Thursday, December 24, 2020

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

 'Twas brillig in the slithy toves, and a dozen formerly successful white males, all born within seven years of each other, clustered within the confines of their computer monitors. 'Twas a cold winter day out there in both the Big Duke City and in Guthrie, OK - even California was at 47 degrees - a good day to huddle up with a warm book in front of a roaring (or gas supplemented) fireplace.
The successful ones spoke coherently and offered the following observations re their own achievements. 


Jack:  I thoroughly enjoyed Outliers. It was fascinating to me. I thought it would be another one of those mind-numbing success manuals, but I found it entertaining and thought-provoking. If Gladwell's intent was to make me think about the world a little differently and why certain people succeed, he was successful. A-

Peter:  Subtitle of Gladwell's book is The Story of Success.  Right off the bat my reaction is: Trite. Is there anything we as Americans worship more than success? Well ok, maybe Twinkies, but the suggestion here is one story after another of SUCCESS. Boring. 

Some folks ask, why see "Hamlet," we know how it ends? 

More to the point, Dylan Thomas, "After the first death there is no other,..." death, in effect , but also always the same. 

The Rosetans introduction. Yes, heartwarming, but hardly unique, as it is an example of the Mediterranean Diet we have come to love, and its life style, simply transposed to America. 

Example: My former neighbor, Rena Cavaletti, from a Hornell, NY, railroad family. Went to work as a "soda jerk" at fourteen, at which time by her own admission she started to smoke. She died at age 94, still smoking Pall Mall unfiltered. So was it the Mediterranean diet she had taught me to cook, or the life style of her Italian community in Hornell, or just good genes? Hard to isolate a proximate cause, as Gladwell does, other than by wishful thinking. 

The 10,000 Rule, the Beatles playing for the magic number of hours in seedy clubs in Hamburg. But as Gladwell, and the Beatles themselves, declare, it could not just as well have been the sex and drugs, rather than the long hours, that were the reasons for their success. 

So then the Silicon Valley guys, pioneers of modern information systems, the quintessential trio at the chapter's end to be born within a year of each other. Realizing that knowledge may be conveyed by a binary system and lucky enough to enter this field at a seminal time, they are recognized as its pioneers. But this is just as much a matter of the right place at the right time than of clustering birth dates. And as punch cards with their Honeywell sorters attest, the principal concept and its technology, admittedly in a state of infancy, were already known in the 19th century rug and tapestry mills of England and Belgium, which had mechanized pattern weaving by the same method of punch cards. 

I don't know if this is a quite fair analogy, but let's take an area of somewhat greater consequence to see whether we would ascribe success to the clustering of birth dates of the individuals. In the 19th century Lise Meitner, 1878, Albert Einstein, 1879, Niels Bohr, 1885; and later the youngsters, Werner Heisenberg, 1901, Robert Oppenheimer, 1904, Hans Behte, 1906, Edward Teller, 1908. Throwing out the new kid, Richard Feynman, 1918, the first group clusters within seven years, and so does the later one. Altogether they cluster by birth date across fourteen years. Would anyone--other than Gladwell--ascribe the genius of their formulations to the proximity of their birth dates? A certain group that clusters can become idolized as pioneers. But in the end it remains a matter of advancing human knowledge in which the individual human genius and effort play an admittedly concomitant but also co-incidental probative part. Birth dates by themselves are inconsequential.

Gladwell's allegations do not amount to causality; they remain the "oh-aren't-we-clever" stuff found on the NYT's best sellers.  Grade:  B

Karl:  This book is both interesting and thought-provoking. It’s well put together and the stories in it are fascinating. The writing style is adequate to the task. 

The book starts off talking about real outliers but most of the book is not so much about outliers as it is stories of successful people, hence the subtitle: The Story of Success

The author’s arguments are most convincing when they are data-based. Those where he is extrapolating from one or two examples are less convincing – though still interesting and thought-provoking. 

My biggest criticism with the book is that the author doesn’t give enough credit to success for drive, perseverance, ambition, intelligence, and good old hard work. Though to be fair, he does call attention to all of these things at different points in the narrative. It’s difficult to think that anyone who has read this book can continue to think himself as “self-made.” The author is quite effective in showing that that’s not quite the case, even for folks who are thought of as real outliers. 

Overall, the book accomplishes what it sets out to do – and does so in a credible, easy-to-follow way. A-


and locked well outside the confines of the friendly Zoom video screen:

Mike:  The title threw me a bit, as in my mind “outliers” are statistically questionable outcomes that you throw out of the calculation. An example in the recent election where several polls had Joe Biden leading by 4% to 7%, but one “outlier” had him ahead by 17%. No one believed that poll, and all called it an ‘outlier’. 

The cover of the book threw me a bit also. 

The hockey players all born in January and February reminded me of what my late wife Helen would say about artists. I felt she was very talented art wise, but she would counter, “There are thousands of really good artists out there, they are just not known.” That also reminded me of Dolly Parton who said her siblings sang as good as she did. She was the one who wanted to perform onstage. 

I’m thinking the real secret of success is motivation – you have to be really obsessed with your interest and work hard to get better at it. I was always surprised to hear that Michael Jordan practiced so much – I thought, “Heck, he’s the best basketball player in the country, he doesn’t need to practice, just show up!” 

When Tom and I were teaching at the Air Force Academy, Helen and I had season tickets to the Falcons basketball games. But they were quite boring, and we often got up from our basketball seats and walked up to the concourse and down into the ice hockey arena seats – which were free. And there we noticed a Gladwell Correlation - namely, that five of the Academy's eleven fielded hockey players were all from the litile town of International Falls, Minnesota. Aha! Another criterion for success! (also, that they were all shorter and weighed less than Helen, but she didn't like for me to point out that criteria). 

What upset me the most was the presentation of Rosie, the hard-working non-math individual working with the computer program on slope (as correctly defined by rise over run). The author could have easily mentioned that it takes two points to determine a line and thus the slope of a line, and with the illustrations provided, apparently all lines went through the intersection of the X and Y axis, thus (0,0) was one [of two] points that determined the line we would be working with. 

OF COURSE it is possible to provide a formula for a line parallel to the Y axis. The Y-axis itself has the line formula: X=0 , a completely legitimate formula. Yes, the slope is infinite, but the formula is solid. There are infinite such lines parallel to the Y axis, e.g., X = 2, X= pi, X=.0001.  

My calculated slope for Outliers:  B