The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
this one is really my first foray into nonfiction as a genre, aside from what i am required to read in school and whatnot. reading articles on my own free time doesn't count. unfortunately, if it was to be something i was hoping to enjoy, i probably should've started with something that was known to garner unanimous positive reviews, because this one just put me straight to sleep most of the time.
the author introduces his philosophy of what constitutes the tipping point, something about the law of the few, and blah blah blah. i know he repeats it a LOT throughout the book, but it just got dull and pretentious to me, so i didn't bother. some of the points he brings up are valid, some are ridiculously obvious (yet he still presents them as "new," it gives what merit he gained from me no value, since it seemed mostly gratuitous at that point).. other "insights" are based on very weak evidence, and yet he still presents them with a voila. half the time he contradicts himself on what evidence he presents, and from time to time even injects a bit of personal bias in there. i didn't find the read worthwhile or particularly enlightening at all. maybe for someone who has a fascination with random drawings of statistical evidence, this might be an eye-opener, but evidence based on statistics can be fallacious more often than not--and yet, there is nothing else to back this up aside from statistical evidence based on a very small group of people he "hand-picked." if you run the test repeatedly with different groups and control groups, maybe. running it once and calling it a day doesn't quite count.
another inevitable part of survey data is that people lie. there are those who don't want to fill out surveys for the very reason that they don't want their represented population to show up on whatever result the surveyor is likely to get; therefore, your results are from 1) people who wanted to fill out the survey, i.e. someone who had nothing to lose, and 2) even then they aren't necessarily being honest. ALL his presented evidence is statistical. not to mention, in the case when he mentioned the car accidents? the percentage rised by maybe 5-7%, and he alluded that it must be an effect of a suicide. 5-7% is the slightest of shifts; there are of course always other factors, if we are to follow that humans are indeed as susceptible to environment as he says. major contradiction. what about testing for the effects after it stabilizes? and if it fluctuates again, what might it be blamed on then?
i also don't appreciate that he concluded that the man on the train shot the four teenagers because there was graffiti. true, having graffiti there would likely have encouraged misconduct, and it may even escalate to violence, like he says. but the case he uses for example is of a very disturbed man, who is obviously just waiting for a boiling point, because his system demands that release. in someone that close to the edge, i doubt he will be moved to act simply because of graffiti--after all, he had the gun on him all along, and the graffiti didn't move him to carry it on his person. we can say that graffiti encouraged those four youths to act the way they did, but to explain the way he acted to graffiti is just past the point of ridiculous.
i'm not sure if i want to go on to read his other bestsellers. god knows there are a bunch of shitty books on bestseller lists that certainly don't deserve them. i'm not saying this was a terrible book--i just hate how he markets what's common sense as insight. he also talks down to the reader a lot, which i also definitely did not appreciate. his bias? that's another one. but certain points i did find interesting tended to be the more dramatic examples, like the chinese man on the hilltop mistaken for a japanese spy (which was never concluded--what happened then?), or the micronesian boy who killed himself because his father waved a machete at him. even the man on the train who shot people got a pause from me, because i can certainly see it happening, and the hysteria that follows.
he claims to present views that are radical and that will change the reader's perception of human nature, but the only new thing i got from this is an appreciation of a paper folded 50 times being the distance to the sun from the earth. his description of the profile of a chain-smoker describes me almost perfectly, and yet i've never touched a cigarette in my life. those people i know who are chain-smokers are the exact opposite of that profile. i can only laugh a little after reading that, since i wasted almost 4 days on reading this when i have an entire pile i could've touched instead.
who knows. maybe a marketing major will appreciate it more. certainly not me. because why don't you tell me something i don't know already?
