Something to understand about Malcolm Gladwell is that he is an exceptionally talented writer that can turn a pseudo-theory into hundreds of pages of pleasant, entertaining non-fiction writing. He’s not an evolutionary psychologist, though I bet he could write a really interesting and thought provoking non-fiction piece on evolutionary psychology.
His pseudo-theory from The Tipping Point has not made advertisers any more money. It’s an example of something that really does sound kind of true when you read it, but what he says doesn’t explain much in the way of meaningful phenomena. Advertising companies tried to take advantage of his pseudo-theory of social influence, and they still make some efforts to target influential users, but it’s a token effort compared towards marketing as broadly as possible. Superbowl advertisements still work.
Oh, by no means did I want to suggest that Gladwell has a forte in evolutionary psychology; if he does, there’s nothing to indicate it in what I’ve read. It’s clear that he glosses over many of the details in his work, perhaps dangerously so. And the entire point of Outliers is that social environment is important to success; not exactly an earth-shattering insight, there’s a negative Times review that’s spot on.
That said, Gladwell says he originally got the idea for 10000 hours from Ericsson and Levitin. At worst, at this point, I think it’s somewhat plausible. I still have a lot more searching to do on the subject, but I am interested in what evolutionary psychology might say about the idea—alas, I’m also not a evolutionary psychologist, so I don’t know that either.
Edit: Of course, what I’m really interested in is “Is the idea that it takes 10000 hours to master a skill set true in enough circumstances to make it a useful guideline?” I’m not interested in the viewpoint of evolutionary psychologists on skill acquisition per se.
Edit: Of course, what I’m really interested in is “Is the idea that it takes 10000 hours to master a skill set true in enough circumstances to make it a useful guideline?”
The ’10000′ hours approximation seems surprisingly well founded, based on the research that Ericsson et. al. reviewed in their works. Obviously this is to obtain ‘expert’ level performance and you can still get ‘good enough’ levels from far less time. Also note that they specify that many of the hours must be deliberate practice and not just performance.
Something to understand about Malcolm Gladwell is that he is an exceptionally talented writer that can turn a pseudo-theory into hundreds of pages of pleasant, entertaining non-fiction writing. He’s not an evolutionary psychologist, though I bet he could write a really interesting and thought provoking non-fiction piece on evolutionary psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point#The_three_rules_of_epidemics
His pseudo-theory from The Tipping Point has not made advertisers any more money. It’s an example of something that really does sound kind of true when you read it, but what he says doesn’t explain much in the way of meaningful phenomena. Advertising companies tried to take advantage of his pseudo-theory of social influence, and they still make some efforts to target influential users, but it’s a token effort compared towards marketing as broadly as possible. Superbowl advertisements still work.
Oh, by no means did I want to suggest that Gladwell has a forte in evolutionary psychology; if he does, there’s nothing to indicate it in what I’ve read. It’s clear that he glosses over many of the details in his work, perhaps dangerously so. And the entire point of Outliers is that social environment is important to success; not exactly an earth-shattering insight, there’s a negative Times review that’s spot on.
That said, Gladwell says he originally got the idea for 10000 hours from Ericsson and Levitin. At worst, at this point, I think it’s somewhat plausible. I still have a lot more searching to do on the subject, but I am interested in what evolutionary psychology might say about the idea—alas, I’m also not a evolutionary psychologist, so I don’t know that either.
Edit: Of course, what I’m really interested in is “Is the idea that it takes 10000 hours to master a skill set true in enough circumstances to make it a useful guideline?” I’m not interested in the viewpoint of evolutionary psychologists on skill acquisition per se.
The ’10000′ hours approximation seems surprisingly well founded, based on the research that Ericsson et. al. reviewed in their works. Obviously this is to obtain ‘expert’ level performance and you can still get ‘good enough’ levels from far less time. Also note that they specify that many of the hours must be deliberate practice and not just performance.