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Somehow I've come around to liking Malcolm Gladwell. The first time I read one of his books, I hated it. Loathed it. Was so incensed by it that I was moved to fling it between the rolling stacks in the library, and slowly roll them together on it. I didn't actually squish his book, because it was examinable material in a class that I hated. At first. Eventually I came around to appreciate its charm, just like with Malcolm Gladwell, whose writing is supremely readable, if a bit too pat at times.

The thing about Gladwell, is that he's big on patterns. He takes big, big samplings of not-very-interesting data, where one piece of information seems to have only the slightest relation to another piece of data, and figures out how they fit together. He finds a pattern, and then applies it outwards, and ever outwards. Eventually he comes to some incredibly clear, too-easy explanation for some phenomenon. This makes for great reading, but at times, can seriously piss me off. (Like Freakonomics - the same potential for wow-factor and hate).

His latest book is Outliers: the Story of Success. I really, really want to read it. The Guardian has a long extract. Here's a sampling:

The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971, in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The university's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, "like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey". Off to the side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.

Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student" by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a "no-date nerd". He had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and he was hooked.

From then on, the computer centre was his life. He programmed whenever he could. He got a job with a computer science professor, so he could program over the summer. In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' ". ( Read more... )

Also interesting--Macleans did an interview with him about the book, in which they asked him about his fixation with the relationship between IQ and performance.

Q: Why do you keep coming back to IQ as a topic?

A: Because everyone always says, and this drives me crazy, “Yes, we know that IQ is not the be-all and end-all,” and yet we continue to act as if [it is]. ( Read more... )

This is an insight that I like to hang on to, even while indulging in genre fantasies of ninth level intellects that can do it all. (Hello Lex Luthor! Yes, I'm talking about you). It's something that keeps me from allowing myself the excuse of inability. Hey, when stumbling blocks come along, as they inevitably do, I can always fall back on the excuses of social barriers to entry, laziness, and sheer bloody mindedness.