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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
After 5 years since I started reading this book, I finally finished it. I always enjoy the way Malcom Gladwell writes his engaging material, the way he does his research and some of the conclusions he draws. Listening to it as an audiobook was particularly interesting as it included direct recordings from interviews, it almost felt like a documentary. I think there were some bold conclusions made in this book, but it was generally a good read!
Un libro fascinante sobre lo complicada que es la comunicacion humana.
Como sabes que lo que tu entiendes que dices es lo mismo que lo que la otra persona entiendes que dices?
Como puedes detectar si alguien miente? Etc.
Muchas ideas interesantes, un gran libro para escuchar.
Not my favorite of Gladwell's, but still very entertaining and thoughtprovoking. The ending felt a little flat though
Was this book entertaining? Yes. But I'm still not quite sure what the point of the book was. With novels, the point is to entertain usually. And that seems to be the point of this nonfiction, book, too, even though I feel like it should have been to inform or to persuade a bit more. I wanted more MEAT in this book, especially if there are going to be correlations made between horrific societal nightmare events like Sandra Black, Nasser, Sandusky, and then to an episode of Friends. I just felt like the chapters were all over the place and I wasn't satisfied with how he tried to wrap everything up into how "we misunderstand each other."
One thing I did realize--I don't have the Default to Truth thing that he talks about. I guess I'm like some police officers then? That's what online dating for the past 13 years gets me. I'm more likely to trust a random truck driver who stops to help me change my tire than someone I meet on an online dating site. I think I have a pretty good spidey sense about people, thanks to being in education for 20+ years.
I think he could have focused the whole book on the coupling idea and how there is a strong correlation between people's actions and place and how it relates to criminal justice. That part was fascinating.
One thing I did realize--I don't have the Default to Truth thing that he talks about. I guess I'm like some police officers then? That's what online dating for the past 13 years gets me. I'm more likely to trust a random truck driver who stops to help me change my tire than someone I meet on an online dating site. I think I have a pretty good spidey sense about people, thanks to being in education for 20+ years.
I think he could have focused the whole book on the coupling idea and how there is a strong correlation between people's actions and place and how it relates to criminal justice. That part was fascinating.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, Murder
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
My favorite ever audio book! It listens like a podcast almost. So informative and challenged so many ideas I had about people. Well researched, interesting book overall. But the audio book quality overall just blew me away.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape
Gladwell does a great job of introducing some thought-provoking concepts, a lot of the cases that were discussed in the book were unknown to me so they were really interesting to read about. To me, this book is a conversation starter. It introduces a topic that few people pay any attention to, the similarities and differences we all fundamentally share but do not acknowledge. His theories, however, I wasn't convinced by. It doesn't take a lot of brainpower (and the power of Google) to poke holes into them, and often times I felt that Gladwell generalized and drew connections where very few existed. A few of the cases were also deeply unsettling, the reader should know before going into it that they will be reading about sexual assault, torture, and racism in graphic detail. Read this book for the captivatingly written cases, but feel free to take the analysis with a grain of salt.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Here's the thing. When someone begins a claim with "I'm not victim-blaming," and then says something that is clearly victim-blaming, they're still victim-blaming. You can't pull an UNO reverse card on what's coming out of your mouth just by saying "I'm not racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic, but...". It doesn't work like that. Similarly, if you choose an extremely important, complicated, and emotionally impactful issue, and then magnify the least important aspect of that issue, you're not issuing a "hot take." You're missing the point.
I have read and greatly enjoyed Gladwell before. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success are still both great books, and I've enjoyed all four seasons of his podcast as well. Everything he's produced up to this has been a great example of how important "explainers" are to public understanding of science and social issues. Everything else he's produced has also been far more logical and coherent than this...whatever this is.
Gladwell's point is, simply, we don't know strangers. We make subconscious decisions about their facial expressions, body language, speech, writing, etc, that do not accurately reflect their intentions, their character, or what they are actually trying to convey, and these subconscious decisions can snowball into much greater errors of judgment. It is, more or less, a feeble extension of Blink, but executed by poorly stringing numerous infamous incidents together and claiming they all have something in common. Sandra Bland's death in the custody of Texas police, the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, the Stanford sexual assault case, and even more that I don't care to recount.
You could make the (pointless) argument that any one of these cases is a result of snowballing errors of judgment. But Gladwell is missing the forest for the trees. Almost all the cases he recounts in this book happened to people as a result of systemic injustice. Sandra Bland--a black woman, facing a white police officer who had never been challenged on his institution's systematic mistreatment of black women. Chanel Miller--a young Chinese-American woman, assaulted by a white man who had never before been challenged on his treatment of women. The Jerry Sandusky victims--vulnerable children, often from broken homes, facing a revered icon of manhood who held immense financial and political sway within Penn State University and its football community.
Gladwell is making the same error as the bail judges in his book--he is breaking down these cases into irrelevant information that is drawing him to irrelevant, inaccurate conclusions. Is it really conducive to a greater understanding of child exploitation to excuse Penn State officials from fault because they never heard the word "sodomized" used to describe Jerry Sandusky's activities with children? Is it really conducive to a greater understanding of rape culture to say that someone (a rapist) becomes a completely different person when drunk, and that their drunk actions (rape) are not a reflection of their true character (the character of a rapist)? I don't understand what Gladwell's goal is here, and it's incredibly frustrating. I have the uneasy feeling that the Venn Diagram of people who will enjoy this book and people who will demand that Joker be nominated for an Oscar is eerily close to a circle.
I have read and greatly enjoyed Gladwell before. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success are still both great books, and I've enjoyed all four seasons of his podcast as well. Everything he's produced up to this has been a great example of how important "explainers" are to public understanding of science and social issues. Everything else he's produced has also been far more logical and coherent than this...whatever this is.
Gladwell's point is, simply, we don't know strangers. We make subconscious decisions about their facial expressions, body language, speech, writing, etc, that do not accurately reflect their intentions, their character, or what they are actually trying to convey, and these subconscious decisions can snowball into much greater errors of judgment. It is, more or less, a feeble extension of Blink, but executed by poorly stringing numerous infamous incidents together and claiming they all have something in common. Sandra Bland's death in the custody of Texas police, the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, the Stanford sexual assault case, and even more that I don't care to recount.
You could make the (pointless) argument that any one of these cases is a result of snowballing errors of judgment. But Gladwell is missing the forest for the trees. Almost all the cases he recounts in this book happened to people as a result of systemic injustice. Sandra Bland--a black woman, facing a white police officer who had never been challenged on his institution's systematic mistreatment of black women. Chanel Miller--a young Chinese-American woman, assaulted by a white man who had never before been challenged on his treatment of women. The Jerry Sandusky victims--vulnerable children, often from broken homes, facing a revered icon of manhood who held immense financial and political sway within Penn State University and its football community.
Gladwell is making the same error as the bail judges in his book--he is breaking down these cases into irrelevant information that is drawing him to irrelevant, inaccurate conclusions. Is it really conducive to a greater understanding of child exploitation to excuse Penn State officials from fault because they never heard the word "sodomized" used to describe Jerry Sandusky's activities with children? Is it really conducive to a greater understanding of rape culture to say that someone (a rapist) becomes a completely different person when drunk, and that their drunk actions (rape) are not a reflection of their true character (the character of a rapist)? I don't understand what Gladwell's goal is here, and it's incredibly frustrating. I have the uneasy feeling that the Venn Diagram of people who will enjoy this book and people who will demand that Joker be nominated for an Oscar is eerily close to a circle.
In this book, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates his skill of taking seemingly dry topics and writing about them almost in the manner of a thriller, leading from one anecdote to another to draw unseen connections and finally to some new principle of human behaviour. The stories he features here fall on the extreme end: child sexual abuse, rape, suicide, terrorism, financial fraud and police violence. What connects all of them is the rather ordinary idea that we humans are not very good at talking to strangers.
Gladwell argues that we make these key mistakes when dealing with people we don’t know: we tend to default to assuming someone is telling the truth even when faced with evidence otherwise; we have overconfidence in our ability to read a person’s true intentions from their faces; and we fail to recognise that some behaviours (e.g. crime, suicide) are tightly coupled to a specific place/situation. He opens and closes the book with the case of Sandra Bland, who was arrested after a traffic stop which escalated into a confrontation, and committed suicide three days later. His short analysis is that in order to correct for the first error of defaulting to truth (which allowed Bernie Madoff, Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar to commit their crimes for years without being investigated), police agencies have ignored the other two, resulting in overpolicing (mostly through traffic stops) by officers who assume the worst of their subjects.
However, Gladwell’s conclusion isn’t very clear: he says that the lesser of the evils is to continue to default to truth, as this vulnerability to the occasional lie affords us the privileges of civilisation — the social trust that binds communities together. Do we simply accept that people like the three mentioned above will continue to slip through the gaps then? And instead of looking at these extreme scenarios, what about strangers who aren’t out to hurt us directly, but whom we don’t get along with anyway? Social and political polarisation is arguably a more tangible threat that also arises from our inability to talk to strangers. Despite its flaws, the book was still a very enjoyable and refreshing read, made more so by the fluency of Gladwell’s writing.
Gladwell argues that we make these key mistakes when dealing with people we don’t know: we tend to default to assuming someone is telling the truth even when faced with evidence otherwise; we have overconfidence in our ability to read a person’s true intentions from their faces; and we fail to recognise that some behaviours (e.g. crime, suicide) are tightly coupled to a specific place/situation. He opens and closes the book with the case of Sandra Bland, who was arrested after a traffic stop which escalated into a confrontation, and committed suicide three days later. His short analysis is that in order to correct for the first error of defaulting to truth (which allowed Bernie Madoff, Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar to commit their crimes for years without being investigated), police agencies have ignored the other two, resulting in overpolicing (mostly through traffic stops) by officers who assume the worst of their subjects.
However, Gladwell’s conclusion isn’t very clear: he says that the lesser of the evils is to continue to default to truth, as this vulnerability to the occasional lie affords us the privileges of civilisation — the social trust that binds communities together. Do we simply accept that people like the three mentioned above will continue to slip through the gaps then? And instead of looking at these extreme scenarios, what about strangers who aren’t out to hurt us directly, but whom we don’t get along with anyway? Social and political polarisation is arguably a more tangible threat that also arises from our inability to talk to strangers. Despite its flaws, the book was still a very enjoyable and refreshing read, made more so by the fluency of Gladwell’s writing.
informative