David and Goliath

David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell

I’m a bit done with Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed Outliers (still do) but each subsequent book as been less and less enjoyable. I suspect it’s how he tends to play a bit loose and fancy free with the data he collects.

In this book, he explains the story of David and Goliath not as an underdog victory so much as a victory due to incorrect assumptions as to how the battle will be met. In the D&G case, Goliath assumes David will meet him in close combat where he, Goliath, has the obvious advantage. In fact, David chooses to battle using his sling shot from a distance where the advantage is reversed. However, Gladwell also claims David won this fight because Goliath was suffering from a pituitary tumour. His point seems to be that we often get these kinds of stories wrong.

Gladwell then proceeds argue that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, there, Malcolm. He supports this claim by making much of the inverted U curve, but it’s really a simple idea that’s even told to children in the Goldilocks fairy tale: too little of something = bad, just enough of something = good, too much of something = bad.

Gladwell almost tricked me into being impressed with his thesis when he makes the argument that when deciding which school to attend for your post-secondary education, you should pick the one where you have the best chance at being at the top of your class, and not the school with the best reputation. In other words, a second-tier school where you might get 80% is better than attending Harvard where you might get 60%. However, if you take this argument to it’s next extreme, you quickly see that this is not that brilliant a deduction. Would you be better attending a school where you might get 70% in your degree program, or a school where you might fail? Suddenly, the answer seems pretty obvious, even without Gladwell’s help.

Rating: Skip it.