Malcolm Gladwell Answers Research Questions From Twitter

I don't care how many tabs you have open,

I care what the tabs are.

If they're 42 porn tabs, you have a problem.

If they're 42 really interesting tabs, go for it.

Go to 50.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

As an author and journalist, I do a lot of research,

so today I'm here to answer your questions from Twitter.

This is Research Support.

[upbeat music]

All right, question number one.

@supercynation, supercynsation,

How reliable is Wikipedia really?

Well, it's not bad.

I mean, it's really interesting to compare Wikipedia entries

to their counterpart in an encyclopedia.

So Encyclopedia Britannica, for example,

they would go and find an expert in a field

and have that expert write the entry.

With Wikipedia, you get a mixture of people

who are real experts and people who just wanna participate.

So when I look on my Wikipedia page, for example,

there's a lot of weird stuff on that page

that isn't terribly true.

On the other hand, if you wanna very quickly figure out

what I've written and the things I'm interested in,

my Wikipedia page is pretty good.

Wikipedia is really good if you lower your expectations.

It is a gateway to research,

so use Wikipedia to start your search

and use it for clues about where to go next.

@ARUNGRAYPT asks, How are libraries still going?

Who's going to a library in 2022?

Yours truly goes to libraries.

That's 'cause lots of things are only in a library.

The amount of stuff that you can get on the internet

is a tiny fraction of the sum total

of knowledge in the world.

Tons of books aren't online.

The person who asked this question,

I don't mean to diss them, but I'm about to diss them.

They're clearly uninterested

in anything that happened before, I don't know,

the year 2000 or 2010, which, by the way,

if you're trying to be a smart person in the world,

is a crazy way to live your life.

What the internet is really good at is directed search.

Libraries are great for serendipitous search.

When I'm reading a book that's next to it on the shelf

or 10 books down on the shelf, it catches my eye,

I pick it out, I flip through the index,

I see something that's really useful.

That's library search.

Serendipitous search is how you come up with new ideas.

The other great thing about libraries is librarians.

A library has an actual set of experts

who are there to help you out.

Whereas, you know, who's helping you

when you're messing around on Google at 2:00 AM?

@Nellie_101 asks, Is it me?

Or did McDonald's fries taste better as kids?

Nellie, it's not you.

They absolutely did.

We did a podcast episode on this in Revisionist History

all about how McDonald's changed the formula,

the recipe for their fries in the 1980s

in response to this totally bogus bit of research

that suggested that the cooking oil they were using

was somehow bad for your heart.

As it turns out, it's not bad for your heart,

but they moved away from,

they used to use a kind of a beef tallow, it was beef fat,

and they moved to vegetable oil.

And actually, the research suggests

that vegetable oil is worse for you.

Not only do fries taste worse cooked in vegetable oil

than the old way, but the fry itself

is now probably worse for your heart than the old fry was.

@johnallpress52 says, Is the 10,000 hour rule

real or make believe?

Well, now he's referring to an idea

I wrote about in my book Outliers.

In looking at research in cognitively complex fields,

what we find overwhelmingly

is that people need about 10,000 hours to practice

before they become experts.

10,000 hours is, you know, it's roughly 10 years.

So it takes 10 years to be good at something

is basically what the rule says, if the thing is hard.

Chess players, it's very, very hard to find someone

who can reach the level of a grand master

who hasn't been playing chess for 10 years.

Very hard to find someone who could be an elite point guard

in the NBA who hasn't been playing point guard for 10 years.

I mean, this is famously a problem

in the NBA in evaluating rookies.

You draft someone to play point guard

and you say, Oh, they're a disappointment.

And the reason is it's too early,

'cause that's the most demanding position

on the court in basketball.

It's not make believe, this is a real rule.

And the research suggests that a good average

for how long you need to spend on that

is about 10,000 hours.

@akidnamedsig asks, The word research

has become so watered down.

Like, do you really think a five second Google search

of the topic or point you're trying to make

and clicking the first three results

that pop up is research?

Couldn't agree with you more.

When you're looking for a definitive, factual answer,

Google's really good.

But when you get into more complicated questions,

you need to do a little more research.

I think it's useful to be a little bit skeptical

about the information you get on the internet.

And I think the reason we don't do that all the time

is that being skeptical is exhausting.

Checking is also slightly problematic

because the question is, well, how do you check it?

The thing you're using to check the original fact

is itself a trustworthy source.

writingtoriches asks, What is the biggest predictor

of success?

If you only choose one factor,

social skills, IQ, et cetera.

Biggest predictor of success

is probably having a rich parent.

I tried to answer this question in my book Outliers

and my answer is it's impossible to boil it down

to one thing.

What we do know is that your IQ is probably a smaller,

plays a smaller role than you think.

And your own efforts play a smaller role than you think.

It's probably more to do with luck and good fortune

and having people around you help you.

Those are probably the things

that make the biggest difference.

@rosshowalter asks, How do nonfiction writers

know when to stop working on a piece?

You never really know.

You know when to stop when they take it away from you.

I actually think that's the wrong question.

The right question is most people, I think,

work too little on their pieces.

All the serious writers I know

do way, way, way, way, way more drafts

and work much longer on their writing than other people.

If you think you should stop working on it,

you probably need to do another draft.

@johnpicciuto asks, Why do smart people do dumb things?

My podcast came up with a hypothesis,

at least in the case of Wilt Chamberlain

and many of his friends.

He didn't shoot free throws underhanded.

He did for one season, and in that one season,

he was suddenly a fantastic free-throw shooter.

And then he went back to shooting free throws the old way,

reverted to being a terrible free-throw shooter,

and by the way, it was the only flaw

in Wilt Chamberlain's game.

Had he been able to shoot free throws well,

he would've been hands down the greatest basketball player

of all time.

And Wilt said he didn't wanna look like an idiot.

People would rather not look like an idiot

than become the greatest basketball player of all time.

Why do smart people do dumb things?

'Cause they don't wanna look like an idiot.

@AlxceTeachesEng asks, What is bad science exactly?

Oh man, there's many different definitions of bad science,

but science committed by people

who think they know the answer before they start.

There's a guy named John Lott

who writes about guns and crime

and he's the only person who claims

that the more guns you have, the less crime you have.

But then you realize that John Lott

is like ideologically committed

to the Second Amendment, to gun rights,

and you really have to ask yourself,

Is his research honest?

The gold standard for figuring out

whether something's good or bad is can it be replicated.

So if I do a study that says the experience

of New York City over the last 25 years

and I draw the conclusion that more guns equals less crime,

can someone else take a look at that same database

and reach the same conclusion?

@HonestlyAtheist, How do you attempt

to overcome confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is,

it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make

when it comes to interpreting data.

A good example would be you've decided

that getting a COVID vaccine

will cause all kinds of illness.

Well, every time you hear a story

about somebody who had a bad side effect

from getting their COVID shot, you say, See?

I told you.

This thing's crazy, it's killing us.

Now what you're neglecting is that 99.9999999%

of people who get a COVID shot

are not only totally fine and healthy,

but actually prevent themselves

from getting all kinds of diseases.

That's confirmation bias.

You selectively find information in the world

to support your erroneous conclusion.

How prevalent is that example?

How many times does it occur?

You can't just rely

on your own personal anecdotal experience.

Ana Pineda asks, How do you get yourself excited

about writing your research paper

when you've lost interest?

If you dislike something or are getting bored

with something, you probably haven't done enough work on it.

In other words, boredom is a intermediate stage.

It's the kind of plateau you get on

after you've scraped the surface.

But you've gotta go beyond that.

And everything, virtually everything,

is interesting if you dig deep and hard enough.

So my advice would be to keep going in that situation.

@izzzabitch asks, Why is country music so sad?

I'm crying.

Iza, funny should ask.

I did a podcast episode on this very question.

It was called The King of Tears.

In that episode, King of Tears,

a reference to a really brilliant bit of research

that was about the specificity of song lyrics.

So it looked at all kinds of popular song lyrics,

from, you know, rock music, folk music, country music.

And the question is how complex were the lyrics?

Make a specificity scale.

Rock music's on the far end of the non-specific end

of the scale and country music's on the far specific

end of the scale.

The argument in King of Tears

was that what moves us emotionally

is specificity and complexity.

OliviaTalbott27 asks, How did writers research

before the internet?

Then all kinds of emojis of people weeping.

Before the internet, we went to libraries

and we called people up on the phone who knew things

and asked them questions.

Both strategies I would wholeheartedly endorse

for anyone who is interested in learning about the world

in a profound way.

@_antithesis_1 asks, What is an intelligence failure,

which is often cited as the cause of unwanted events?

Well, the classic intelligence failure would be 9/11.

There was a famous study conducted by the Senate

in the aftermath of 9/11, which said,

Look, all the clues were there.

Why didn't we pick up on them and prevent 9/11?

This is intelligence failure.

Let's say we could find 10 pieces of intelligence

that pointed directly to what Al Qaeda was planning on 9/11.

They're buried in a mountain

of a million different data points.

It's not an easy matter to find the 10 that matter

out of a mountain of a million.

I would say be suspicious of people

who use the term intelligence failure after the fact.

@anotherpanacea asks, Has any psychologist

been worse for the world than Philip Zimbardo?

Faked the Stanford prison experiment

and helped create the justifications

for broken windows policing?

Well, @anotherpanacea, could not disagree with you more.

Zimbardo didn't fake the Stanford prison experiment.

This is the famous experiment

where Zimbardo gathered together a bunch of volunteers

and said to one group of them, You're prison guards,

to another group said, You're prisoners.

And he ran a simulation

over the course of, I think, several days.

What he discovers is that the prison guards

take it very seriously and ended up doing things

that they would never ordinarily do.

And he was trying to understand why ordinary Germans

would've been capable of committing such terrible offenses

during the Second World War.

The Stanford prison experiment is controversial

because it's complicated.

Did Zimbardo overstate his case?

Did he draw conclusions he shouldn't have?

It's not faked, it's just difficult.

Second part of your question, broken windows policing,

which was an idea that was first put forward

by a very brilliant researcher called George Kelling.

That idea says that if you tolerate small acts of disorder,

large acts of disorder will follow.

So it's why in the subway in New York,

they realize the first step in cleaning up the subway

was in cracking down on people who jump the turnstiles.

You cracked in on the small act,

and what that does is sends a signal to everybody else.

Now you can take it to extremes.

And there's departments that did take it to extremes.

But the idea itself is something that has been,

I think, verified on many occasions in research.

@doomedhippo asks, I have a research question.

Looking into paranormal stuff and having a hard time.

I'm mostly seeing blogs parroting

the same 'people/legends say'

and not getting firsthand reports of hauntings.

How do I get to the actual primary sources

of these stories?

So my aunt would always say

that the living room in her house in Jamaica was haunted.

Can I verify it?

Did I take a picture?

Did I write it up in a scientific journal?

No, it's just a story we tell in our family.

I suspect that's where stories about ghosts are found.

They're stories told from one person to another.

They're not written up in the literature

and searchable on Google.

The problem you have, @doomedhippo,

is that you're in a pretty kinda squishy area.

It's not like there are a ton of scientists

at reputable universities

who are doing case-controlled studies

on paranormal sightings.

So the minute you start moving away from the mainstream,

you are gonna be reliant, overwhelmingly, on anecdotes.

Doing firsthand research yourself

is probably the best approach.

Finding people who have seen ghosts

and bringing a tape recorder and putting it in front of them

and asking them about their experience.

Shoot me an email.

I'll tell you my ghost story.

The question is from @NatalieisBlue and she asks,

Why do most wealthy people play golf?

This is a reference to a Revisionist History episode

which was called A Good Walk Spoiled,

in the course of which

I talk about a really fascinating study.

It's called a natural experiment,

when you can find data that's just out in the world.

Serious golfers register their rounds of golf

on the US whatever the US Golf Association service is.

And so this guy, and he's a young, brilliant economist,

he had a database that allowed him to predict

exactly how much golf CEOs of companies played.

There was a correlation

between how well your company was doing

and how much golf you played.

The more golf you played,

the worse your company was doing.

To answer your question, Natalie,

Why do most wealthy people play golf?

Well, probably because it takes a lot of money

to play golf.

Probably because they have a lot of time on their hands.

But also because they are more concerned

about their leisure time

than running the companies that they're supposed to run.

@everyone_cares asks, Trying to figure out if it's normal

that I have 42 tabs open at once on my laptop

because I'm totally going to read research,

look into this soon.

So how many tabs do you have open usually?

I don't know, 10 to 15?

I actually aggressively close and open

just 'cause it stresses me out.

I know someone who thinks that a great interview question

for somebody is have the subject of the,

the interviewee, take out their laptop

and show you how many tabs they have open on their browser.

And by looking at the things they're interested in,

you can get a really good sense of what they're like.

So I guess I would say if they're 42 really interesting tabs

about stuff that pops into your head, go for it.

Go to 50.

@Sprucey_1969 asks, Is there a word that describes

the action of digging out yet more sources to research

rather than actually writing, other than procrastination?

What you've described is getting lost in tangents,

which I don't know if that's a bad thing.

If you're enjoying yourself, why not?

So those are all the questions for today.

I thought there were some great questions.

A lot of you clearly have been reading some of my books

and listening to some of Revisionist History podcasts.

Those of you who haven't have your work cut out for you.

Thanks for watching Research Support.

[calm music]