Thanks for this write up Ezra. I too have my problems with Gladwell but I've never been able to understand all the snark that's been thrown his way.

Ezra, I must disagree. If a journalist uses a story that is flat out wrong to illustrate a point, then that point is going to be considered pure bull by his audience, and rightly so.

I glossed over some of the racial overtones (really? only black girls play basketball? quick somebody inform Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird and any of the other countless women who apparently missed the memo!) when originally reading the article, but my reaction was exactly what Orzel's was: using basketball for his illustration was the choice of a man who'd never really watched basketball regularly. And since these little stories are mainly how he gets his point across, it's an epic fail.

I've never been able to understand all the snark that's been thrown his way.

A couple reasons. First, as a popularizer, Gladwell trades in, as Ezra calls them, "fables." Fables are, by their nature, non-falsifiable. Gladwell is generally honest and rigorous enough that the points he's making are generally correct, but those points he makes are backed up by research and evidence he doesn't bother to provide or elaborate on.

Next, Gladwell's articles end up falling into the hands of New Yorker readers and other consumers of topics written for people who don't have the time to really understand what they're talking about but use the material to present themselves as "well informed" on cocktail party chatter. These people are annoying, and while it might not be fair, it's not to surprising to judge someone like Gladwell on the basis of what their disciples and fans are like.

I understood the lessons of Gladwell's essay on David v. Goliath for what it was, and it was insightful and it did explore a lot of fascinating issues and bring home an important point. However, it helps to have enough background to understand "why things are the way they are," which Gladwell ignores. There are good reasons why basketball is played the way it's played, for example (eg, the full court press only works when one side isn't ready for it. when both sides use it and are ready for it, it's not helpful, so both sides elect for "mutual disarmament" and let the opponent come up the court unopposed), and Gladwell doesn't bother to explain that, even as an aside.

This brings up another essay that Gladwell could have written which is much more related to sports than anything else (and thus has less value as a "fable" explaining universal values): when sports or other competitions reach an advanced enough level, the players generally trim down the rules or the competition to a few choice skills that they wish to develop and compete over and shed other, blunter parts of the competition as extraneous. Basketball is about executing plays on a half court, rather than exhaustive competitions for the ball, which highly skilled players can do and are easy, so they don't waste their time on. Foil fencing is about grabbing command of the action and placing a hit on a limited target area rather than just hitting someone somewhere, anywhere first (the latter form tends to be slower and rely less on agility than raw strength and endurance).
Gladwell, in his own way, is entertaining, but his writing is a form of dessert-- good tasting, but loved by way too many people who don't understand the value of a balanced meal. He oversimplifies without even bothering to explain he's oversimplifying. And sometimes we wonder if he doesn't even know he's oversimplifying.

"But Gladwell isn't an academic and he's not a traditional reporter. Insofar as he has a beat, it's modern fables. Stories with a point. He's like Aesop for the corporate class."

This is a defense of Gladwell?

Or Tom Friedman?

Or Tim Russert?

You can stick a sharp stick up your own ass, Ezra.

Look, I'm all in favor of good narrative work. But if you choose to work in non-fiction rather than fiction, you have certain burdens.

Good storytelling in a non-reality based genre is a merit in ficiton, but a deadly serious demerit in non-fiction.

And every single thing I've ever read by Gladwell on a topic I knew something about in advance was in a pretty obviously non-reality based genre.

If the theory you trying to expound is so weak that the example that you choose to present is non-reality based, that says something about your general theoretical reliability, y'know.

But, hey, if stuff like Gladwell and Friedman and Russert gets you off, you belong at the WaPo. I like stuff like that too, but for me, it only really works on the fiction section of the aisle.

The criticisms of Galdwell in the linked post are weak sauce, regardless of what you think of Gladwell himself. And I said as much!

Thusly:
The pile-on seems to be a little vehement and overall misplaced.

"There's a reason for this: the press works, as long as the other team isn't ready for it."
You've just restated the essence of Gladwell's point. After all, if Goliath knew that slingstones were coming he would have just put his helmet on, yeah? And presto. . squashed David. He refers to David running out precipitously from the battle line to explicitly point out the fact that he's moving before Goliath is ready.

"Or the way he brushes off the criticism that playing "40 Minutes of Hell" is kind of a dick move in a league of twelve-year-old girls."

No, he doesn't. He refers to the opposing coaches storming out and getting frustrated, etc, etc. It's just tangential to his point. He isn't writing an article about how to be a nice girls' basketball coach. He's writing an article about how underdogs win. And it turns out that underdogs often have to be dicks to win (he refers to this specifically multiple times. . about how the underdogs often must ignore rules about what is considered acceptable behavior. . i.e. not being a dick).

So in short, you basically restated Gladwell's points as your own and then accused him of being a fraud.

And:

"conveniently ignoring the fact that Washington won the war by defeating the British in straight-up battles"

What? 'by' doesn't mean you're using it for here. The reason that the British lost a war against an entire population in an area 5 times its own size with no capital across 3,000 miles of ocean is not that Washington beat them in 'straight-up battles'.

With the least bit of research, though, he could have found out that the preferred asymmetric strategy in basketball is the Princeton offense. Then he would have had plenty of examples of Princeton beating the big boys (or nearly beating, as in the 1 point loss to Georgetown in the 89 tournament).

Gladwell's article does have the proper caveats, I think, it's just that they are de-emphasized a bit. You can see things his way, or you can dig into his caveats and see things a different way. But I was happy I read that article, it was well written and had some genuine insights I hadn't thought of before.

"The criticisms of Galdwell in the linked post are weak sauce, regardless of what you think of Gladwell himself."

That 12-yr-old girls can't break a press proves nothing. Admittedly not having seen the games, I would guess that the talent gap between Gladwell's team and the other teams they played has been greatly exaggerated. After all, they're 12 and none of them are likely that good at basketball.

Show me a lower-tier team that consistently beats the big boys without getting talent and by using the press, and I'll listen. This would need to take place at the college level, since it's the level with the greatest talent gaps and where players are actually good enough to employ tactics that every coach puts in to break the press. It's informative that teams like Gonzaga got better because of more TV exposure across the board, NBA early entries, and a reduction in the number of schollys, thereby thinning the talent pool and making more of that talent available to them.

Other than the 12-yr-old girls team, Gladwell's basketball anecdotes were woefully inadequate. 96 Kentucky? 9 future NBAers (not sure why only Antoine Walker counts.) Eventual National Champs. Bet they weren't David playing Goliath once that season. More likely they were Goliath!

Cain: I totally agree. The better strategy would be to slow the game down, thereby frustrating the more athletic team that's more likely capable of scoring quickly. That said, Princeton still lost most of the time when they played the big boys, even if they kept low-scoring games close.

Thanks for the (semi) defense, Ezra. One small point. You say that my arguments "make no sense" in terms of basketball because "If full court press were really a fail-safe strategy for weak teams, more of them would use it." But I quite explictly state that the press is NOT a fail-safe strategy. It does not guarantee victory. All it does is improve the underdog's odds from close to zero to something closer to fifty percent. It is, in other words, a "better" strategy not a "best" strategy, and one of the points of the piece was to examine the seemingly irrational hostility of underdogs to "better" strategies. Many of the criticisms of my piece by bloggers seem to have been animated by this misunderstanding, which suggests that either my pieces are too long to be read closely :-) or I should have made this point even more explicitly.

"Many of the criticisms of my piece by bloggers seem to have been animated by this misunderstanding, which suggests that either my pieces are too long to be read closely :-) or I should have made this point even more explicitly."

Of course, the criticism of your piece is actually animated by the fact that you have a long pattern of being a fabulist in your examples, Malcolm, and your latest hoops piece falls well within that pattern.

You're basically Stephen Glass-lite.

Oh hello Ezra,

Just stumbled up on your above post on Malcolm Gladwell and our book club having read his "The Outliers" -

One: Malcolm has a big fan club, and two: if the cap fits.... ?

Or would 'tall poppy syndrome' be more applicable ....?

L'Chaim

Reading Aesop, I don't get the sense that he really believed that grasshoppers are lazy. Reading Gladwell, I do get the sense that he really believes the examples he uses to be true rather than only illustrative of a larger point.

Personally, I have no idea if George Washington won the Revolutionary War by defeating the Brits in conventional battles or if he won in spite of abandoning guerilla tactics or if the choice was not determinative of the outcome of the war either way. Ditto for whether David beat Goliath because he reinvented the rules of the duel. Ditto for all of the other examples discussed, mentioned or alluded to in the article. What I would really like to see from Gladwell is an article focused on fewer examples so that I don't have to wonder whether he's extending the lesson way beyond the areas it applies to. (And from my vague recollection, his article about the fallibility of overinclusive rules as opposed to flexible standards as applied to banning pitbulls and to racial profiling was limited to those two topics and therefore, to me, at least sounded more convincing.)

Also, Gladwell (or the guy claiming to be him) makes a good point in his comment in this thread. I wonder whether underdog strategies would cease to be effective if they were tried more often. If the 14 worst teams in the NBA (say, those that didn't make the playoffs) started using a full court press all the time, I imagine that it wouldn't take their opponent more than a few games to adjust. And then it wouldn't work for anybody. Underdog strategies seem best if they can be saved, hidden and then used at one decisive moment (a tipping point, anyone?... sorry) and in areas where there aren't repeat players. Maybe that goes some ways towards explaining why these strategies aren't used more.

Another explanation is just that the payoff is too low to make them worthwhile even if the probability of success increases. Is it worth it for the Wizards to work their tails off practicing and using a full court press every for every game if the reward is to win a bunch more games but still not make the playoffs or win a title?

Also, it's a little funny that so many people are accusing him of being a newcomer to basketball. I'm pretty sure I've read a conversation between Gladwell and Bill Simons in which Gladwell seemed to be a pretty big basketball fan.

"If the 14 worst teams in the NBA (say, those that didn't make the playoffs) started using a full court press all the time, I imagine that it wouldn't take their opponent more than a few games to adjust. And then it wouldn't work for anybody."

This isn't the problem with the example.

It wouldn't take a few games for NBA teams to adjust. It would take a couple of possessions at most - aka about a minute of game time.

The problem with the example is that the full court press is a significantly weaker defense given minimally trained players on the other team.

"Also, it's a little funny that so many people are accusing him of being a newcomer to basketball."

It was a basketball post that first tipped me off to the fact that Gladwell was a fabulist. A couple of years ago, he pimped the rantings of a basketball theorist who had already been thoroughly discredited as a fraud by the entire hoops community. That made me start paying closer attention to the examples he used in non-basketball stories too.

Gladwell is the type of guy who would write a story in 2011 about the virtues of seeking out unconventional money managers using Bernie Madoff as his example.

Gladwell is an entertaining writer, but Stephen Glass was an entertaining writer too.

Malcolm Gladwell fits into the category of deserving 95% of the backlash he receives, yet still being worth listening to. There's a really strong correlation between this category and being a chat or podcast partner with ESPN scribe Bill Simmons, another insanely popular writer who's a blast to read but often full of nonsense. Matt Taibi, who's approaching this territory himself, was on Simmons's podcast this week, so be prepared.

"Malcolm Gladwell fits into the category of deserving 95% of the backlash he receives, yet still being worth listening to. There's a really strong correlation between this category and being a chat or podcast partner with ESPN scribe Bill Simmons, another insanely popular writer who's a blast to read but often full of nonsense."

Simmons (whom I love) is writing in a genre (sports fanatic literature) which is widely acknowledged as being not being particularly reality based.

If Gladwell were just writing about how much he loved the Toronto Raptors and how Chris Bosh was the bestest player ever!!, I don't think folks would have any problems with him.

However, since he's working in a more non-fiction genre, he's expected to have his examples stand up to at least cursory scrutiny, and they almost never do.

I think the best example of "underdog strategy" in the NBA isn't the press: it's Don Nelson's "smallball", which involves, at its extreme, playing 4 guards at the same time -- with a muscular 2 at the 4 position (Mitch Richmond guarded Vlade Divac back in the Run-TMC days, Kelenna Azibuike played 4 last year from time to time) -- running as much as possible, shooting tons of 3's, and, in contrast to the press, frankly not playing a whole lot of defense.

One of the big advantages of any unpopular tactical approach in pro sports is that you don't need to compete for in-demand players (a sort of genuine Moneyball approach). There's not much demand for 6'4" guys who can sorta guard 6'10" post-up players, and in the past there wasn't much demand for the "point forward" skills Nelson values, so if you find one of these guys you probably don't need to pay him much to get him on your team.

And although Nelson has never won an NBA title, he has had a lot of success replicating this system at a number of stops in the NBA, and was responsible for the Warriors' victory over the Mavs in the first round of the playoffs two years ago, which was one of the biggest NBA playoff upsets of the last 20 or 30 years. Notably, the Mavs didn't manage to adjust to the Warriors in time to win the series.

And FWIW Nelson has been a hell of a lot more successful in the NBA than press-genius Rick Pitino.

So you're arguing that Gladwell's core competency is anecdotal evidence? As a scientist, should I tell you what I think of that?

Petey, how's John Edwards doing?

After positing that Ranadivé's team was an exemplary "underdog," Gladwell tells us that it was coached by a corporate titan, with the assistandce of an All Pro professional athlete and a woman who played who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. That's a lot of talent in support of 12-year-old girls, and makes them sound not so much like a band of ragtag upstarts, but more like Goliath.

The problem with Gladwell is that if you actually know something about what he's writing about, he's transparently incorrect.

Take the hockey example that runs through _Outliers_: there is a huge imbalance in player birthdates at lower levels in Canada, and even among marginal NHL players. But once you look at Canadian NHL stars, there's only a very slight difference - NHL teams take a longer view of performance than the guys who coach 8-year-olds.

So Gladwell there, as here, details an inefficiency in a low-stakes league; and the same inefficiency completely disappears when the game is played at its highest level.

The genius of Moneyball, for example, is that it found inefficiencies at the highest levels of sports. Do we really care that it's also a strategy to win AA baseball championships?

[as an aside - Gladwell is nowhere near the fraud that Tom Friedman is. Friedman is transparently wrong even to people who don't know anything about the subjects he writes about.]

I too have my problems with Gladwell but I've never been able to understand all the snark that's been thrown his way.

I've always thought this was because of simple envy.

There. is. no. defense. of. Malcolm. Gladwell.

As far as hucksters go, he's relatively harmless, but a huckster he is indeed.

*And although Nelson has never won an NBA title, he has had a lot of success*

No. The famous RUN-TMC teams never won a playoff series. Furthermore, despite having three Hall of Famers in Milwaukee, he never made to the NBA finals in all his years of coaching.

As for the press, the reason it worked for John Wooden was because his 1964 team was smaller but quicker and in better condition than their opponents

Give me a break. I guess if you're reading Gladwell expecting the reporting of scientific evidence, then shame on you. Gladwell's level of rigor is pretty clear to anyone who reads the first paragraph in any of his work -- the anecdotal story line should signal that he isn't going for statistically valid levels of proof.

That said, there is a completely different value he brings. He (sometimes) highlights anomolies and paradoxes that should direct some readers to the source materials, and he does bring up interesting observations (his essays on the persistance of paper and one about coffee were pretty good). Nobody, least of all Gladwell, is saying he's uncovering previously undiscovered truths -- for god's sake he's just synthesizing some of things he found interesting in an easy to read narrative.

He is as factual as Tom Wolfe's 60's journalism, or Tom Friedmans', and about as much as most of the others in the New Yorker or others. I have over time found biases/incompleteness in the stories by most of the other non-fiction writers in magazines, but so what. If you want rigor, read the scientific journals. Stay away from the lay literature at all costs.