Malcolm Gladwell and the Case For Endless Self-Googling

I piled cringe upon cringe Friday -- first because I read Steven Pinker's vivisection of Malcolm Gladwell's new essay collection, second because of what I found when I Googled a flub Pinker wielded against Gladwell.

Reviewing What The Dog Saw for the New York Times, Pinker slapped Gladwell like this:

He ... quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Because Gladwell once took time to chat with me at a journalism conference, because my daughter loves Gladwell's Blink, because Gladwell replied to my daughter's fan e-mail once, I wanted Pinker to be wrong. I wanted "igon value" to be some legitimate alternate spelling. So I Googled "igon value."

The Google results, as I said, made me cringe.

First, a timeline. As I write this, it's 2009. Gladwell's original "igon value" essay appeared in The New Yorker in 2002. So that gave Gladwell -- or his source for the story, or a reader -- seven years to notice the "igon value" error. Had someone noticed, "igon value" could have been switched to "eigenvalue" in time to deny Pinker the mocking bludgeon of the "Igon Value Problem."

Someone did notice. On the first page of Google results for "igon value," you find this blog post. But the blogger doesn't mention "igon value," doesn't even mention Gladwell. No, that would be too easy. Rather, a reader of the blog posted this comment: "One of my favorite journalistic gaffes is 'igon value' from one of Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker pieces. I guess he and his editors never took a single linear algebra course. (I actually really dig Gladwell's pieces in general)."

This amounts to a ghastly parable for the conscientious writer, for any of you with a semi-obsessive impulse toward using the Internet as a tool to track your reputation, your triumphs, your "igon value" screwups. It's one thing to Google yourself. It's another thing to read every comment on every blog post that mentions your name.

Or maybe it's not a parable at all. Maybe it's just another way of saying that you can't be perfect and that you can't spend your whole life trying to track down every mistake you might have made. Realistically, Pinker would have bludgeoned Gladwell with something else if he'd corrected the spelling of "eigenvalue" in time for the book. Indeed, Pinker praised Gladwell's writing but tarred him for being a "minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures."

Am I the only person who'd rather be called an "idiot" than a "minor genius"?

Back to the point, here's what feels most broken about all this. We have a blog commenter who says "I actually really dig Gladwell's pieces" and somehow the error he detected did not get fixed. Why? Well, we can't know at this point. I e-mailed the commenter Friday and asked this: "I'm just curious as to whether you wrote to Gladwell or the New Yorker about the error you found. If so, did you get a response? If not, why do you think you chose to write a comment on a blog instead of alerting Gladwell? Oh, and what did you have for lunch on that day in 2003? Surely, you remember all of this perfectly."

If I get a response and the commenter is cool with being quoted, I will write a follow-up post.

In the meantime, try to resist the can-of-worms impulse to Google yourself.

This piece was originally posted at davidquigg.com. For more of David's posts about books, writers, and writing, please click here. His most recent, "Jonathan Lethem and the Bartender," got a mention on the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.

 

Comments

[hbobrien]

The problem is, in a variant of McKean's Law ("Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error."), Pinker appears to make an even worse flub.

Pinker writes, "It is simply not true that (a list of items Pinker provides no support for)... or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievemen­ts."

According to Pinker's page at Harvard http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/index.htmll), "He conducts research on language and cognition.­" If so, then he should be well aware the position he's describing is called, ""threshold theory." It originates not with Gladwell but a number of colleagues in Pinker’s field (Barron and Harrington 1981, Heilman 2005, McCrea 2008). It is widely regarded an open issue.

This leaves us two possibilities: A) Pinker is ignorant of this work in his own field, or B) Pinker is using the "New York Times" to conduct "science by press release" just as grievous as anything by Pons and Fleischmann during the cold fusion brouhaha.

I'm aware of the limits of rigor in an op-ed for the general public. But that flat-out denial of even the *possibility* of others in his field being right pretty much washes up Pinker as a credible source, to me. (All it would've taken was replacing "simply" with "probably" in the problem sentence.)

[TheBaffler]

Pinker's review was wonderfully devastating.

[sheaintsayin]

Just finished Blink; just bought What The Dog Saw. He's smart, sexy, seems kind, and I dig his hair.

[fabucat]

I'll give Mr. Gladwell props for his unapologetically wonderful Afro. I wish that more African Americans wore their hair this way. (I'm a child of the 60s, can't you tell?)

I still think that he's a stealth right-winger, however.

[iamjones]

props. i dig the hair , too.

[henock]

I feel that Malcolm Gladwell is a good writer. And, it is true he reponds to his fans emails; he returned mine. I must admit Blink is not one of my favorite work of his.

[jerzyjc16]

A set of favorable characteristics (high IQ, ability to throw a football 70 yards) isn't unrelated to success, it's just not a surefire predictor of success. Ryan Leaf was a can't--miss NFL QB, just to cite one example.

Gladwell's passion and his bevy of beautifully written anecdotes lead the reader to jump to the conclusion that favorable characteristics are surefire predictors of failure. We love the idea that talent is the cause of failure, or that being rich causes unhappiness. That hard work trumps talent every time. Gladwell's own persuasive and charming writing talent tends to overpower the reader into this mis- interpretation. Gladwell himself says he couldn't make the leap to world-class runner because he decided he lost his appetite to work even harder than he was working. But he couldn't deny (just look at his body type) that he didn't have the "talent" or innate physical ability to get him to even consider making that leap. Not every major league ballplayer was the best player on his little league team--just the vast majority of them. That virtually 100% of major league ballplayers also worked their tails off to advance from little league to high school to minor leagues to majors is also undeniable.

[CBKCBK]

Apparently someone at the New Yorker did catch the "igon value" mistake before the article was printed in the magazine. What appears to be the printed version of the article is available as a pdf here: http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/blowingup.pdf.

For more discussion (including the observation that "igon value" doesn't appear in the pdf version), see Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1897#more-1897.