While I always appreciate a good Gladwell takedown, it would have been nice if the AAK article noted Gladwell’s essay mostly piggybacked off of Korean Air’s own PR campaign at the time. Gladwell turned up the cultural determinism angle, but the basic story was widely reported in many media outlets.
The moment anyone who knows anything about World War II heard about that bomber book they knew it was a combination of BS and Columbusing of the highest order.
I think it's good when people think across disciplines and try to bring insights from one area into another but you have to behave with humility and listen to specialists.
I'm sorry to be THAT GUY, but it was jarring reading sentence like "The shoot-down of Flight 007 quickly cooled the Russia-U.S. relations, which was showing signs of hope until that point", while knowing by 1983 US-SOVIET relations were already in deep freeze because of a lot of other things.
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back in 2010 I wrote myself into a heated Gladwell takedown on Quora challenging a self-proclaimed social impact VC’s mushy praise & smooshy promotion of the Outlier methology/mythology. Turns out his sister was dating Gladwell at the time. Tipping Point-Blink-Outlier: Silicon Valley inside games.
I'm surprised Gladwell didn't stick something about eating kimchi in that Korean Airlines explanation. Like eating spicy food is akin to risk taking and that's why the pilots crashed.
I love a good Gladwell takedown. And there are so many excellent ones! This one is indeed top-tier. My only complaint is that there's too much "Actually I think Gladwell is great in general, just not so much in this case that I happen to know about.." throat clearing.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB933090613281869060
back in 2010 I wrote myself into a heated Gladwell takedown on Quora challenging a self-proclaimed social impact VC’s mushy praise & smooshy promotion of the Outlier methology/mythology. Turns out his sister was dating Gladwell at the time. Tipping Point-Blink-Outlier: Silicon Valley inside games.