Malcolm Gladwell's Ridiculous Attack On Ed Snowden Based On Weird Prejudice About How A Whistleblower Should Look

from the you-don't-get-the-whistleblowers-you-want dept

There was a time when I was a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. He's an astoundingly good story teller, and a great writer. But he's also got a pretty long history of... just being wrong. Over the years, Gladwell's willingness to go for the good story over the facts has become increasingly clear. Famously, Steven Pinker ripped Gladwell's serial problems many years ago, but it hasn't really stopped Gladwell since then. If you've ever quoted "the 10,000 hour rule" or suggested that someone can become an expert in something if they just spend 10,000 hours doing it, you've been fooled by Gladwell. Even the guy whose one study Gladwell based the idea on loudly debunked the claim, and just this past year put out his own book that is basically trying to rectify the false beliefs that have spread around the globe from people believing Gladwell's incorrect spin.

So, suffice it to say I was already skeptical of Gladwell's recent piece attacking Ed Snowden as not being a "real" whistleblower. But the piece is much, much worse than even I expected. The short, Gladwellian-style summary of it might be: real whistleblowers have to look the part, and they need to be part of an Ivy League elite, with clear, noble reasons behind what they did. Here's how Gladwell describes Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and to whom Gladwell has given his stamp of approval as a "Real Whistleblower™"

Ellsberg was handsome and charismatic. He had served in the Marine Corps as a company commander in Korea. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on game theory and collaborated with Thomas Schelling, who went on to win a Nobel Prize. He took a senior post in McNamara’s Defense Department, represented the State Department in Vietnam, and had two stints as a senior intelligence analyst at the rand Corporation. Ellsberg knew about the Pentagon Papers because he was a member of the select team that wrote them, working on the section dealing with the very early nineteen-sixties. Before he approached the Times, he went to the Senate, where he tried to get someone to release the documents formally and hold public hearings. He walked the halls and dropped in on people he knew. “I had Senator Mathias in mind, and Senator Mike Gravel,” who, he notes, had “written me a letter congratulating me on my New York Review of Books article,” about the bombings in Laos. (It seems safe to say that the subject, verb, and object here—“Senator,” “written,” “New York Review of Books article”—may never again appear together in a sentence.)

See? To Gladwell, Ellsberg "fits the part." But that's not how whistleblowing often works. And here's how Gladwell describes Snowden, who apparently doesn't look the part:

But Snowden did not study under a Nobel Prize winner, or give career advice to the likes of Henry Kissinger. He was a community-college dropout, a member of the murky hacking counterculture. He enlisted in the Army Reserves, and washed out after twenty weeks. He worked at the C.I.A. for a few years and left under a cloud. He learned about the innermost secrets of American intelligence-gathering and policy not because he was personally involved with that intelligence-gathering or policymaking but because he was a technician who helped service the computer systems that managed these things. The élites, Snowden once said, “know everything about us and we know nothing about them—because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class.” Had Snowden been a whistle-blower in 1967, at the launch of the Pentagon Papers, he would have blown the whistle on Daniel Ellsberg. The whistle-blower as insider has become the whistle-blower as outsider. That is a curious fact, and, as we come to terms with the consequences of Snowden’s actions, it may be an underappreciated one.

Gladwell's gentlemanly view of whistleblowing as an elite pasttime is historical fiction. It's not how whistleblowing usually works, and completely ignores how the government has regularly gone after and punished whistleblowers time after time. Gladwell, somewhat ridiculously, creates a fictional composite he calls "Daniel Snowberg" and suggests if the following had happened, that would have made Snowden an acceptible whistleblower:

Imagine a young man called Daniel Snowberg. He has a doctorate in international relations, and once spent a summer interning at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the think tank specializing in digital freedom. He gets a job as an analyst at the National Security Agency, and while there he runs across a copy of the infamous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (fisc) authorization, under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. This is the order that led Verizon to hand over its telephone records to the N.S.A.

The order troubles him. The Patriot Act allows the N.S.A. to obtain phone records and the like if it provides “a statement of facts showing that . . . the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.” But this isn’t a search specific to an investigation. It appears to be a fishing expedition. He surreptitiously copies the authorization: it’s not that long. He sends it to his old colleagues at the Frontier Foundation. They share his alarm: the legal opinion in the fisc order looks unconstitutional to them. They set up a meeting with Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wyden, too, is troubled. He encourages them to leak it to the Washington Post. And they do. That is the leaker as insider.

Edward Snowden took a different path. He used a Web crawler (a search engine preprogrammed with key words) to roam through the N.S.A. files, “touching” as many as 1.7 million of them. Among those files was the fisc order. But Snowden also accessed, and ultimately passed on to journalists, thousands of files concerning activities that had nothing to do with domestic surveillance.

But that final paragraph also bullshit and a misleading myth pushed by the intelligence community, and has since been debunked. Even James Clapper admitted two and a half years ago that Snowden didn't take 1.7 million documents, and that it was a much more curated list of files that he felt actually showed serious problems. And, while Gladwell keeps trying to suggest that Snowden "flooded" documents, rather than "leaking" them. That's ridiculous.

As the EFF has written in response to Gladwell's piece, Gladwell seems to be troubling rewriting history to suit his narrative, rather than actually stating facts, noting that contrary to Gladwell's claim, both Ellsberg and Snowden did essentially the same thing -- taking a large number of documents but not all that they had access to -- to the press, and allowing them to sort through what was newsworthy.

Also, the EFF notes that the "Daniel Snowberg" hypothetical is ridiculous, because that description matches exactly what happened with Mark Klein, the former AT&T tech who blew the whistle on the NSA's upstream tapping of AT&T backbone cables. And it didn't work the way Gladwell thinks it would work:

Mr. Klein was in tech support at AT&T. Like Snowden, he didn’t go to Harvard, pal around with Kissinger, or serve in the intelligence services. But he had real documents and direct testimony demonstrating that, at the behest of the NSA, AT&T was (and still is) making illegal copies of Internet traffic through key network junctures. This includes the juncture in a building on Folsom Street in San Francisco. After copying, searching is conducted through the full content of much of that information, especially messages going to and from abroad but including millions of Americans' communications. We now know that the government calls this program “UPSTREAM,” and calls its searching through the actual content of messages “about” searching, but we didn’t know these names in 2006. This was a big, new program with profound legal and constitutional implications. It deserved (and still deserves) serious public and judicial consideration.

So what happened? Mr. Klein went to the press before coming to EFF, but a Los Angeles Times story about his discoveries was famously spiked by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte who intimidated now New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet out of running it. Finally, the New York Times did publish a story but the government just kept issuing carefully worded denials.

During this time Mr. Klein also came to EFF and we tried to do what Ellsberg did. We approached several U.S. senators about the information, including Mr. Klein’s own Senator Dianne Feinstein. We were, to put it kindly, strung along. We never even got a meeting with a senator. EFF also filed a lawsuit against AT&T based on Mr. Klein’s information, but we had to keep the actual evidence under seal for a long time, making it easy for the government to largely ignore us and, when pushed, dismiss Mark’s claims as unfounded since he was just a lowly technician.

We tried another part of the “Ellsberg” strategy. We took Mark to Washington to try to increase the chance of Congressional assistance as well as to try to bring more public attention to what his evidence revealed. We even managed to have a press briefing on Capitol Hill and a few meetings with staffers.

But we couldn’t get a hearing on Mark’s whistleblower information, couldn’t keep the press on it, and couldn’t penetrate the assumptions and elitist narrative about whistleblowers.

But, honestly, beyond the ridiculous hypothetical, the pure insanity of claiming that Snowden can't be a whistleblower because he isn't elite enough, and the factually incorrect statements (which were shown to be factually incorrect years ago), the best evidence that Malcolm Gladwell is (once again) full of shit comes from none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself who explained how Snowden made the right call in doing what he did, and happily comparing Snowden to himself:

Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

Snowden is every bit the "whistleblower" that Ellsberg was -- and perhaps moreso, seeing as he did what he did knowing (unlike Ellsberg) that he needed to leave his home country to do so, and that he might never return. Gladwell tells a good story, but it should be left on the fiction pages.

Filed Under: daniel ellsberg, ed snowden, leaks, malcolm gladwell, whistleblowers

DailyDirt: You Say Ketchup, I Say Catsup...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Ketchup actually started out as a fish sauce and somehow evolved into the much more widely-consumed condiment we know today. Early recipes of ketchup contained sodium benzoate -- which was banned in the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. That ban led to other formulations which contained vinegar as a preservative and used ripe tomatoes. Here are just a few more fascinating factoids about this tangy, thixotropic, tomato-based foodstuff.

• MIT researchers have developed LiquiGlide -- a non-stick coating that could let people get every last drop of ketchup out of a bottle easily. Anticipation is no longer making me wait.... [url]
• Malcom Gladwell is famous for (among other things) his talk on spaghetti sauces and the discovery that customers want a spectrum of choices when it comes to spaghetti sauces. But ketchup seems to be the exception to the rule because there's just a single dominant brand -- and there are far fewer than 57 varieties of it. [url]
• Should ketchup count as a vegetable in school lunches? The tomato sauce on pizza may not count as a vegetable serving according to mothers and the USDA, but it might for some politicians. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: catsup, condiment, food, ketchup, liquiglide, malcolm gladwell, pizza, sauce, sodium benzoate, tomato

Malcolm Gladwell Discovers That Innovation And Invention Are Not The Same

from the indeed dept

A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell penned a fascinating piece for the New Yorker, dealing with the fact that nearly all major technological and scientific advances tend to be "invented" by multiple, totally separate, people at the same time. This seemed like pretty good fodder for recognizing that patents for such things often don't make sense, since the evidence suggests that they were the natural progression of the state of the art, and giving one a monopoly would significantly punish the others who came up with the same concept (and may have even done a better job). Yet, oddly, Gladwell used the piece to play up how wonderful giant patent troll Intellectual Ventures was. It seemed like a weird disconnect.

In his latest piece, Gladwell goes a step further in his exploration of innovation, in writing about the difference between invention and innovation, picking apart the classic story of Steve Jobs seeing the GUI/mouse combo at Xerox PARC and "copying" it for the Macintosh. Gladwell points out that the lessons that some take from the story aren't really correct. Specifically, one of the standard lessons is the idea that Xerox had the personal computer revolution in its hands and let it slip away. But Gladwell points out that this isn't really true. While PARC showed Jobs that idea (much of which was copied itself from Doug Engelbart and his famous work at SRI), it really was the implementation that mattered, and Jobs and Apple (along with Ideo) had to work quite hard to take the idea of the mouse -- which cost hundreds of dollars and was fragile in the Xerox version -- and make it cheap, reliable and easy to use.

It's that part of the story that often gets overlooked. It's that part of the story that matters, which thankfully Gladwell points out:

[The] striking thing about Jobs's instructions to Hovey is that he didn't want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. "You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons--three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse," Hovey went on. "The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat it and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important.

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus....

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs's imagination. Xerox PARC's innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user's intention and the computer's response. Jobs's software team took the graphic interface a giant step further. It emphasized "direct manipulation." If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it....

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation--between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball--is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that's appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

It really is a pretty succinct description that highlights how the idea is only a small part of things, and it's the actual execution and implementation that matters.

It's interesting to see that the modern day PARC has responded to the story directly, pointing to some key "lessons learned" that are demonstrated by the article, and with some additional background -- including the fact that Xerox didn't just create a mouse, but had actually explored a bunch of different pointing mechanisms, before settling on the mouse after doing extensive research.

The PARC blog also talks up the importance of "open innovation," and sharing ideas outside of a company, recognizing (frequently) that others may be better able to take an idea and run with it by creating something really powerful on top of that.

Tragically, the Gladwell piece never happens to mention how patents get in the way of all of this -- though it does quote Myhrvold a bit just about the nature of research. It's really too bad, because the world could use a deeper explanation of how patents quite frequently get in the way of this whole process.

Filed Under: innovation, invention, malcolm gladwell, steve jobs
Companies: apple, xerox

Gladwell Logic: There Was War Before Nuclear Bombs Existed, Thus Nukes Have No Impact On War

from the make-your-own dept

In what can be considered impeccably poor timing, last fall, Malcolm Gladwell penned a silly article in the New Yorker, insisting that social media is useless for revolutions or civil actions because it doesn't involve real personal connections, but only weak ones. Of course, in the months immediately following Gladwell's piece, we've seen massive protests show up all over the Middle East, with nearly all of them making significant use of social networking tools for organization. And while I agree that it's silly to give too much credit to social networks, it's undeniable that such things have become a key tool used by protestors these days, and almost certainly has helped their ability to organize and disseminate necessary info.

All of that might make a lesser man reconsider the original faulty premise. But not Gladwell. Not only is he standing by his initial thesis, he's backing it up with the intellectually void argument that because people organized and toppled governments prior to Twitter, it means that Twitter isn't a big deal in these protests and regime changes:

I mean, in East Germany, a million people gathered in the streets of Berlin. They were - the percentage of people in East Berlin in East Germany who even had a telephone in 1989 was 13 percent, right?

So, I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together. So I don't see that as being a - in looking at history, I don't see the absence of efficient tools of communication as being a limiting factor on the ability people to socially

In other words, if something happened before a technology came about, then technology has no impact on it later on. This is laughably bad logic. Just because something happened without technology X, doesn't mean that technology X has no impact on it. Of course, this has now created something of a meme on Twitter, kicked off by Jeff Jarvis, called #GladwellLogic, in which you try to apply that same logic to other things. Jarvis kicked it off by pointing out:

#GladwellLogic: People were smart before there were books, therefore books don't make us smarter.

It's not hard to come up with your own examples:

• #GladwellLogic: Wars happened before there were nuclear weapons, submarines, machine guns or airplanes. Therefore, none of those things impact war.
• #GladwellLogic: People got from point A to point B before there were cars. Therefore, cars have no impact on transportation.
• #GladwellLogic: People produced stuff prior to there being electric lighting. Therefore, lightbulbs had no impact on productivity.
• #GladwellLogic: People made music before machines could record it. Therefore, recorded music had no impact on music.

Try and create your own...

Filed Under: logic, malcolm gladwell, revolutions, social media

Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell And A Look At Free

from the might-help dept

Malcolm Gladwell is an interesting guy. He's an amazing writer and storyteller -- perhaps the greatest storyteller of this generation. And, as such, he's amazing at taking complex ideas or research and making it seem simple and easy to understand. I have to admit that I really enjoy reading almost anything he writes for the pleasure of seeing how it's written. That said, I've found his books to be unsatisfying in the end. Great, fun reads at the time, but I kept feeling like I was waiting for more. I was waiting for the actual substance to back up the amazing thesis. It's amusing then, to see him basically suggest the same thing about Chris Anderson's new book, Free in his review of the book in the New Yorker. That review has kicked off quite an online conversation -- with a response from Chris, and other "luminaries" like Mark Cuban and Seth Godin weighing in as well (Godin agrees with Chris, Cuban doesn't).

A few people asked me if I was going to respond to Gladwell's review, and at first I wasn't sure if it was worth digging in to it, but at the same time, I did want to put up something of a review of Free myself. So, I might as well kill two birds with one stone here. First: a bit of disclosure: I know Chris. Not well, but we've been known to email and talk on occasion, and we sat down and got lunch a year and a half ago when he was first planning out this book, during which I made some suggestions (some he took, some he didn't) though I doubt my words really had that much of an impact (I'm sure he heard similar things from others, and that they were much more clear and eloquent than I was). Also, Chris does mention me in the acknowledgments section of the book, noting that my daily writings here "informed and inspired" the book. Thus, take anything I say with a grain of salt.

There have already been some attacks on Free that have really missed the point. There are plenty of points to attack, but it seems that the problem is that (once again) people get stopped by the big zero, and forget to keep working through the rest of the details. Like I said last time, it's as if our brains have a "divide by zero" error message that prevents all additional thinking on the subject. Nearly all of the attacks on the concept of free seem to focus on the fact that not everything is free (this is what Cuban does, for example). Except... no one ever claims that everything is free. The whole point is that "free" is simply a part of a larger business model, and the fact that you charge for some stuff doesn't take away from the idea of embracing "free" where it makes sense as a part of that business model.

Gladwell, to his credit, stays away (mostly) from this type of mistake, but he makes a few other ones in the process. For example, in responding to Anderson's recognition of the value of non-monetary rewards as a part of the larger economic ecosystem where some business models involve "paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards," Gladwell's retort is:

That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between "paying people to get other people to write" and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can't you pay people to write?

The answer to Gladwell's question is simply one of economic efficiency. You can pay people to write -- just as Encyclopaedia Britannica does. Or you can get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- as Wikipedia does. The latter is a lot more efficient a solution, and the difference in productivity and output is quite evident. It's not saying that there is no business in paying people to write, but it's a very different business than the indirect business model, and it's the economic efficiencies that come into play.

Money, at times, is a transactional lubricant. It helps us make transactions faster than bartering three pigs for two trees, a goat and a bushel of corn. At other times, though, money can be friction. It can limit transactional effectiveness by acting as a kind of crutch. That's where non-monetary benefits can suffice (or do a much better job) in rewarding people for their actions. In those scenarios money gets in the way and actually makes a transaction less efficient.

A more efficient solution is a good thing. It helps enlarge markets, increase productivity and make the net of society better off. Much of what Chris discusses in the book is that end result. The process may be messy, but economic growth through efficiency is undeniably a good thing -- and Gladwell seems to miss that point entirely.

That said, Gladwell's comment actually does bring to light my biggest complaint with Anderson's book. I think it's a fantastic read, and quite educational and (at times) thought provoking. But I don't think it goes far enough in diving into the meaty details, which is where folks like Gladwell are led astray. So while I think that Anderson is correct, I'll also say that Gladwell is correct in suggesting that Anderson doesn't clearly answer that question. That doesn't mean that Anderson cannot or that the failure to answer that question means that Anderson's thesis is wrong, even though Gladwell implies the failure to answer such questions calls the entire work into question.

My second issue with the book is related to this, in that while it outlines why "free" is so important and how it's being used and how it plays out in other areas, it really doesn't explain much of what to do about it. This, too, is echoed in Gladwell's questions. He feels that there should have been more about how do you actually apply such things -- and I agree that the book comes up short here as well, though I believe it is on purpose. It lists out examples and business models that are certainly useful to read about, but does little to suggest how you actually apply them. This is speculation on my part, but I remember in our discussion before he started writing the book, Chris explained his goal was to make the book more descriptive than prescriptive, recognizing the difficulties in making a prescriptive book on a topic where there are so many other factors that it's often difficult to outline specific prescriptions. I recognize that challenge, but it does leave the book open to many attacks from people who read it and are left saying "ok, but what do I do about this?" On that, I think the book comes up a bit short -- though, it should provide plenty of consulting fodder for Anderson (and other consultants who jump on the bandwagon, probably without understanding it too much).

The big problem here is that not only will people among the critics misinterpret the lessons of the book, but so will businesses. They'll implement bad business models that have "free" as a component, but that won't be economically sound. No one claims that "free" solves everything, but some will undoubtedly interpret it this way. Then, when they fail, they'll blame "free" and claim that it was wrong, rather than the fact that they implemented a bad business model. This, in fact, is what happened in some areas with The Long Tail, Chris' earlier book. They assumed it said stuff it did not, and then got upset when their improperly created business models failed.

From there, however, Gladwell then goes on to bring up some other criticisms that don't pack much of a punch. He knocks Anderson for using YouTube as an example of using "free" as a part of a business model, noting that YouTube is losing money (though, Gladwell relies on debunked numbers to assert those losses). Similarly, he talks about how the WSJ can charge, Apple can charge for iPhone apps, and cable TV can charge -- but his mistake here is taking a static picture and (often) removing the context. The WSJ can charge, but there are questions about whether that strategy really can last -- and the publication has been opening up more and more stuff as "free" to try to draw people in to that subscription model. The Apple example is quite misleading as well. Estimates suggest that Apple makes very little on iPhone apps, but has really nice margins on the iPhone.

But beyond shoddy research by Gladwell, the bigger issue is not recognizing the dynamic nature of these things at work. Using a little game theory economics wouldn't hurt. By looking at how business models play out when goods have a marginal cost of zero, you quickly learn how opportunities to be more efficient via a well-placed use of free expands the size of certain markets. The trick is recognizing that things that are "free" stop being products that are sold, and become resources -- inputs -- into other products... for free. Thus, you get markets where increasing marginal returns carry the day, rather than diminishing marginal returns. This seems especially odd, given that Gladwell's claim to fame is his ability to pick up on trendlines. To then look at Chris' book and compare it to a static picture of the world is quite unconvincing.

Furthermore, it misses the main point of the book: which is that competition happens, and when it does, price gets driven to marginal cost. You might not like it. You might wish it didn't happen, but arguing against the fact that it's how markets work is like arguing that the sun won't rise tomorrow. No one said that it didn't make economic sense when other businesses had margins squeezed. Yet when that big "zero" shows up, people seem to forget that it's just a number and the basic lessons of the book aren't new or radical -- but the same economics we've always known. It's just that it's applied to markets where marginal cost is zero, something that's become more common thanks to technology.

Gladwell's review, then, does Anderson's book a disservice. It criticizes it because it doesn't answer questions the book didn't set out to answer, and then attacks the picture today without acknowledging the trendlines and the direction that they're moving in. And, finally, it ignores the actual nature of the argument (this is happening) with a moral discussion (is this good?). That's unfortunate. Where Chris' book shines quite frequently is in laying out these trendlines clearly and in a way that will get you thinking. It may not answer all the questions about free, but it should certainly help those who don't stop thinking at the zero to at least recognize the trendlines and get them thinking about how to deal with them. And that is, unquestionably, a good thing.

As Chris did with The Long Tail, he's taken complex economic theory and made it easy to understand in a compelling and highly readable format. While my own personal complaint (above) concerns how much of that economic theory may have been left on the cutting room floor, that's a critique that probably only applies to folks like myself who spend way too much time reading, talking and thinking about these issues. I'm guessing the mass audience this book is targeted for doesn't care so much about understanding the deeper economics, even if it answers the basic questions raised by Gladwell. If you read Techdirt frequently (and enjoy it), then you're quite likely to enjoy reading Free. It certainly complements and adds to the material we write about here frequently, and presents it in a great package.

---

I did want to bring up one separate issue, because I get the feeling it will be raised in the comments. There was a lot of attention paid recently to charges of plagiarism in the book. Chris has admitted to the basics of the charges, and explained it as sloppy editing in an effort to deal with concerns about how to cite online content. I have to admit that sloppy editing seems like a weak excuse here, and a bit disappointing. It seems a bit lazy.

That said, I've discussed at great length my position on "plagiarism" in the past -- and, amusingly, much of it is inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's own discussion on plagiarism, where he recognized that someone taking his own work and adding value to it and doing something different wasn't such a bad thing after all, and that it could actually represent an inspiration. So if I were actually "plagiarized" by Chris or anyone else (and I don't believe I was), I'd actually find it something of an honor to have my works as a part of something better and more interesting. I don't think it takes away from the quality of the overall work at all. I would have preferred that such mistakes in attribution did not happen, mainly because it's a distraction, but the issue is a minor one. If Chris can take the works of others and make it into something more valuable, aren't we all better off because of it?

Filed Under: business models, chris anderson, economics, free, malcolm gladwell

Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them?

from the gladwell-missing-the-point dept

Malcolm Gladwell is a truly fantastic writer. However, sometimes he gets so interested in making a story sound good that he misses the real point. His latest piece for the New Yorker starts out as a puff piece on Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures (which gets way too many puff pieces), but then turns into a much more interesting article about how just about every major invention or scientific or mathematical discovery came from multiple, entirely independent people at almost exactly the same time. As Gladwell points out -- rarely is it about "genius," but about the fact that all of the previous work in the field naturally leads to this end result -- and if it wasn't one person discovering it, someone else would. The article lists out big name invention after invention that all have "multiples" -- multiple entirely independent individuals who came up with the same thing at the same time. Not only that, but almost always the person who gets credit for the discovery isn't actually the person who discovered it. In fact, someone even coined a term for it: Stigler's Law: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer? Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.

This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36 different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.

What Gladwell misses (though others have discussed it in detail) is that while ideas may be a dime a dozen, executing on those ideas is what's difficult. Innovation isn't idea generation. Innovation is taking an idea and making it do something useful. Yet, in giving monopoly rights to Myhrvold and his friends, we make it much more difficult for others (even those who discovered the same things totally independently) to help actually make them useful.

In the end, the Gladwell article inadvertently makes the best case against Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, while hyping up the company at the same time. It's a strange disconnect, and it's too bad that Gladwell, like so many others, fell so under Myhrvold's spell, that he missed the real story he held in his hands.

Filed Under: ideas, independent invention, innovation, malcolm gladwell, multiples, nathan myhrvold
Companies: intellectual ventures