What the dog saw and other adventures

Malcolm Gladwell, 1963-

Book - 2009

Brings together, for the first time, the best of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." Gladwell also explores intelligence tests, ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias," and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Little, Brown and Co 2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Malcolm Gladwell, 1963- (-)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
Previously published in the New Yorker.
Published in paperback by Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co. in 2010. Includes a reading group guide.
Physical Description
xv, 410 p. ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780316076203
9780316075848
  • Pt. 1: Obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius. The pitchman : Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen ; The ketchup conundrum : mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties--why has ketchup stayed the same? ; Blowing up : how Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy. ; True colors : hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America ; John Rock's error : what the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health ; What the dog saw : Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery
  • Pt. 2: Theories, predictions and diagnoses. Open secrets : Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information ; Million dollar Murray : why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage ; The picture problem : mammography, air power, and the limits of looking ; Something borrowed : should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? ; Connecting the dots : the paradoxes of intelligence reform ; The art of failure : why some people choke and others panic ; Blowup : who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we'd better get used to it
  • Pt. 3: Personality, character and intelligence. Late bloomers : why do we equate genius with precocity? ; Most likely to succeed : how do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job. ; Dangerous minds : criminal profiling made easy ; The talent myth : are smart people overrated? ; The New-Boy Network : what do job interviews really tell us? ; Troublemakers : what pit bulls can teach us about crime.
Review by New York Times Review

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in "Whole Lotta Love"? Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The familiar jacket design, with its tiny graphic on a spare background, reminds us that Gladwell has become a brand. He is the author of the mega-best sellers "The Tipping Point," "Blink" and "Outliers"; a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit; and a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, where the 19 articles in "What the Dog Saw" were originally published. This volume includes prequels to those books and other examples of Gladwell's stock in trade: counterintuitive findings from little-known experts. A third of the essays are portraits of "minor geniuses" - impassioned odd-balls loosely connected to cultural trends. We meet the feuding clan of speed-talking pitchmen who gave us the Pocket Fisherman, Hair in a Can, and other it-slices!-it-dices! contraptions. There is the woman who came up with the slogan "Does she or doesn't she?" and made hair coloring (and, Gladwell suggests, self-invention) respectable to millions of American women. The investor Nassim Taleb explains how markets can be blindsided by improbable but consequential events. A gourmet ketchup entrepreneur provides Gladwell the opportunity to explain the psychology of taste and to recount the history of condiments. Another third are on the hazards of statistical prediction, especially when it comes to spectacular failures like Enron, 9/11, the fatal flight of John F. Kennedy Jr., the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the persistence of homelessness and the unsuccessful targeting of Scud missile launchers during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. For each debacle, Gladwell tries to single out a fallacy of reasoning behind it, such as that more information is always better, that pictures offer certainty, that events are distributed in a bell curve around typical cases, that clues available in hindsight should have been obvious before the fact and that the risk of failure in a complex system can be reduced to zero. The final third are also about augury, this time about individuals rather than events. Why, he asks, is it so hard to prognosticate the performance of artists, teachers, quarterbacks, executives, serial killers and breeds of dogs? The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures. Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, "Gee, that's interesting!" He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay. I particularly liked "Something Borrowed," a moving examination of the elusive line between artistic influence and plagiarism, and "Dangerous Minds," a suspenseful tale of criminal profiling that shows how self-anointed experts can delude their clients and themselves with elastic predictions. An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "saggital plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus - for example, that "we" believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that "risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable." As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don't drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour. But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless "rituals of reassurance" with no effect on safety, or that people have a "fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another," it is demonstrably false. The problem with Gladwell's generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings. For example, in many cases of uncertainty, a decision maker has to act on an observation that may be either a signal from a target or noise from a distractor (a blip on a screen may be a missile or static; a blob on an X-ray may be a tumor or a harmless thickening). Improving the ability of your detection technology to discriminate signals from noise is always a good thing, because it lowers the chance you'll mistake a target for a distractor or vice versa. But given the technology you have, there is an optimal threshold for a decision, which depends on the relative costs of missing a target and issuing a false alarm. By failing to identify this trade-off, Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes about the limitations of pictures and the downside of precise information. Another example of an inherent trade-off in decision-making is the one that pits the accuracy of predictive information against the cost and complexity of acquiring it. Gladwell notes that I.Q. scores, teaching certificates and performance in college athletics are imperfect predictors of professional success. This sets up a "we" who is "used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors." Instead, Gladwell argues, "teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree -and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before." But this "solution" misses the whole point of assessment, which is not clairvoyance but cost-effectiveness. To hire teachers indiscriminately and judge them on the job is an example of "going back and looking for better predictors": the first year of a career is being used to predict the remainder. It's simply the predictor that's most expensive (in dollars and poorly taught students) along the accuracy-cost trade-off. Nor does the absurdity of this solution for professional athletics (should every college quarterback play in the N.F.L.?) give Gladwell doubts about his misleading analogy between hiring teachers (where the goal is to weed out the bottom 15 percent) and drafting quarterbacks (where the goal is to discover the sliver of a percentage point at the top). 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. Gladwell advances a kind of populism that appeals to both the Horatio Alger right and the egalitarian left. Steven Pinker is Harvard College professor of psychology at Harvard University. His most recent book is "The Stuff of Thought."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008), is a staff writer for the New Yorker, in whose pages he has published many thought-provoking and just-plain-offbeat essays. This collection brings some of those together, including a profile of Ron Popeil, the television pitchman; an analysis of the downfall of Enron, with special emphasis on the easy availability of information; an intriguing look at criminal profiling; an exploration of why there are so few brands of ketchup on the market; an account of a case of plagiarism in which Gladwell was one of the victims; a chronicle of the development of hair dye and its social ramifications; and a consideration of the phenomenon of dog whispering (this essay gives the book its title). As in his best-selling books, Gladwell displays an easygoing writing style and a sharp critical mind. This is the kind of essay collection you can read from cover to cover or, just as satisfactorily, dip into a bit at a time.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Gladwell's fourth book comprises various contributions to the New Yorker and makes for an intriguing and often hilarious look at "the hidden extraordinary." He wonders "what... hair dye tell[s] us about twentieth century history," and observes firsthand "dog whisperer" Cesar Millan's uncanny ability to understand and be understood by his pack. Gladwell pulls double duty as author and narrator; while his delivery isn't the most dramatic or commanding, the material is frequently astonishing, and his reading is clear, heartfelt, and makes for genuinely pleasurable listening. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Gladwell's (www.gladwell.com) three previous nonfiction works were all No. 1 New York Times best sellers. Here, he collects 22 of his favorite essays for The New Yorker into the categories of "Minor Geniuses," "Human Relations," and "How We Make Predictions." Whether he is discussing the invention of the Ronco Veg-O-Matic or the fall of Enron, Gladwell's commentary is well researched, informative, and often delivered from an unexpected point of view-hence, the title. Gladwell himself reads, and though his breathy voice is soothing, his performance can be choppy. Nonetheless, this collection is definitely worth purchasing. It will appeal to Gladwell's many fans as well as to anyone who enjoys following a well-presented argument; perfect for a longish commute. ["Fans of Gladwell's writing will want to add this to their bookshelves," read the review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 11/15/09, a New York Times, USA Today, and LJ best seller.-Ed.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.