In Defense of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell

Steven Pinker unloads on "The New Yorker's" tendency to promote pop science distorters. Yet, I'm more sympathetic to their star confabulators ...

Earlier this week, I wrote about the article in The New Yorker admitting that Dr. Oliver Sacks, the long-time New Yorker contributor billed as not just a doctor but also a scientist, had often in his The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat-prime punched-up his case studies of his patients with curious details borrowed from Sacks’ own lavishly idiosyncratic psychology.

Now Harvard’s Steven Pinker has jumped in as well, pointing out the sizable role recurrently played by The New Yorker’s star-making machinery (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell) in promoting the bad habits that led to the Replication Crisis in his field of psychology (but not, as Pinker has pointed out, in psychology’s most denounced subfield of psychometrics):

Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan’s insincerity.

“In his journal, Sacks wrote that ‘a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached’ to his work: he had given his patients ‘powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.’ Some details, he recognized, were ‘pure fabrications.’

Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers,

By the way, I got an email today from a New Yorker fact checker asking if it were true that I gave a speech at such-and-such place (a fact that I’ve written about several times online) and that I must answer by Monday morning. It would seem more productive to just look it up online. But I guess it’s nice that one magazine still has enough revenue to keep up expensive Bright Lights Big City traditions. Still, I presume that despite the manpower devoted to fact-checking, the actual reference in The New Yorker to my being impertinently allowed to speak in public will just be the usual low-brow point-and-sputter.

pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?

Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite (carrying on C. P. Snow’s war of prestige between “the two cultures”). A common denominator behind Sacks’s fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It’s a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as ...

A thoroughly muddled essay called “The Truth Wears Off” by the (since-disgraced) writer Jonah Lehrer, misunderstanding regression to the mean and Tversky’s Law of Small Numbers to argue for a mystical “decline effect,” which supposedly cast doubt on the scientific method. (I discuss this in Rationality.)

The many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn’t matter).

It’s bizarre to think back to how intellectually prestigious Malcolm Gladwell was in the first decade of this century. Virtually his only critics were Pinker, Judge Richard Posner, and myself.

I actually was moderately sympathetic to Gladwell because I bothered to understand his strengths and weaknesses.

The key to understanding Gladwell is to grasp that he is essentially a public relations professional of the kind that research universities employ to write press releases to make their professors’ academic papers more understandable to the upper middlebrow general audience. But Malcolm had somehow lucked into doing the same thing — punching up academic studies — for The New Yorker.

As I’ve pointed out several times, academic PR is a useful and honorable trade. I’ve frequently quoted PR specialists’ press releases about new papers rather than the original paper in a scholarly journal because the PR pro has emphasized the study’s most interesting finding, found vivid examples, added a little human interest, and otherwise provided amiable helps for us non-specialists. And he has the professor read it over before he sends it out to make sure he didn’t get anything too wrong.

The job is a little like being a trial lawyer in that you are supposed to make the best case for your client (in this case, the professor). But it’s less demanding because the other side isn’t employing a lawyer also trying to win the debate for his client.

Malcolm was extremely good at taking an academic’s technical research and polishing it up to be comprehensible and appealing to New Yorker subscribers.

What Gladwell’s not good at, however, is …

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