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BGonline.org Forums
Curious question: What is the difference between backgammon players?
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Curious question: What is the difference between backgammon players? (Chris Bray)
Date: Thursday, 4 August 2011, at 4:29 p.m.
Having read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking last year, I'm surprised to see Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success recommended. I haven't read that book, but I have read reviews by Isaac Chotiner, who wrote that "it is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell's method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule," and by Steven Pinker, who called Gladwell "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures" with a book full of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies." The reviews suggest that Chris' second paragraph contains all the elements that need be extracted from Outliers to summarize the book: unusual success requires some emotional maturity and intelligence, but not overmuch; being at the right place and right time, since that tends to be better than being at the wrong place and wrong time; and lots of practice, 10,000 hours, except when less or more will do. I would similarly summarize the argument in Blink as "One should develop one's capacity for rapid, intuitive decision-making because, as Gladwell's cherry-picked examples sometimes show, intuitive decisions are better decisions, except when they aren't."
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