December 16, 2006

Joy Joy!

The Malcolm Gladwell debate appears to have inspired another new aphorism in the style of G.C. Lichtenberg from Deogolwulf at the Joy of Curmudgeonry website:

"Many have devised for themselves an additional criterion of knowledge: that it may not offend their sensibilities or disturb their repose."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Am I alone in thinking these fewtrils are pretty naff?

Anonymous said...

The comedy gets only better as Mr. Gladwell tries a different size shoe on each foot he puts in his mouth.

Here, and excerpted below, is Mr. Gladwell's latest attempt at intellectual Houdinism. It’s excerpted because I’d be shamed into deleting it ASAP if I were Gladwell and someone explained to me how statistics work.

“One small point--and I realize that I should have made it a long time ago. A number of people have taken issue with my statement that the car salesmen discarded three out of four pieces of data about their customers, and focused only on race. The experiment, they point out, was designed to isolate race as a variable. Quite right. But only within the context of the ENTIRE experiment, not from the standpoint of the individual car salesman. Each individual car salesman, after all, only saw one customer from the experimenter pool. And my point was that the salesmen who only saw black male customers seemed to have little or no interest in letting socio-economic data counteract their race-based assumptions.
Posted by: malcolm gladwell | December 16, 2006 at 11:20 AM”



According to Wikipedia, Mr. Gladwell was one of Time’s 100 most Influential People of 2005 focusing on unexpected research into social science, particularly sociology and psychology. How can anyone research these areas, much less unexpected results if they can’t grasp fundamental tools of the trade. God help us.

Ken

Anonymous said...

(reposted with corrected hyperlinks)

The comedy gets only better as Mr. Gladwell tries a different size shoe on each foot he puts in his mouth.

Here, and excerpted below, is Mr. Gladwell's latest attempt at intellectual Houdinism. It’s excerpted because I’d be shamed into deleting it ASAP if I were Mr. Gladwell and someone had to explain how statistics work for me to begin to understand how my latest "clarification" makes no sense.

“One small point--and I realize that I should have made it a long time ago. A number of people have taken issue with my statement that the car salesmen discarded three out of four pieces of data about their customers, and focused only on race. The experiment, they point out, was designed to isolate race as a variable. Quite right. But only within the context of the ENTIRE experiment, not from the standpoint of the individual car salesman. Each individual car salesman, after all, only saw one customer from the experimenter pool. And my point was that the salesmen who only saw black male customers seemed to have little or no interest in letting socio-economic data counteract their race-based assumptions.
Posted by: malcolm gladwell | December 16, 2006 at 11:20 AM”

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Gladwell was one of "Time's 100 most Influential People of 2005... focusing on unexpected research into social science, particularly sociology and psychology". How can anyone research these areas, much less unexpected results if they can’t grasp fundamental tools of the trade. God help us.

Ken

Ted Heistman said...

Well, when he is not trying to be politically correct I think he is kinda smart.

Plus, considering his background, its plausible that he is kind of confused about the subject and other peoples perceptions on race.

Anonymous said...

He's a moralist of the PC variety. His first priority is: morally wrong or not? The "science" (such as it is) comes second.