In The New York Times, Steven Pinker takes the time to look at Malcolm Gladwell and his latest book of anecdotal curiosities coupled with feel-good populist platitudes. Gladwell is a poster boy for IQ denialism, which bores academics familiar with the mainstream science on intelligence, like Pinker. Here is an excerpt from the end of the review:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Congratulations to Pinker, who put in the effort to stomach Gladwell and his igon values for long enough to write a review. Meanwhile, in another review, Janet Maslin is falling for him head over heels:

The essay’s general point was that we know more about early success than about the kind that comes late in life. Its more startling and original idea — and it is vital to Mr. Gladwell’s success that he can reliably produce at least one such lightning bolt per discussion — was that the success of the late bloomer, like Cézanne or Mr. Fountain, is dependent on the help of others, like Zola or Mr. Fountain’s wife, Sharon. The effect of “Late Bloomers” has been quantifiable, which is good, because Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for quantifiable data.

Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for cherry-picked anecdotes that entertain and fool non-scientific literary critics like Mrs. Maslin.

Here is Gladwell’s response on his website. Steve Sailer makes an appearance in the comments, where he definitively presents the data for there being a correlation between QB draft rank and pro performance, and Gladwell solves the problem by calling him a racist, misrepresenting Sailer’s views, and refusing to respond to the data Sailer presents. Good job, Gladwell.

I also just noticed that Alexis Madrigal, one of the authors of Wired Science, has inserted a vapid contribution to the comments section:

Pinker’s review was jocular, cruel and intended to embarrass instead of enlighten.

Part of it is: haters gon’ hate. People like your work, so you’ve become an easy-as-Al-Gore target for those who deem popularity itself a crime.

The other part is: you get famous and simple mistakes people regularly make become inexcusable. Not to be too nice — after all, lack of humanity is a key attribute for an intellectual — but I want to say, “You know, Malcolm Gladwell goes out and comes into work overtired sometimes, too.

Alexis, it’s disturbing that you side with a journalist/essayist over a scientist on the question of whether future performance can be predicted by past performance, or over whether interesting anecdotes are an appropriate substitute for double-blind scientific studies. It is absolutely true, as Pinker points out, that Gladwell “never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings”. Pinker also makes several coherent critiques about Gladwell’s beliefs about decision-making and its inherent tradeoffs, and it is quite ridiculous that Gladwell believes that an entire year of evaluation is necessary for determining whether someone is a good teacher. These are not small mistakes. Gladwell’s writing is meant to make everyone feel good about themselves by ignoring decades of scientific results that cognitive performance on arbitrary tasks is statistically predictive of performance on future tasks.

I love Alexis’ posts at Wired Science, but I am honestly shocked that he sides with Gladwell over Pinker. I guess that popularity and trendiness is just cooler to Madrigal than the truth shown by decades of intelligence research and articulated by 51 expert intelligence researchers. No amount of peer-reviewed research can best a fluff book that is written solely to make everyone and anyone feel good about themselves.