Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.
I've posted about Gladwell's critics before, I hope you forgive me linking an older comment, but I don't want to just repeat myself. edit This is a link to the whole thread because it's worth reading for other discussion on Gladwell.
It would be more interesting/relevant to hear if you had any specific beef with the particular article on PARC rather than rummaging up unrelated complaints.
I agree that I wasn't really being fair to Gladwell. I posted this comment to support Krylez's more general assertion about Gladwell's style.
But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at, and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.
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Gladwell does a tremendous job of cherry picking bits of information to form a compelling narrative. I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.
> I find his constant and blatant omission of inconvenient data to be intellectually dishonest.
Such as...?
I've posted about Gladwell's critics before, I hope you forgive me linking an older comment, but I don't want to just repeat myself. edit This is a link to the whole thread because it's worth reading for other discussion on Gladwell.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758542
I generally find him entertaining but always take anything I read by him with a grain of salt.
It would be more interesting/relevant to hear if you had any specific beef with the particular article on PARC rather than rummaging up unrelated complaints.
I agree that I wasn't really being fair to Gladwell. I posted this comment to support Krylez's more general assertion about Gladwell's style.
But I'll come out and say what I hinted at elsewhere in this thread: I really wish Gladwell had bothered to tie together the threads between PARC, Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Objective-C, the iPad, the Scratch app being banned and Apple's vision of app-store-based-computing. It seems to me that he really missed out on a exactly the kind of cherry-picking and narrative forming he's good at, and in this case I think there might be a pretty interesting story buried in there. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the history to know if there really is, and it's likely it wouldn't have really worked in the New Yorker.