What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures

(Malcolm Gladwell, 2009)

Everything that can be tested must be tested.

Physical events, whether death rates or poker games, are the predictable function of a limited and stable set of factors, and tend to follow what statisticians call a normal distribution, a bell curve.

Jumps of that magnitude happen in the stock market every three or four years, because investors don’t behave with any kind of statistical orderliness. They change their mind. They do stupid things. They copy one another. They panic.

In the markets, unlike in the physical universe, the rules of the game can be changed.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

He buys options on both sides, on the possibility of the market moving both up and down. And he doesn’t bet on minor fluctuations in the market.

Other people believe they know more than they do.

What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress.

The key is not having the ideas but having the recipe to deal with your ideas.

It was a never-ending struggle, this battle between head and heart.

We associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong.

Motivational researchers were concerned with why: Why do people buy what they do? What motivates them when they shop? The researchers devised surveys, with hundreds of questions, based on Freudian dynamic psychology.

You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling.

Fights don’t come out of nowhere.

Dogs are students of human movement.

A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t. Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species.

Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. Dogs are really interested in humans, interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.

Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions.

The idea of regulation — learned to handle the disruption, and block it out. They’ve regulated themselves. Children throwing tantrums are said to be in a state of dysregulation. They’ve been knocked off kilter in some way, and cannot bring themselves back to baseline.

Touch is an incredible tool. It’s another way to speak.

Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive.

There is no commanding, only soliciting.

Women have their own psychology.

Now the task of the intelligence analyst is to help policymakers navigate the disorder.

Puzzles are “transmitter-dependent”; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are “receiver-dependent”; they turn on the skills of the listener.

A power law distribution — where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.

Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution.

Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless.

It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision. That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair.

We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It was easier the old way.

We tend to trust the camera more than our own eyes.

The human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle than the technical task of picture taking. Pictures promise to clarify but often confuse.

Mammography doesn’t fit our normal expectations of pictures.

So much of what can be seen on an X-ray falls into a gray area that interpreting a mammogram is also, in part, a matter of temperament. Some radiologists see something ambiguous and are comfortable calling it normal. Others see something ambiguous and get suspicious. Caution simply creates another kind of problem.

Mammography is a form of medical screening: it is supposed to exclude the healthy, so that more time and attention can be given to the sick. If screening doesn’t screen, it ceases to be useful.

The screen seldom gives you quite enough information.

Mammography is especially likely to miss the tumors that do the most harm.

Almost by definition, mammograms are picking up slow-growing tumors.

We simply don’t trust our tactile sense as much as our visual sense.

The problem was that the picture didn’t tell them what they really needed to know.

Seeing a problem and understanding it, then, are two different things.

Mammograms do not have to be infallible to save lives.

You have to respect the limitations of the technology.

While a picture is a good start, if you really want to know what you’re looking at, you probably need more than a picture.

Serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness.

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness,” I wrote, “is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn’t a straightforward application of the ethical principle “Thou shalt not steal.” At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal.

Resemblance is not proof of influence.

Art is not a breach of ethics.

Creative property has many lives. By the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going.

What is clear in hindsight is rarely clear before the fact.

“Creeping determinism” — the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable. It turns unexpected events into expected events. The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.

Classic intelligence problem — Here was a signal (a sane person) buried in a mountain of conflicting and confusing noise (a mental hospital), and the intelligence analysts (the doctors) were asked to connect the dots — and they failed spectacularly.

In attempting to solve one kind of intelligence problem (overdiagnosis), the
hospital simply created another problem (underdiagnosis). This is the second, and perhaps more serious, consequence of creeping determinism: in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.

Making warning systems more sensitive reduces the risk of surprise, but increases the number of false alarms, which in turn reduces sensitivity.

Human beings sometimes falter under pressure.

Learn the sequence unconsciously. Implicit learning — learning that takes place outside of awareness. But as you get better, the implicit system takes over. Under conditions of stress, however, the explicit system sometimes
takes over. That’s what it means to choke.

Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on.

Panic also causes what psychologists call perceptual narrowing.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct.

Instinct can tell you nothing.

Panicking is conventional failure, of the sort we tacitly understand. Performance ought to improve with experience, and that pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome. Choking makes little intuitive sense. Choking is paradoxical failure.

Perform under stereotype threat, you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing.

The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. This is choking, not panicking.

We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.

A normal accident — the kind of accident one can expect in the normal functioning of a technologically complex operation. It is almost inevitable that some combinations of minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic. In the end, the normal accident was the more terrifying one.

Deviation could be controlled but not eliminated — normalized deviance.

How human beings handle risk, when a risk can be identified and eliminated, a system can be made safer.

Risk homeostasis — under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organization safer in fact don’t. Because human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another. Risk homeostasis also works in the opposite direction.

Consumed the risk reduction, they didn’t save it.

We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.

Doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

The assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market
failure. Late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much
the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year.

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.

Withitness, which he defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior.

The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability.

Different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.

If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.

The very best companies, they concluded, had leaders who were obsessed with the talent issue. “The talent mind-set”: the “deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors.”

The link between, say, IQ and job performance is distinctly underwhelming. What IQ doesn’t pick up is effectiveness at common sense sorts of things, especially working with people.

Tacit knowledge involves things like knowing how to manage yourself and others and how to navigate complicated social situations.

Flawed managers fall into three types:
(1) High Likability Floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies.
(2) Homme de Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and plots against
his enemies.
(3) Narcissist, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder. Narcissists are biased to take more credit
for success than is legitimate.

Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb, for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?

They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.

The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.

It is a truism of the new economy that the ultimate success of any enterprise lies with the quality of the people it hires.

When we make a snap judgment, it is made in a snap. It’s also, very clearly, a judgment: we get a feeling that we have no difficulty articulating.

Apparently, human beings don’t need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone. The power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgments about others.

All of these affective reactions are probably governed by the lower brain structures. Maybe these clues or cues are immediately accessible and apparent.

The first impression becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: we hear what we expect to hear.

How we behave at any one time, evidently, has less to do with some immutable inner compass than with the particulars of our situation. This conclusion, obviously, is at odds with our intuition.

Psychologists call this tendency — to fixate on supposedly stable character traits and overlook the influence of context — the Fundamental Attribution Error, and if you combine this error with what we know about snap judgments, the interview becomes an even more problematic encounter.

Structured interviewing — process of cataloging.

Behind each generalization is a choice of what factors to leave in and what factors to leave out, and those choices can prove surprisingly complicated.

Profiling’s “category problem” —for that process to work, you have to be able both to define and to identify the category you are generalizing about.