His books are high level books, not scientific works. If they were almost none would read them.
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Right? Itās popular science journalism, not science. I get the feeling a lot of people that hate his books havenāt read them at all, but are instead reacting to third-hand oversimplified accounts of what the content is.
Iām guessing the book does address the points outlined in this article, and the āX number of hours is a hard ruleā is not an author error but a misunderstanding of what exactly the book says. Ironically for someone complaining about TLDR complainers, I havenāt read this particular book so I canāt tell for sure.
I read (or rather listened to) Outliers a couple of weeks ago. While there were a number of things that I learned from it, a lot of it was very cherry picked and I couldnāt put too much faith in any of the conclusions. One of the points I really disliked was his argument that America should look to Chinese educational models because of their success in subjects like maths (brought on by lots of study). When you teach English to Chinese kids from about 4-16 and talk with their parents, you see what that kind of pressure does to people as they grow up under it. I donāt want that kind of success for my kids.
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Fair enough. I read Blink and rather enjoyed it, in a breezy introduction-to-themes, Kurzgesagt way. Reading Gladwell felt to me like a bit like Taubes: a well researched and neatly presented idea collage thatās not particularly deep, but doesnāt pretend to be. The appendixes and footnotes do point to the deeper resources you might be interested in if depth is your thing, as they should. Good enough for me.
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Why half a brain after all everyones only using 10% right?
I in fact HAVE read several of his books, and as a physicist and statistician I can tell you that far too many of his arguments fail to have even a minimal amount of research and analysis behind them. Iām not asking for p-values every page, but I would like to see more than āI saw this thing once and it makes sense that this wild hypothesis is the reasonā
Immersion does the trick in wonderful, wonderful ways. We had a Finnish kid in our school growing up who had a rudimentary command of the English language. At first we thought he was just quiet, but it turned out he was actually at a second grade reading level and he just wasnāt very proficient. Within a year, heād gotten up to an eighth grade reading level (this was my junior year in high school) and this was while he was taking another second language class. Bear in mind that 10,000 hours is more than what this kid spent simply breathing in a year.
Some people who have a real knack for languages pick it up astonishingly fast. My best friend currently laments how much she sucks at Spanish while holding an academic book on the history of Cuba, written in Spanish, a year after she started. I told her I loved her and that she needed to shut the fuck up.
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For me, the two easiest things to comprehend in a language I donāt understand very well are childrenās conversations, which are usually very simple, and writing on very specific or technical topics, which usually have lots of neologisms and proper nouns.
The vast majority of it remains mostly incomprehensible.
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