Malcolm Gladwell has the happy knack of selecting the right stories and the right studies, and packaging them into memorable little morsels. Highly recommended. I suspect you could go a long way toward writing good non-fiction by studying what people like Gladwell and Steven Pinker do in their books.
Some titles:
- The Tipping Point. All about social epidemics. Why some ideas spread, while others don’t.
- Blink. Why and when making very rapid decisions can produce better results than extended cogitation.
- Shorter articles. A good indication of what his longer work is like.
I thought _Blink_ was interesting, but I don’t think he made a very convincing argument for WHEN very rapid descisions can produce better results. He gave lots of examples where quick thinking worked and didn’t work, but how am I supposed to use this? I mean, don’t I need to know “in a blink” whether thinking “in a blink” will work or not if I’m going to use his observations constructively?
I agree, although I did think there were some interesting tidbits.
In particular, I thought the comments about heartrates were thought-provoking, particularly the remarks about top (team) athletes having relatively low heartrates when they’re playing at their best.
Maybe I should read “The Tipping Point” first, but I think there’s a huge difference between how memes and epidemics spread.
To be convinced of a meme, people usually need several repetitions (like in the famous Goebbels quote about telling a lie often enough). Much stronger is to hear something through multiple channels – like school, media, friends, etc… But a single exposure to a disease typically leaves a person either infected or unchanged. This means that the spread of a disease is linear in the number of carriers (assuming that most of the population is uninfected), but the log of the popularity of a meme grows nonlinearly.
So it’s strange that the phrase “Tipping Point” comes from epidemiology, when it seems more appropriate for memes.
Hi Aram,
I don’t think Gladwell argues that the spread of memes exactly parallels the spread of disease, merely that it’s a useful and stimulating analogy, suggesting useful hypotheses and ways of thinking. This is, of course, a point that’s been made many times before — I think convincingly — by people such as Richard Dawkins.
I don’t understand your final point. Why does it matter where the phrase “tipping point” comes from? Surely all that matters is whether it works well for Gladwell’s own subject matter.
I phrased my comment like an objection to Gladwell, but I didn’t mean it to be.
The phrase “tipping point” seems to fit memes better than it does diseases, so I found it strange that it was originally a phrase used in epidemiology.