Homicide is a product of low intelligence. People with low intelligence don't analyze their situations, they react impulsively. Even in my 99 % white rural county in West Virginia, the five homicides over the seven years I've lived in my county have been committed by very stupid people. One homicide was done by a 45-year old man who shot his 70-year old roommate over cigarettes. Who in their right mind does that? Another homicide was a drunk 45-year old woman driving her car over her 45-year old boyfriend in a fit of rage. Crazy! Another was a 40-year old meth dealer shooting a man repossessing his car. Didn't the meth dealer realize that the cops would come after him for shooting a man performing an official, legal act.
Just as an aside, in my forty years of working in Washington DC and eating fast-food occasionally, the only people who I've seen not ordering from a menu but by demanding a specially made order were black women. Always.
I’ll withhold judgement on the knock out King until I hear what Carlishia was substituting. I wonder if Burger King’s “BK have it your way” ad campaign was aimed particularly at blacks?
We never ate at McDonald's because of the mandatory pickles and mustard. I believe Wendy's made a big deal of freedom to choose toppings when she was young.
Something you don't point out is that murder is special, and uncommon (that is, not a part of daily life). It has always been known that most murders are by people the victim knew, and few are "hits". A large fraction are crimes of passion. That's not true of the most common crime, larceny. Maybe it is for simple assault, but fistfights generally aren't prosecuted. It isn't true of burglary, fraud, robbery, vandalism, car theft, . . . There, rational, instrumental, thinking is the cause-- combined, to be sure, with the low IQ of "I won't get caught" or "I can't get a job that pays better than drugdealing because I'm low IQ."
The recent Kia Boys crime wave in which vast numbers of Kias and Hyundais were stolen after somebody posted on social media how to hack the locks and ignition systems on South Korean cars was awfully instrumental.
Actually, it sounds to me like the kid did good. The idea that letting "The Knockout King" continue his "fistfight" with your mother is the best outcome strikes me as unconvincing.
The mother clearly isn't bright, since she escalated a fight with a low-IQ, violent, honor-code, young man. The son, though, achieved his goal. He killed the man who punched his mother, and he isn't being prosecuted.
And, indeed, this is a socially good outcome, most likely. The dead man punches middle-aged women. He probably does worse things.
Plus, the first shot, the shot in the back, was "defense of others", so it wasn't even a crime.
The second shot, while the puncher was running away, is criminal, as is the mother's saying "shoot him". But would a jury convict, especially a South Side jury? Never in a million years. It would be jury nullification, on the grounds that they're not going to send a young man to prison for obeying his mother and killing a bad guy. Indeed, I bet he was only charged initially because the dead man must have had some clout with the alderman.
"I looked up all 23 gay bars in Chicago on Yelp. The great majority were on the north lakefront, but the only two on the black South Side were in South Shore."
"Oh, the South Side of Chicago, is the baddest part of Town" -- Leroy Brown (1973)
Some things never change. Over half a century later, the South Side apparently has managed to hold on to it's well deserved infamous reputation as being Chitown's most murderous area.
In the 1980s, the West Side of Chicago was considered the worst. My wife and I went to the wedding of her black friend Angela to Thomas. Angela was a public school girl from the West Side while Thomas was a black South Side Catholic schoolboy, which was considered by Angela's relatives to be two socially desirable traits.
"Personally, I’d suspend judgement until I had more evidence. An IQ of 150 is so rare (1 in 2,330) that I’d wonder if something is wrong with either the test or the randomness of the sample. But to Kahneman’s extremely literal brain, this is merely a simple algebra problem. The question stipulated that the mean IQ is “known to be 100” and that’s all you need to know."
That's what I was thinking. It's likely the other 49 kids have an IQ of 100 making the average of a group 101.
Suppose you have a random group of 50 which randomly included Bill Gates or some other billionaire. It is unlikely that the mean income of that sample will equal the mean income of the population.
Yes, though it might also be that the person running the experiment meant the same was randomly selected from a magnet high school.
If you flip a coin a thousand times you shouldn't be surprised to see seven heads in a row. It's equally likely to start at any position in the sequence, but if it starts with the first flip, you gotta think 'trick coin'
Here's a brain-twister question for the late Dr. K.:
Say not only is the first child's IQ reported as 150, the second child's IQ is reported as 160? Is it still just a simple algebra problem or do you need to broadly investigate what is going on?
150 is greater than 3 standard deviations from the mean which has a (3 in 1000)*50 or about a 15% chance of being in a random sample. 160 is 4 standard deviations away which is 1 in 10,000 or 0.5% chance of occurring in a sample of 50. Having two of these outliers in a random sample is pretty unlikely (1 in 10,000 or less). As a Bayesian or Frequentist, I would reject the null hypothesis that these score came from a random sample.
Apparently we need terms like systems one and two to explain heretofore undiscovered principles of jurisprudence such as "crime of passion/opportunity," "mens rea," and "mitigating circumstances."
hah- it's true. People are incredibly suspicious of the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of years of smart men reacting to facts. It's amazing how the average bar stool philosopher assumes he has a better system off the top of his head than Common Law.
Anglo common law is among the greatest achievements of the human race and our social betters basically decided that an inscrutable system of statutes is superior to the intolerable notion that someone somewhere might exercise a hint of discretion in a professional capacity
I was under the impression that we still followed the principles of British Common law in the US (except for Louisiana). In the early days of common law didn't they also supplement with written laws?
21st Century intellectuals love non-self explanatory terms like System 1/System 2, Type One Error vs. Type Two Error, Motte and Bailey, and Jumped the Shark. They are like a secret handshake to show you have earned membership in The Club.
It's a way to repackage old ideas in order to resell them. Thinking Fast and Slow is from what I remember largely an amusing book of trivia that shows how people make errors in predictable ways which is not exactly a breakthrough. Your jargon examples could probably be better explained by salesmen than behavioral psychologists.
I have trouble remembering which of Type 1/2 is which, but the distinction routinely helps me clarify my thinking. Similarly, once I read about motte and bailey (from Bryan Caplan) my ability to detect certain kinds of phony arguments increased. Can't speak to jump the shark.
A wise man often says that if you don't have a word for it, you can't think about it. As SamizBOT points out, we already have fine terms for some of Gladwell's and Ludwig's supposed revelations, such as about the difference between considered rash and considered conduct - crime of passion and so on.
But we need other terms for other insights as well. Motte and bailey is one of my favorites. So I don't think that these "non-self explanatory" terms should be treated so dismissively unless you're ready to point out older-school ways of invoking the insights they embody.
"How long did this argument that led to a shooting take? How was the Chicago Police Department supposed to get there in time to defuse it?"
to be fair, there are some longer term, slow simmering beefs that the cops might be able to take of the burner.
"is the peculiarly American fact that Carlishia Hood had a handgun in her car. In any other developed country, a fistfight between Jeremy Brown and Carlishia Hood would in all likelihood have remained a fistfight."
Yeah, between a middle-aged woman and a guy called 'Knock-out King'. That's what guns are for.
That said, I totally side with Knock-out King in this dispute. Lady could see the line was long and she knew what time it was. She knows she's holding up the line. These people always do. Most others, like me, we just stand there and stew, then go home and kick the dog.
Only The Knock-out King has the balls and moral rectitude to do something about it. With only one super power, he might not be the hero we'd have chosen, but he was the hero we need.
Yep, although I still a some sympathy for her position. Adrenaline is real. It's like in retrospect we expect people engaging in self-defense, and cops dealing with people who have proven themselves dangerous, to immediately switch off when the danger is past.
Do not take an extra swing with that billy club. Do not empty your magazine into that home intruder. I can see here clearly on the video from the comfort of my computer desk that the danger was over.
How in your right mind are you 1 second after someone was punching you in the face followed by gunfire (without ear protection)?
Three jurors who convicted the cops for clubbing Rodney King in the second trial told the New York Times that, after watching the entire video repeatedly, they concluded that only the 60th and last strike was unjustified beyond a reasonable doubt.
Plenty of 105+ IQ men of any color would have already flipped into berserker mode and chased the guy and shot him in the back, much less a 14 yr old. Like I said, it's a strange lead to a book about Chicago crime.
Maybe I'm too cynical but the writers seem to be pushing a narrative of these crimes as unfolding in dramatic stages, like they're pushing their ultimate conclusion that we need more "community activists" and "life coaches" to flood the streets, ever ready to intervene and calm things down. In reality, La'Quavious (who's already high on weed) pulls out his gun as soon as he sees Shantavious eyeing his bae and in the next split-second Shantavious and his crew have their guns out and it takes about 5 seconds for both sides to empty their stacks and start running away.
Gladwell is asking us to assume that messy, irrational, emotion- and adrenaline-fueled human clashes can be tamed and defused because, as a crisis escalates, those involved will suddenly be freed from the red mist of their rage, and will instead smoothly shift into calm, rational, decision-making mode just because some social scientist or NGO worker or New Yorker writer has explained how their felt need to blow some MFer away is ackshually a coherent, step-by-step process in which their own different types of thinking can be cleanly classified, analysed, and managed.
If someone punched my mom in the head I'd shoot him too, even if she was insisting on no pickles on her Chick-fil-A at lunchtime. This is an odd case to deem emblematic of Chicago low IQ, reflexively violent crime. There also seems to be some weird latent misogyny with Malcolm. How many people would classify a confrontation between a middle-aged woman and the South Side's Knockout King as a "fistfight?"
Gladwell has to level the playing field, as it were, though. Knockout King's motivations have to be roughly equal to NoPickle Mom's in terms of their moral validity. Otherwise, the situation can't be analysed -- and 'resolved' -- in the cold logic of Systems 1 and 2 thinking. Once you place NoPickle Mom on higher moral ground, it's much easier to say (as most of us I think would) that Knockout King pretty much got what was coming to him, even if all the details don't make for morally-comfortable viewing.
I think the kid was legally justified in shooting the guy while he was beating mom. A physical beating from an adult man of a woman can cause death or great bodily harm. It was when he chased the guy down and shot him again that there was some line-crossing. The attack had ended and so the justification for lawful defense of another went away. Notably, Kyle Rittenhouse was actually really good about disengaging when his attackers did so.
It's a classic lesson out of concealed carry class. Very easy in the eyes of the law to go from self-defense to murder.
The example I remember was a shop owner in Oklahoma who shot and killed a burglar and called the cops shortly thereafter... except on the CCTV tape he was found top have actually just wounded the burglar at first, then took time to call the cops, then came back after the phone call and finished him off with another couple of rounds, presumably thinking no one would know the difference. Oops.
You could certainly argue that to a jury. On a law school criminal law exam, you’d probably say that it’s too speculative. Now, if he yelled “gettin’ my gun,” or if he was widely known to have a shotgun in his car, it’s a better argument.
As a prosecutor, I’d probably press charges but then try to plead him out for something minimal. Chasing him out the door and shooting him is a bit much.
Yesterday, someone on X asked about things in movies that really irritate you. Mine was women who knock down the baddie and then run away to lengthen the chase scene instead of finishing him off.
Malcolm Gladwell is very entertaining and sometimes insightful, but quite often there are holes in his arguments that he ignores (or doesn't see) because it ruins his beautiful hypothesis. The more I read from him, the more I see it.
Right. There are a lot of positives about Malcolm, but he lacks the ability to do reality checks on his ideas. For a while in the early 21st Century, he was considered infallibly brilliant, but his reputation receded after he got into a public argument with Steven Pinker in the New York Times around 2009 over something Pinker learned from me about drafting NFL quarterbacks.
Advice: don't tangle with Pinker when you in the wrong. You will lose.
But, anyway, now that Gladwell's reputation is less over-inflated, it's easier for me to appreciate his strong suits.
It's a shame. Research and writing are tedious and if these guys could be more detached and less ideological they'd deliver some really valuable work product. But you probably could have said the same of me at various life stages when I was really ideological or religious.
Gladwell is an excellent writer, in the sense that his prose is unusually pleasant to read. When you're floating along a writer's argument with ease, like an innertuber on a lazy river, you become quite willing to grant that argument the benefit of the doubt, and even forgive what seem 'minor' oversights and mistakes.
Agreed. I used to listen to Bill Simmons's sports podcasts. He'd have Gladwell on as a guest. Initially, Gladwell was a much larger cheese than Simmons, so Bill was quite nauseatingly obsequious in the Great Writer's presence. Gladwell himself was cheerful and obliging.
But as time went by, Gladwell's star lost a bit of its twinkle (as noted by Steve and others), and Simmons's sports media power grew rapidly. Bill reflected this changing balance precisely, increasingly challenging Gladwell, and even talking down to him now and again. But Gladwell cruised on in much the same mode.
System 1 / 2 = amygdala vs. cortex. Maybe if one continually uses a particular part of the brain the other doesn't develop as much.
It seems Gladwell at least partly agrees with your "racist" Wikipedia claim that
> (certain groups) need stricter moral guidance from society
Homicide is a product of low intelligence. People with low intelligence don't analyze their situations, they react impulsively. Even in my 99 % white rural county in West Virginia, the five homicides over the seven years I've lived in my county have been committed by very stupid people. One homicide was done by a 45-year old man who shot his 70-year old roommate over cigarettes. Who in their right mind does that? Another homicide was a drunk 45-year old woman driving her car over her 45-year old boyfriend in a fit of rage. Crazy! Another was a 40-year old meth dealer shooting a man repossessing his car. Didn't the meth dealer realize that the cops would come after him for shooting a man performing an official, legal act.
Just as an aside, in my forty years of working in Washington DC and eating fast-food occasionally, the only people who I've seen not ordering from a menu but by demanding a specially made order were black women. Always.
I’ll withhold judgement on the knock out King until I hear what Carlishia was substituting. I wonder if Burger King’s “BK have it your way” ad campaign was aimed particularly at blacks?
A Whopper with onion straws, jalapenos, banana peppers and a sliced yam.
We never ate at McDonald's because of the mandatory pickles and mustard. I believe Wendy's made a big deal of freedom to choose toppings when she was young.
Their names are Brown and Hood. #SummerofSteve
Great takedown of the times here Steve!
One of your best, Steve.
Something you don't point out is that murder is special, and uncommon (that is, not a part of daily life). It has always been known that most murders are by people the victim knew, and few are "hits". A large fraction are crimes of passion. That's not true of the most common crime, larceny. Maybe it is for simple assault, but fistfights generally aren't prosecuted. It isn't true of burglary, fraud, robbery, vandalism, car theft, . . . There, rational, instrumental, thinking is the cause-- combined, to be sure, with the low IQ of "I won't get caught" or "I can't get a job that pays better than drugdealing because I'm low IQ."
The recent Kia Boys crime wave in which vast numbers of Kias and Hyundais were stolen after somebody posted on social media how to hack the locks and ignition systems on South Korean cars was awfully instrumental.
A small typo:
"She also told he child to shoot a woman who had sided with Brown in their dispute, but the boy did not."
should be:
"She also told the child to shoot a woman who had sided with Brown in their dispute, but the boy did not."
Even more egregious than the typo - what kind of mother tells her 14-year-old to shoot a woman she disagreed with about a chicken order?
I'm comforted to know that the boy probably has a morally upright father at home to set a good example and teach him right from wrong.
Actually, it sounds to me like the kid did good. The idea that letting "The Knockout King" continue his "fistfight" with your mother is the best outcome strikes me as unconvincing.
I criticized the mother, not the kid.
The mother clearly isn't bright, since she escalated a fight with a low-IQ, violent, honor-code, young man. The son, though, achieved his goal. He killed the man who punched his mother, and he isn't being prosecuted.
And, indeed, this is a socially good outcome, most likely. The dead man punches middle-aged women. He probably does worse things.
Plus, the first shot, the shot in the back, was "defense of others", so it wasn't even a crime.
The second shot, while the puncher was running away, is criminal, as is the mother's saying "shoot him". But would a jury convict, especially a South Side jury? Never in a million years. It would be jury nullification, on the grounds that they're not going to send a young man to prison for obeying his mother and killing a bad guy. Indeed, I bet he was only charged initially because the dead man must have had some clout with the alderman.
In a perfect world, you're wrong. In our very imperfect world, why even prosecute.
She told her son to "get in the car". That doesn't sound like escalation to me.
"I looked up all 23 gay bars in Chicago on Yelp. The great majority were on the north lakefront, but the only two on the black South Side were in South Shore."
"Oh, the South Side of Chicago, is the baddest part of Town" -- Leroy Brown (1973)
Some things never change. Over half a century later, the South Side apparently has managed to hold on to it's well deserved infamous reputation as being Chitown's most murderous area.
In the 1980s, the West Side of Chicago was considered the worst. My wife and I went to the wedding of her black friend Angela to Thomas. Angela was a public school girl from the West Side while Thomas was a black South Side Catholic schoolboy, which was considered by Angela's relatives to be two socially desirable traits.
"Personally, I’d suspend judgement until I had more evidence. An IQ of 150 is so rare (1 in 2,330) that I’d wonder if something is wrong with either the test or the randomness of the sample. But to Kahneman’s extremely literal brain, this is merely a simple algebra problem. The question stipulated that the mean IQ is “known to be 100” and that’s all you need to know."
Bayesian vs Frequentist?
That's what I was thinking. It's likely the other 49 kids have an IQ of 100 making the average of a group 101.
Suppose you have a random group of 50 which randomly included Bill Gates or some other billionaire. It is unlikely that the mean income of that sample will equal the mean income of the population.
Yes, though it might also be that the person running the experiment meant the same was randomly selected from a magnet high school.
If you flip a coin a thousand times you shouldn't be surprised to see seven heads in a row. It's equally likely to start at any position in the sequence, but if it starts with the first flip, you gotta think 'trick coin'
Yes, 101 is correct, as the problem is phrased, to my literal brain. The sample is not expected to average 100, the population is.
I trust Kahneman got the answer right.
Here's a brain-twister question for the late Dr. K.:
Say not only is the first child's IQ reported as 150, the second child's IQ is reported as 160? Is it still just a simple algebra problem or do you need to broadly investigate what is going on?
150 is greater than 3 standard deviations from the mean which has a (3 in 1000)*50 or about a 15% chance of being in a random sample. 160 is 4 standard deviations away which is 1 in 10,000 or 0.5% chance of occurring in a sample of 50. Having two of these outliers in a random sample is pretty unlikely (1 in 10,000 or less). As a Bayesian or Frequentist, I would reject the null hypothesis that these score came from a random sample.
Apparently we need terms like systems one and two to explain heretofore undiscovered principles of jurisprudence such as "crime of passion/opportunity," "mens rea," and "mitigating circumstances."
hah- it's true. People are incredibly suspicious of the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of years of smart men reacting to facts. It's amazing how the average bar stool philosopher assumes he has a better system off the top of his head than Common Law.
Anglo common law is among the greatest achievements of the human race and our social betters basically decided that an inscrutable system of statutes is superior to the intolerable notion that someone somewhere might exercise a hint of discretion in a professional capacity
I was under the impression that we still followed the principles of British Common law in the US (except for Louisiana). In the early days of common law didn't they also supplement with written laws?
In some areas of the law, yes; but statutes and regulations are the bulk of our system
Didn't anyone else call 911or intervene?
When there's no justice, there's just us -- Judge Dredd.
21st Century intellectuals love non-self explanatory terms like System 1/System 2, Type One Error vs. Type Two Error, Motte and Bailey, and Jumped the Shark. They are like a secret handshake to show you have earned membership in The Club.
It's a way to repackage old ideas in order to resell them. Thinking Fast and Slow is from what I remember largely an amusing book of trivia that shows how people make errors in predictable ways which is not exactly a breakthrough. Your jargon examples could probably be better explained by salesmen than behavioral psychologists.
Now hold your horses, Steve.
I have trouble remembering which of Type 1/2 is which, but the distinction routinely helps me clarify my thinking. Similarly, once I read about motte and bailey (from Bryan Caplan) my ability to detect certain kinds of phony arguments increased. Can't speak to jump the shark.
A wise man often says that if you don't have a word for it, you can't think about it. As SamizBOT points out, we already have fine terms for some of Gladwell's and Ludwig's supposed revelations, such as about the difference between considered rash and considered conduct - crime of passion and so on.
But we need other terms for other insights as well. Motte and bailey is one of my favorites. So I don't think that these "non-self explanatory" terms should be treated so dismissively unless you're ready to point out older-school ways of invoking the insights they embody.
Ken
"How long did this argument that led to a shooting take? How was the Chicago Police Department supposed to get there in time to defuse it?"
to be fair, there are some longer term, slow simmering beefs that the cops might be able to take of the burner.
"is the peculiarly American fact that Carlishia Hood had a handgun in her car. In any other developed country, a fistfight between Jeremy Brown and Carlishia Hood would in all likelihood have remained a fistfight."
Yeah, between a middle-aged woman and a guy called 'Knock-out King'. That's what guns are for.
That said, I totally side with Knock-out King in this dispute. Lady could see the line was long and she knew what time it was. She knows she's holding up the line. These people always do. Most others, like me, we just stand there and stew, then go home and kick the dog.
Only The Knock-out King has the balls and moral rectitude to do something about it. With only one super power, he might not be the hero we'd have chosen, but he was the hero we need.
RIP Knock-out King.
plot hole- how could the mom tell the son to finish off Knock-out King if she was unconscious?
What the hell 'Knock-out King'? You can't even knock-out a middle aged woman?
The command to finish him off totally turned the morality of the story upside down.
Yep, although I still a some sympathy for her position. Adrenaline is real. It's like in retrospect we expect people engaging in self-defense, and cops dealing with people who have proven themselves dangerous, to immediately switch off when the danger is past.
Do not take an extra swing with that billy club. Do not empty your magazine into that home intruder. I can see here clearly on the video from the comfort of my computer desk that the danger was over.
How in your right mind are you 1 second after someone was punching you in the face followed by gunfire (without ear protection)?
Three jurors who convicted the cops for clubbing Rodney King in the second trial told the New York Times that, after watching the entire video repeatedly, they concluded that only the 60th and last strike was unjustified beyond a reasonable doubt.
In the immortal words of Maxwell Smart--missed it by that much
Plenty of 105+ IQ men of any color would have already flipped into berserker mode and chased the guy and shot him in the back, much less a 14 yr old. Like I said, it's a strange lead to a book about Chicago crime.
Maybe I'm too cynical but the writers seem to be pushing a narrative of these crimes as unfolding in dramatic stages, like they're pushing their ultimate conclusion that we need more "community activists" and "life coaches" to flood the streets, ever ready to intervene and calm things down. In reality, La'Quavious (who's already high on weed) pulls out his gun as soon as he sees Shantavious eyeing his bae and in the next split-second Shantavious and his crew have their guns out and it takes about 5 seconds for both sides to empty their stacks and start running away.
Thanks for this, AG.
Gladwell is asking us to assume that messy, irrational, emotion- and adrenaline-fueled human clashes can be tamed and defused because, as a crisis escalates, those involved will suddenly be freed from the red mist of their rage, and will instead smoothly shift into calm, rational, decision-making mode just because some social scientist or NGO worker or New Yorker writer has explained how their felt need to blow some MFer away is ackshually a coherent, step-by-step process in which their own different types of thinking can be cleanly classified, analysed, and managed.
I'm sure it's going to work just great.
Hey you rapscallions, let's lower the temperature in the room. Alright my man. Now that we did that, let's rap! No I mean in the 1960s sense.
If someone punched my mom in the head I'd shoot him too, even if she was insisting on no pickles on her Chick-fil-A at lunchtime. This is an odd case to deem emblematic of Chicago low IQ, reflexively violent crime. There also seems to be some weird latent misogyny with Malcolm. How many people would classify a confrontation between a middle-aged woman and the South Side's Knockout King as a "fistfight?"
Gladwell has to level the playing field, as it were, though. Knockout King's motivations have to be roughly equal to NoPickle Mom's in terms of their moral validity. Otherwise, the situation can't be analysed -- and 'resolved' -- in the cold logic of Systems 1 and 2 thinking. Once you place NoPickle Mom on higher moral ground, it's much easier to say (as most of us I think would) that Knockout King pretty much got what was coming to him, even if all the details don't make for morally-comfortable viewing.
I think the kid was legally justified in shooting the guy while he was beating mom. A physical beating from an adult man of a woman can cause death or great bodily harm. It was when he chased the guy down and shot him again that there was some line-crossing. The attack had ended and so the justification for lawful defense of another went away. Notably, Kyle Rittenhouse was actually really good about disengaging when his attackers did so.
It's a classic lesson out of concealed carry class. Very easy in the eyes of the law to go from self-defense to murder.
The example I remember was a shop owner in Oklahoma who shot and killed a burglar and called the cops shortly thereafter... except on the CCTV tape he was found top have actually just wounded the burglar at first, then took time to call the cops, then came back after the phone call and finished him off with another couple of rounds, presumably thinking no one would know the difference. Oops.
Especially since he was probably the one who installed the camera.
What if the Knockout King had a gun in his car and was going to get it?
You could certainly argue that to a jury. On a law school criminal law exam, you’d probably say that it’s too speculative. Now, if he yelled “gettin’ my gun,” or if he was widely known to have a shotgun in his car, it’s a better argument.
As a prosecutor, I’d probably press charges but then try to plead him out for something minimal. Chasing him out the door and shooting him is a bit much.
Yesterday, someone on X asked about things in movies that really irritate you. Mine was women who knock down the baddie and then run away to lengthen the chase scene instead of finishing him off.
Yeah if you are a woman fighting a dude, if you get an advantage, capitalize on it.
By the way, in my younger, braver days, I once ate there. Or, rather got food there. The Polish was delicious, and it was fast and cheap.
Malcolm Gladwell is very entertaining and sometimes insightful, but quite often there are holes in his arguments that he ignores (or doesn't see) because it ruins his beautiful hypothesis. The more I read from him, the more I see it.
His book on the strategic bombing campaign was just awful.
Right. There are a lot of positives about Malcolm, but he lacks the ability to do reality checks on his ideas. For a while in the early 21st Century, he was considered infallibly brilliant, but his reputation receded after he got into a public argument with Steven Pinker in the New York Times around 2009 over something Pinker learned from me about drafting NFL quarterbacks.
Advice: don't tangle with Pinker when you in the wrong. You will lose.
But, anyway, now that Gladwell's reputation is less over-inflated, it's easier for me to appreciate his strong suits.
It's a shame. Research and writing are tedious and if these guys could be more detached and less ideological they'd deliver some really valuable work product. But you probably could have said the same of me at various life stages when I was really ideological or religious.
Gladwell is an excellent writer, in the sense that his prose is unusually pleasant to read. When you're floating along a writer's argument with ease, like an innertuber on a lazy river, you become quite willing to grant that argument the benefit of the doubt, and even forgive what seem 'minor' oversights and mistakes.
Gladwell got away with this for a long time.
Agreed. I used to listen to Bill Simmons's sports podcasts. He'd have Gladwell on as a guest. Initially, Gladwell was a much larger cheese than Simmons, so Bill was quite nauseatingly obsequious in the Great Writer's presence. Gladwell himself was cheerful and obliging.
But as time went by, Gladwell's star lost a bit of its twinkle (as noted by Steve and others), and Simmons's sports media power grew rapidly. Bill reflected this changing balance precisely, increasingly challenging Gladwell, and even talking down to him now and again. But Gladwell cruised on in much the same mode.
Is Gladwell funny? I haven’t seen it, if so.