Categories: The Interview

Maclean’s Interview: Malcolm Gladwell

On plane crashes and the minimum IQ for success

by Kate Fillion on Friday, November 21, 2008 3:40pm - 6 Comments

Q: Growing rice is cognitively demanding?

A: Oh yeah. An Asian rice farmer is required not just to work harder than his or her European, medieval counterpart, but also has far more decisions to make. You do a thousand years of that and you get very different cultural habits that, as it turns out, are beautifully suited to the task of tackling calculus.

Q: But those countries have enormous urban populations. A lot of those high-achieving kids must come from families who haven’t set foot in a rice paddy for generations.

A: Cultural habits are passed down from generation to generation, and they persist even after the conditions that spawned them are long gone.

Q: Obviously, these are the kinds of generalizations or stereotypes that upset people.

A: Generalizations about cultures are useful when they are used with the intent to help, not harm, and when they’re specific. If I can learn something about how to teach math in the inner city by making a generalization about Asian culture, I’m going to do it. We would be wilfully blinding ourselves if we didn’t take culture into account.

Q: Speaking of culture, do you think Canadians and Americans define success differently?

A: I’d like to think Canadians aren’t as obsessed with the cult of individualism. When Jeb Bush, George’s brother, was running for governor of Florida, he referred to himself as a self-made man. This is a guy whose father was president, his grandfather was a powerful investment banker and his other grandfather was a U.S. senator! You’d be laughed out of town if you tried to make that argument in Canada.

Pages: 1 2 3

Tags: Interview, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, secret to succes

Ben R

I think Dan Seligman’s book “A Question of Intelligence” does a better job explaining the performance of East Asians on math/science subjects. Essentially, if you look at the group average, they do particularly well on the non-verbal component of psychometric tests. This is consistent with their performance on math/science subjects. Seligman also notes possible explanations of this including:

“Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile “selection pressure” for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn’s 1987 paper refers to “the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain.” These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world’s best visuospatial abilities.”
john mohle

i appreciate malcolm gladwell’s thought provoking works

i am not convicted of the assumption that life is about being the best i can be in some gifting or other

a lot of wreckage comes from the desire for material success(i cite current economic upheaval) or from kids wanting to make “the show” hockeywise for instance

i would be interested in the perspective of malcolm’s wonderful mind on this matter
Dan

I hope you contineu to publish further intervies wiht Malcolm.
Pingback: An all-encompassing denounciation of Malcolm Gladwell by a non-reader « The Prairie Wrangler
http://www.ceousa.org Roger Clegg, Center for Equal Opportunity

Mr. Gladwell suggests at the beginning of the interview that affirmative action is an appropriate way to level the playing field. But it’s a gross non sequitur to say that, since so much in life is not merit-based, therefore it’s okay to engage in racial discrimination–that since the playing field is not level, we should use racial preferences to level it.

Race is a poor proxy for disadvantage, and the costs of racial discrimination overwhelm any benefits it may have. To put it another way: There are people of all colors at both ends of the playing field, even if there are racial disproportions. Rather than just assuming that everyone at one end is black (and deserving of preferential treatment) and that everyone at the other end is white (and undeserving of it), why not make the special consideration available to all who are disadvantaged, regardless of skin color?
http://www.infomarketerszone.com Jeff – Writing Tips

Intresting comments – something I do disagree strongly with though is his statement that “Being successful is all about whether you have the skills necessary to impose your will on the world. That’s really what class advantage is: being taught the skills necessary to make sense of institutions.”

I would argue much more strongly that the learned skill of “influence” or “persuasion” are the real way to get your way in the world. Imposing will have limited (even the reverse) impact of rising up in today’s institutions.

However, the point that those born into certain circumstances where they are able to learn the important of influence and how to master the art of influence will certainly stand a better chance of mastering this fundamentally important concept.

Jeff