Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is anyone here familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know? Is there a high-quality review anywhere that summarizes what I should know going into it? I understand that Gladwell has a bad reputation around here generally; is there a good general summary of his offenses to help me keep an appropriately skeptical mindset?
I realize that there's probably some irony in worrying about being biased toward excessive trust in someone who's writing in part about how people are biased toward excessive trust.
I just listened to the audiobook. I was actually considering writing a book review but didn't think there was much value in i. It isn't particularly worth reading imo. It's not really about "Talking to Strangers" like it claims so much as it looks into systematic/psychological reasons for why one of the BLM cases Sandra Bland got pulled over and it went so wrong beyond the leftist explanation of "racism" and rightist explanation of "just a bad apple".
It presents three reasons. The first is that most people are predisposed to trusting others, and it takes a lot of evidence to convince someone that a person is lying. But some people (like the cop in the Sandra Bland case) are very distrusting/paranoid and start off suspicious of people. His ultimate point on this was pretty unclear since he spent a long time praising the suspicious guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's fraud long before anyone else, but also seemed to conclude we shouldn't encourage/place paranoid people in power like the cop since it'd cause society to break down. That we need trust for meaningful and smooth interactions. He never addresses high trust/low trust societies and just kind of assumes everyone is as trustful as Americans, implying some studies using college students are indicative of the ancestral environment, which I think is pretty bad. He also doesn't really mention how, instead of a simple paranoid/trusting binary, we could maybe try to work harder at actually examining whether the evidence that someone is lying is strong or nonsense. This section was just generally too narrow and shallow imo.
His second point is all about how body language and facial expressions can be very misleading. That while you could practically understand an episode of Friends with volume off because the body language and facial expressions are so over the top, in real life things are much more unclear but people don't realize that. And they think they can determine guilt/innocence based off how people act but that's really pretty much nonsense, even for the most skilled interrogators. I think this is all true but doesn't really have much depth to it, no point in reading 50 pages on it.
The third section was about a particular policing policy. In Kansas City in the 90s, they had really bad crime, and they did lots of research and experiments into how to lower it. The conclusions they eventually came to after trying lots of things was that much of the crime was isolated to very small geographic locations, like just one or two blocks, or a stretch of street. You might see something like 80% of the crime in the city in like 3% of its geographic area, or something like that, I forget the exact numbers or if it was just certain subsets of crime but they were very dramatic. And that the best way to reduce crime was for cops to go into those high crime areas at high crime times(e.g at night in the dark) and constantly search people's cars. Make up some excuse like a broken taillight or that they didn't signal or whatever, use that as an excuse to question the driver, and if the driver looks suspicious search the car. And that had high rates of catching people with illegal drugs and guns and vastly reduced crime. But the rest of American police departments only heard the last part about "pull people over for dumb reasons and look for excuses to search them", without the part about "only do this in high crime areas", and then police started annoying people and wasting money and even arresting lots of innocent people for dumb reasons which was very bad. I don't really know enough about policing to know if this section was completely accurate but it sounds plausible to me based off what I do know. I've been meaning to make some sort of post somewhere discussing this section because doing this sort of policing right, being extremely heavy handed in high crime areas but extremely light handed in other areas, sounds like it'd be a major step up and I'm curious if it's true.
Appreciate the response.
I don't remember the book as clearly as when I'd just finished listening to it, but I feel like you could reasonably view it as using the Bland case as a case study for a more general message/phenomenon. Which isn't to say that the title represents it well, or that I could make a good argument for the relevance of all the different topics/claims that the book tries to tie it to.
At times it seemed to be building toward something like "people are too complicated to perfectly understand, so don't get overconfident". But it always seemed to revert back to "this situation seems complicated, but let me explain everyone's exact thoughts and motivations". Similarly, lots of "here's the popular idea about this, but isn't it a little too neat and tidy? Let's look deeper", but then its own narratives end up exactly as reductive/simplistic/superficial.
I feel like the point about Harry Markopolos was pretty clear in the end. The "praise" was just the front half of the "but"; "you think you want a guy like this in your corner, but you don't".
I was pretty skeptical about the narrative about body language. There's probably a book's worth of material in how people are influenced by exaggerated screen acting as it forms an increasing proportion of their "social" experiences; and another's on broscience in police and intelligence training. But I have a hard time taking seriously the idea that facial and body "language" are pure social convention, and that there are no universal involuntary responses to things. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from The Blank Slate, or being overly credulous toward it?
I feel like the book was conflating "these ways of evaluating people can produce false positives" with "evaluating people is completely impossible". In some places it almost seemed like it was leading to autistic supremacism; "the en-tees think they have these rich nonverbal communication channels and intuitive faculties, but they're all pure delusion", and so on.
I skipped the chapter on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Overall, I may have ended up biased against the book's value instead of for it. Like Malcolm watching the arrest video, I still get angry rereading or remembering parts of it, and remembering the anxious faux-earnest tone that they were read in. That's probably not a good sign. Still, I'm starting to question the value of this kind of single-perspective book generally.
One thing I did appreciate somewhat was reading about how embarrassingly obvious Amanda Knox's innocence was, years after seeing the crowing over Less Wrong "getting it right" and how it proved the superiority of their methods.
I'm passingly curious whether you ended up making the post on policing.
That's Malcolm Gladwell's standard Modus Operandi. I've read/listend to a lot of his stuff, and he's extremely hit or miss with his research. He's pretty entertaining at least, even though he sometimes lands way off base with his conclusions.
No, I never did.
Sometimes I wish I were better at reading things "for entertainment" without worrying about what beliefs or habits of thought I'm absorbing. Idk.
I think it just comes down to reading a lot of stuff from different points of view. If you read two books that advocate for opposite beliefs, you can't come out too badly.
Provided, presumably, that you can accurately identify the "belief(s)" that a book "advocates for", and identify an adequately entertaining book that advocates for the opposite(s), without "accidentally" picking one that argues so badly that it only reinforces your prior beliefs, or one that disputes minor points while reinforcing the underlying assumptions; and without "coincidentally" finding that you don't have the spare time to read anymore.
Yes, I don't think any of that is that difficult.
Probably just don't want it as much as I want to believe I do, then. Many such cases.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The only book of his I've read is Blink. It's a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing book to read, but it's a bit sad reading it years after it came out, after probably an absolute majority of the psychological studies it cites have been hit by the replication crisis. The book's thesis is also a bit confused: he says it's about the value of relying on your intuition and snap judgement over cold dispassionate analysis, but there's a whole chapter on what happens when your snap judgement goes wrong (the shooting of Amadou Diallo). There's a big chunk of the book where he talks about how the single biggest factor determining whether a doctor faces a malpractice suit is how nice the doctor is to the patient, which he takes as a point in favour of his thesis when to me it sounds like an indictment of it: a competent doctor who did everything in his power to help his patient but got sued anyway because of his substandard bedside manner (while his charming Chad of a colleague, who wouldn't know a foley catheter from his elbow and is on regular rotation in M&M conferences, gets away scot-free) sounds like whatever the equivalent of blackpilling is for medics.
I remember reading an article critical of his whole approach to writing; I think it was this one but I'm not sure.
Never read Blink, but it sounds pretty typical.
It seems like the conventional understanding these days is that being a "charming Chad" is a central part of most jobs, medicine particularly, rather than an optional extra distinguishable from "competence". (As famously expressed by Zunger, and frequently discussed in relation to House previously.) Don't feel like arguing it myself, though.
Thanks for the article link; I read it and passed it on. I had this one in the draft of my reply to non_radical_centrist:
Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell? - Knight Science Journalism @MIT (archive)
It's conceivable that I meant to suggest it to you as either being or having a link to the one that you were remembering.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link