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Over the weekend, Harvard psychology professor, Steven Pinker, reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, What the Dog Saw, for the New York Times. Pinker writes:

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.

Ouch! Steve Sailer notes that Gladwell assertion that quarterback performance isn’t correlated to draft choice is incorrect. Finally, Vanity Fair chimes in with a Gladwellian parody on Christmas:

He is grotesquely overweight. He is childless. He lives in the chilly and undesirable North Pole. He insists on dressing in a bright-red jumpsuit with fur trimmings. He can only ever find employment on one day a year, and, even then, it is night work.

On every accepted level, Santa Claus is a total loser.

Yet this is a man who heads up a brand that commands 98 percent global recognition.

Furthermore, he is universally adored.

How does he do it?

In a controlled research investigation involving uninterrupted surveillance videotaping, a sustained loop of twinkly music, and state-of-the-art ¬merriness-determination equip¬ment, a Dutch santologist named Hans Bunquum discovered the secret to Claus’s phenomenal success.

“The conclusion is both remarkable and inescapable but also—most importantly—counter-intuitive,” Dr. Bunquum told me over a glass of organic lemonade in his stunn¬ing waterstulp, or waterside studio, near Rotterdam. “To become the object of universal love, one must first live with a red-nosed rein¬deer, and then gain a premier position as the sole registered employer of elves in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s as simple as that.”

Posted by edelfenbein at November 16, 2009 9:27 AM