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A review by satanicpuppy
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
1.0
I tend to like Gladwell, but I felt he went way off the rails on this one.
He puts a lot of weight on his few themes: transparency, contextual mismatching, causal coupling, etc, but even in the text he's skirting the fact that his chosen examples often don't conform to his argument. For example, we get the Brock Turner thing, where he's arguing (among other things) that alcohol and rape are strongly coupled. Okay, that's crazy reductive, but we'll just accept it as true. Then we jump straight to Jerry Sandusky, and this is represented as a communications issue where everyone's preconceived notions are getting in the way of accurate blah blah, WHERE'S THE CORRELATION WITH ALCOHOL NOW? I thought they were coupled?
He argues that suicide is strongly correlated with available methods, and let's just ignore that all the suicide "data" (there is no real data) in the book is female suicide, and women make up 20% of suicides, and just deal with the assertion as it stands. He makes the argument, then jumps to the Sandra Bland case which is again, represented as a communication issue, but she committed suicide in a cell with a method that required a serious will to die. Where's the coupling? I thought suicide was coupled with an easy method, and it just magically vanished if you took that away?
I felt the data was cherry-picked, I felt the arguments were weak and superficial (all correlation, no causation) or just trite and obvious (people are bad at reading other people? Really?) and I felt he had an unwarranted perception of who the "real" victim was (poor poor Brock Turner? What the hell? I've never seen such a sympathetic treatment of that guy) in most of his situations.
Anyway. Miss this. You won't learn anything except his what his opinions are, and you're going to come off as a jerk if you spout them in public.
He puts a lot of weight on his few themes: transparency, contextual mismatching, causal coupling, etc, but even in the text he's skirting the fact that his chosen examples often don't conform to his argument. For example, we get the Brock Turner thing, where he's arguing (among other things) that alcohol and rape are strongly coupled. Okay, that's crazy reductive, but we'll just accept it as true. Then we jump straight to Jerry Sandusky, and this is represented as a communications issue where everyone's preconceived notions are getting in the way of accurate blah blah, WHERE'S THE CORRELATION WITH ALCOHOL NOW? I thought they were coupled?
He argues that suicide is strongly correlated with available methods, and let's just ignore that all the suicide "data" (there is no real data) in the book is female suicide, and women make up 20% of suicides, and just deal with the assertion as it stands. He makes the argument, then jumps to the Sandra Bland case which is again, represented as a communication issue, but she committed suicide in a cell with a method that required a serious will to die. Where's the coupling? I thought suicide was coupled with an easy method, and it just magically vanished if you took that away?
I felt the data was cherry-picked, I felt the arguments were weak and superficial (all correlation, no causation) or just trite and obvious (people are bad at reading other people? Really?) and I felt he had an unwarranted perception of who the "real" victim was (poor poor Brock Turner? What the hell? I've never seen such a sympathetic treatment of that guy) in most of his situations.
Anyway. Miss this. You won't learn anything except his what his opinions are, and you're going to come off as a jerk if you spout them in public.