which he attributes at least in part to learned behaviors that get passed down from parents who are more capable of navigating various important social situations that he says, you know, someone like Chris Langan can't navigate because he didn't have that instruction or didn't have that model. OK.

So, you know, basically two chapters to say IQ plateaus, which is cool. And then like rich kids do better than poor kids, which, okay. Groundbreaking. It's very weird to say that like rich kids are doing better than poor kids and then like

Say it's about like emotional intelligence. Right. The links between intelligence and financial status and success, like the literature on those things are just unbelievably vast. Yeah. And Gladwell barely touches it. Right. Oh, yeah. These chapters are 40 pages that reference two or three studies and a bunch of cute little anecdotes. It's just like, you know, there might be an interesting grain or two in here, but

You're way out of your depth. There's also some IQ stuff that is just sitting there ready to be debunked, like this bright, flashing red light. It's not clear to me that it's actually all that much of a paradox that somebody with a very high IQ would not necessarily be quote-unquote successful in this societally defined way if you think of IQ as being really good at taking tests. Right.

But if you're then cutting out emotional intelligence from it and like social intelligence from it, then in what way is it generalized? We don't live in a world where we're all doing fucking calculus all day. Yeah. What you're really talking about is there are certain kinds of tests that

Yeah, I mean, so what Gladwell is debunking is like the idea that if someone has a very high IQ, they're going to be able to do a lot of things.

They would be automatically successful both financially and like socially, right? And that's just not something that I think that intelligent people think about IQ. Yeah, I don't think anyone believes that. You know, that's something that might annoy IQ purists, but who cares? There's a part two of the book. You're between chapters and it's like part two, legacy. Okay. I was very confused at first.

What he means is cultural legacy. This is the race science section of the book. Ooh, good. Get the calipers out. The next chapter is called Harlan, Kentucky, and it's about the tendencies toward violence in so-called cultures of honor. Gladwell basically says that this accounts for many regional differences in violence and that Southerners

Okay.

The ethnic theory of plane crashes. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, is this the fucking South Korean thing? Oh, yeah. You would literally crash a plane into a mountain because you didn't want to talk back to your superior or something? That is correct. Okay. Now, I want to say, before I got to this chapter, I wasn't sure about doing outliers for the show. I was like...

10,000 hour rule. Yeah, it's pop science bullshit. But is there enough here? And then I got to this and I was like, oh, my God, this episode is on, you know, we're fucking doing it.

The chapter tells the story of Korean Air, an airline that over a several decades span had significantly more plane crashes than other airlines. And as the chapter title suggests, Gladwell thinks that this is because they are Korean. Specifically, he says that there are certain Korean cultural norms of communication that make crashes more likely, including more indirect manners of speaking and deference towards people in authority. Okay. Essentially,

A well-functioning plane requires consistent and clear communication among the crew and with air traffic control. And according to Gladwell, these cultural norms get in the way. Oh, my God. In an interview, Gladwell once said, the single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane. It's not the maintenance. It's not the weather. It's the culture the pilot comes from. Oh. Yeah. He doesn't back that up with data. I don't.

I think it's also the weather and shit. I think it's a lot of other stuff. The thesis is so widespread that in 2013, when Asiana Flight 214 crashed at SFO, several prominent news organizations covered the question of whether culture was a factor. The Washington Post runs a piece with the headline, "'Lack of Cockpit Communication Recalls 1999 Korean Airlines Crash Near London.'"

NBC ran a story titled, Korean Culture May Offer Clues in Asiana Crash. A reporter asked the head of the National Transportation Safety Board in a press conference whether culture might have been the cause of the crash.

So you might notice that this is essentially an unfalsifiable thesis, right? Yeah. As Gladwell himself admits, airplane crashes are super rare in large part because they require the confluence of events. It's not like it happens in movies where like one engine engine blows up. You need bad equipment, bad weather, tired or inexperienced pilots, poor communication, all of that. Right. So the idea that you can sort of yank a specific conclusion about the role of culture out of all this is

on its face suspicious. But it gets worse as you dig in. One of the first Korean air crashes Gladwell cites is Flight 801 in 1978. That flight was shot down by a Russian fighter jet. Oh!

Now, Gladwell even states this. He like acknowledges that very quickly. But then he still folds it into this broader thesis about Korean flight crews and like continues to use to like count it as one of the plane crashes that he's talking about when he when he cites the number of plane crashes. Oh, my God. He then goes on to list several other Korean air crashes throughout the 1980s, trying to make the case that something weird is happening with Korean air.

He does not give details about these flights, so I looked them all up. The very first one is a 1983 flight, Flight 7, that was also shot down by the Soviets. LAUGHTER

This time, Gladwell doesn't even mention that, which is notable, especially because this was a very big event in the Cold War. You can look up Flight 007. The plane had taken off in New York and stopped in Anchorage. So many Americans died. Reagan called it a crime against humanity. Huge deal. Huge deal. But Gladwell just lists it off as if it were another example of Korean flight incompetence.

Next on his list is what he describes only as a Boeing 707 that went down over the Andaman Sea in 1987. Do you want to guess how that plane went down? Was it shot down by India? No, you got it way wrong. North Korean terrorists planted a bomb on it. Oh. So all in all, the

Gladwell identifies seven significant Korean air crashes between 1978 and 1997. And that is sort of the basis of his thesis here. But three of them were the results of terrorists or military attacks. Yeah. I mean, frankly, this should be enough to just write off this fucking chapter entirely. But I want to mention one more thing. Gladwell uses the National Transportation Safety Board's crash report for Korean Air Flight 801 throughout the chapter.

and misquotes it several times. And as Korean speakers have pointed out, grossly mistranslates the Korean. The upshot is that Gladwell wants you to believe that the first officer sensed some danger due to the weather, but was so deferential to the captain that he didn't properly communicate it. In reality, Korean speakers who analyzed it said he very plainly told the captain that the weather was bad. I don't want to get into every little detail here, but a Korean-American blogger put it like this.

This so-called interpretation of the pilot's true intentions is pure garbage. It is so ludicrously wrong that I cannot think of enough superlatives to describe how wrong this is. Gladwell's exposition on Korean language is completely, definitely, utterly, entirely, 120% laughable to anyone who has spoken Korean in a professional setting. Wow. So what actually, what's the actual explanation for how the plane went down? It's just like straightforward pilot error. He had the information and he crashed anyway. I think that the...

The bottom line with that one, and I looked into the other ones a bit, and it seems like if you look at the reports on the crashes, it was a combination of events, but, you know, circling around bad weather and a couple of poor decisions. And that's basically it. You know, it's not much more complicated than that.

It's also a bigger problem, I think, existentially, too, because if it actually was the case that the co-pilot knew this thing and didn't say anything because of deferentialness, even that is not necessarily a cultural explanation. That could also just be that individual happens to be very deferential. Absolutely.

Let's put behind us the fact that this is unbelievably dishonest and that he full-on lies about half of these crashes or at least gets them grossly wrong. He said the single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from. And he uses Korean culture as his case study. But all he has as evidence is a single flight transcript that

And a handful of plane crashes, again, half of which were either shot down or blown up. There's no analysis of data from other Korean airlines. No data about other airlines with higher crash rates than average, nor from what I can tell, did he consult with a single Korean person. And finally, as Gladwell himself points out, reforms to internal training at Korean Air were able to completely remediate the Korean Air crash rate.

Which really undermines the idea that these like ingrained cultural norms are playing a big role. The interesting thing about this too is that it's in this one, it's not like he's necessarily taking a body of scientific work, right? That there's like a meta review of every plane crash or something. He's actually doing some sort of quasi academic study himself. He himself is going through the flights. Yes.

But what's weird is like, if it's a pop science book, there's dozens of scholars who research this. People have logs of like every single plane that's crashed, all the reasons, all the

There's probably actually like some interesting stuff there that we don't know about. And you could actually do some sort of comparative study of like, yeah, there's some cultures that are more collectivistic. There's others that are more individualistic. You could list those as a kind of like on, you know, where are they on that spectrum? And then say, you know, because like Germany is actually also very hierarchical. Like maybe Germany and South Korea do have like 0.2% more plane crashes than other countries. Right.

And that might actually be partly a little bit due to their more hierarchical cultures or something. But like you could actually do this in a scientific way. And someone probably has, honestly, because it's actually like kind of an interesting question. Like does culture play into plane crashes?

But instead of doing that or engaging with the literature at all, he's just being like, well, I found six crashes. Right. You said maybe there's 0.2% more plane crashes. The problem with plane crash data is that planes almost never crash. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're talking about crash rates that are something like...

four out of every million flights for Korean air. And that's extraordinarily high. The sample sizes we're working with here are such that science almost can't be done. I also just realized that this book is called Outliers, The Story of Success. And this chapter is just about Korean people being bad at flying planes. Yeah.

That's a better chapter title, though. So, look, that was chapter seven, the ethnic theory of plane crashes. I figured we had hit rock bottom, and then I turned the page. Chapter eight.

rice paddies and math tests. Oh, we're back in Asia, aren't we? We are spending an extraordinary amount of time in Asia. It's only half the population of the planet, Peter. I don't see why some generalizations wouldn't be justified. Now, the thesis of chapter eight

is that you can track the purported success of Asians in mathematics to rice farming. He opens up talking about how important rice is in China, and then he moves on to a very different topic, Asian numbering systems. Now, before we go on, I want to note that the fluidity with which Gladwell switches between talking about China specifically and southern China specifically and Asia generally in this chapter is unreal. Right.

Now, he posits a very simple and somewhat compelling thesis here predicated, of course, on actual researchers' work, which is that Asian numbering systems use simpler rules and simpler words than their Western counterparts, which seems to lead to Asian children developing their counting skills much faster than Western children, giving them a huge developmental head start in mathematics. Okay.

Of course, I'm saying Asian numbering systems. We're really talking about Chinese numbering systems. And then for reasons I genuinely cannot comprehend, he basically says, you know, and also I think it might have something to do with rice farming.

All of a sudden, he's talking about how rice farming is very difficult and requires a lot of diligence and persistence. And those are all important in math. And rice farming was an integral part of society in southern China. And that helps explain why Asians are better at math. I want to accuse you of oversimplifying this because it sounds so unconvincing. I mean, the weird thing is that he mentions the numbering system. I thought he was just going to go...

in a completely different direction and that the rice paddies thing was going to be some cute fucking anecdote that helps highlight why the numbering system works or something. But no, the only reason he mentions the numbering system from what I can tell is because...

His actual thesis is so off base that he has to put in what seems like a much more likely explanation so that if anyone ever says, what the fuck are you talking about with this rice paddy bullshit? He can be like, well, it could also be the numbering system. I want to point out that there is absolutely no research or data presented to try to specifically tie rice farming to success in math. Like one simple thing to do would be to look at people within Asia who farm rice and people who farm something else.

and prepare their math scores. He does not do that. In fact, and here's the weird thing, he barely mentions math scores at all. The fact that Asians are good at math is supposed to be something that you already believe. Right. Right.

He mentions a single piece of research, the trends in international mathematics and science study. He notes that students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score high in math in that study. What you may notice is that China is not on that list. Right. Despite the fact that his entire spiel about rice farming is centered entirely around southern China. Right.

Let me pull out a footnote here where he explains this. Mainland China isn't on the list because China doesn't yet take part in the TIM study. But the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that the mainland probably would – that the mainland would probably also do really well. What? So –

Okay. One quick thing to note is that both Hong Kong and Taiwan are tiny little rich islands. Right. You know, another thing you can pull from this is that Singapore, which is one of those top performing countries in the study, is not a rice farming country at all. Right. On the other end, Thailand...

Right. Right.

This chapter is basically a terrible educated guess about why Asians are so good at math. And it doesn't actually show in any meaningful way that Asians are so good at math. It's mind-boggling. I mean...

This is the worst chapter in the book in terms of like presenting evidence. And we're after, you know, we're following the plane crash chapter. Asians can't fly planes chapter. Yeah. He doesn't explain why Korean math skills did not translate into the cockpit. That's what I would have. I would have loved to hear him weave these together. You might as well at this point, right? Just make it all one fucking thesis. Who cares? Wait, what is...

What is his actual argument that it's the rice paddies, though? It's like there's something specific about growing rice that you have to, like, count the plants or something? Yeah, it's not counting per se. It's basically that it's very hard and requires a lot of persistence. And he cites some studies that show that

Some Asian students basically showed higher levels of persistence than Western students in math and that a lot of being good at math is actually – is not that you're calculating more. It's that you're willing to spend longer on it. Yeah. A.k.a. you're more persistent. That part seemed to be true. Like that sort of little bit of research or whatever from what I could tell. Yeah.

But that's it. There really is nothing specific about rice farming. It's an argument you can make about just about any sort of peasant culture, right? Right. Now, you know, rice farming is still happening, of course. But like a hundred years ago, all of our ancestors were struggling a lot more, right? And if you felt like building a narrative around the struggles of like

your immigrant ancestors in New York City in the 1880s or whatever, and saying that that helped sort of instill a work ethic into you or whatever. You could do it, right? You could do it with any fucking culture. Everyone has a history of sort of working hard and persevering or whatever. That's a large chunk of why we're all alive. So I truly don't understand why he latched onto rice paddies

I really feel like he was just like, and here's the Asian section of my book. I'm going to explain what they're up to. What's the first thing I know about Asia? Math and rice. Right. I'm just going to Google those and figure it out. Yeah. Because, again, I can imagine this being like kind of an interesting theory if you actually did it academically. Like there probably are some crops that are much easier, some crops that take more perseverance. Yeah.

But surely rice is not like the most difficult crop in the whole world. So then you would look to other places that like, you know, like maybe the far north or something where you basically can't grow anything. Life is really hard there. So like they should be super good at math, right? But it's like he's not really doing any of the like basic comparative work that you would need to do to prove a cultural explanation. Yeah. I mean, look, he himself says, well, like wheat farming, like rice farming is a southern China thing. Wheat farming is much more common in the north.

But he's just like, yeah, but we don't have that data. And it's like, well, that's – you're going to need that data, bro. Come back to me when you have the data. Right. And then I would like to see like maybe some controls for income, et cetera. You know, like you have really not done even the slightest amount of the legwork necessary to establish this. Although he probably tells it in a really compelling way. Oh, yeah. This is also the Gladwell thing that he is like a really gifted storyteller. No, he is. I mean –

I was kind of struck here because sometimes he weaves the research and the story together in a way where your initial instinct is that makes sense. And then you think for a second and you're sometimes like, maybe not. Right. But with this, it was really just two separate things. One, Asians good at math. Two, rice farming difficult. Right. Right.

That's it. I couldn't fucking believe this chapter. And if you're going to make a chapter built entirely around one of the most common stereotypes that is promulgated in Western society, maybe be careful. Right. I couldn't believe it. Even after the ethnic theory of plane crashes thing, I was jolted by this chapter.

This is when I write a pop science book. One of the chapters is going to be called Women Be Shopping. Sorry, it's just science. I also think thematically, because I've read a million of these fucking pop science books for various projects. And one thing that I've found in, especially with this

Yeah.

It's probably related to their educational policies. It's probably related to something that is like really fucking obvious, like their per capita GDP and their spending on education and like these specific structures of their specific education systems. Interesting you bring this up.

Because the last chapter is about a Bronx school that succeeds with poor inner city students basically by having very long school days because they figured out that a lot of why poor students tend to fall behind. So they aren't learning as much as richer kids when they're at home or over the summer. So they made the school day longer and they helped mitigate that. One thing that Gladwell notes in this chapter is.

is that school kids in Asia, in those successful countries, are in school a lot more. Yes. And he just kind of throws that out there. And he's like, you know, so obviously that's why they're doing great. And you're like, I thought it was the fucking rice patties, dude. What happened? Right. Which is it? He ends that Bronx chapter by saying that the school is, quote, bringing the lessons of the rice patty to the American inner city. Right.

That's a little kicker. He had the kicker ready for you to write the whole chapter around. Right. So that's the end of the book. There's an epilogue and it's called A Jamaica Story, which made me nervous. But it turns out it's just about his his ancestors or whatever, and like his family history. And he's a.

Essentially talking about his own family and the advantages that they had and that paved the way for his success. It seemed like a relatively humble sort of, I've been very successful over the past decade and I realized that I got a bit lucky.

Yeah, that sounds fine. Yeah. It was totally fine. I would have preferred if right before it, he wasn't talking in really overstated generalizations about Asian people for 50 pages. It's also interesting because I always thought he had like gotten worse over time and the earlier books were a lot, you know, on a lot firmer footing because you to keep putting out these pop science books, you can start out with some good ideas and some good insights, but you only have a couple of those in your life, right? Like big, true ideas. Yeah.

But then it sounds like even from the earliest days, he was on pretty shaky foundations with this stuff. It's true that his later books have been increasingly criticized. Yeah. There are some real takedowns of his work over the last few years. Yeah. Oh, yeah. His responses have become increasingly defensive from what I can gather.

So it's true that the tolerance for Gladwell has fallen off a cliff. And I'm not yeah, I'm not sure if that's because it has gotten worse or people have just sort of gotten wise to it. Right. But I will sell you this. It was 2008. And this shit sucks. This shit sucks. Well, I'm I'm stealing this from a tweet of yours.

That a lot of the general interest blogging that we had during like the blog glory days, a lot of those guys are getting cringier and cringier partly because social media has exposed them to genuine expertise. Right. And I wonder if the end of the TED Talk era, which I think we're at like a post-TED world now, even though of course those things exist and pop science books still exist. Yeah.

The cultural hegemony that it used to have I think is over partly because if he writes a book about rice farming in southern China, someone who studies rice farming in southern China can go on Twitter and be like, hello, this is what I do. This is how this book is bullshit in a way that the academics that were complaining about his books earlier were probably just doing it at a cafeteria table with themselves. Right.

And it wasn't really getting noticed. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I also wonder, you know, I was having a conversation with some Zoomers about some of like the mid-aughts racial comedy. Oh, yeah. And I think we were talking about...

An episode of The Office, like Diversity Day, which I think like is no longer on Peacock. Oh, yeah. It was like I think that there was a time after the 90s in this sort of end of history era when most of us sort of had this agreement that racism had largely been solved.

And that it was because of that, something that we can now joke about because we're all on the same page. And as we sort of witnessed the Obama era, the rise of the Tea Party, the rise of the Trump wing of the Republican Party.

it became very obvious that we actually have very different ideas about what racism is, why it's significant, whether it's behind us, et cetera. And that stuff became less acceptable. And I see bits of that in Gladwell's discussions of like,

Asians being good at math. You probably wouldn't get away with this now because some editor would be like, Jesus, dude, is this sort of stereotyping necessary? Is it accurate, et cetera? Back then, you're operating off the assumption that racism is really behind us. So let's talk about this shit, right? We can talk about it now.

We can now admit that a lot of these stereotypes are true. Right. Rather than dismantling the stereotypes or thinking about why we believe they're true. Or actually even like doing basic work to investigate them because it doesn't sound like he even did that. Well, I mean, injecting a little bit of nuance into it. Right. It's not Asians are good at math. It's like a handful of largely small island countries that are very wealthy are performing very well on math tests. Is that really a mystery? I don't know that it is. Right. I do want to leave –

with one Gladwell quote. Unrelated to this book, I don't remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane. This did get dark. This did take a dark turn. ♪