Book Review: Outliers

Outliers

In statistics, there’s this concept called “error variance.” No, no wait. Stick with me on this for a second. Basically error variance is all the unknown stuff that you can’t measure or control, but which still decides to affect outcomes despite all etiquette and social decorum. You may have a main effect from your treatment (say, an experimental drug or a painful shock) or your individual difference (say, intelligence or shoe size), but error variance is that mysterious other stuff that causes some individuals to differ –sometimes wildly– despite your best efforts to predict what they will do or how they will be. It’s what my old statistics professor used to call “cussidness,” and it’s the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers.

Specifically, Gladwell sets out to demystify some of the reasons why some people are outliers –that is, those athletes, businessmen, rock stars, and other exceptional individuals who fall so far to the right of the probability curve that they’re off the charts in terms of how well they do whatever it is they do. Gladwell argues that these people are so far out of normal bounds that they defy typical explanations for their success. Bill Gates and Bill Joy weren’t such good computer programmers just because they were smart. Canadian hockey stars aren’t so good at hockey just because they’re so naturally athletic. And The Beatles aren’t the greatest band of all time just because they were inherently good at playing music. Other stuff was at play. Cussidness was involved.

In the course of his book, Gladwell offers several explanations for all this, and they’re all a uniformly fascinating mixture of storytelling and research distillation. One example would be the phenomenon of why so many members of Canadian hockey’s upper echelons have birthdays in January, February, and March, and why so few have birthdays in December, November, and October. The reason, in a nutshell, is that those young lads with birthdays closer to the cutoff date of January 1st for inclusion in each year’s school hockey leagues are more likely to have a few months worth of growth and development on their younger teammates. And at 12 years old, that can be a LOT of growth and development. Those bigger, more practiced players get more coaching and opportunities to play in games, and over time those advantages compoind into making them MUCH better players. The end result down the line? You’re going to have a REALLY hard time making it as a professional hockey player if you were born in December.

This kind of happenstance of lucky timing and placement is a theme that runs throughout much of the book. Gladwell discusses, for example, how Bill Gates was fortunate to not only be born at a time that was ripe for the rise of the personal computer and computer programming in general, but through a lucky cascade of coincidences he was able to get early access to computer after computer so that he could practice his programming skills to the point of expertise long before many people had even seen a computer much less worked with one. Bill Gates wouldn’t have been an outlier if he had been born the son of a fisherman in Burma. Or probably even if he had been born a year or two earlier to his own parents. Outliers like Gates owe as much to chance and cultural inheritances as they do ability.

Speaking of the power of cultural legacies, Gladwell also spends a fair amount of time discussing how they account for a lot of our success (or failure). Those who come from a culture emphasizing hard work and a direct relationship between effort and reward –rice farmers in Vietnam or Jewish garment makers in turn of the century New York, for example– are more likely to succeed. This is, I thought, perhaps his weakest set of arguments once you decouple it from the “be born in the right time and place” phenomenon, but it was still interesting. Gladwell also presents a fascinating explanation for why he thinks many Asians are better at math than English-speakers. I won’t go into too much detail, but the theory is based in how much quicker and inherently easier it is to count in many Asian languages relative to the clunky system we have in English. Also, rice farming is involved somehow.

So while I have some minor quibbles with Gladwell’s methodologies (mainly that he devotes no time at all to the good science practice of exploring other explanations and theories that compete with his own), the book is interesting and engaging from cover to cover. I’ve seen other reviewers criticize Gladwell for spitting in the face of the American dream –that anyone can do anything with enough hard work and talent– but in fact Gladwell goes to great pains to explain that ability (intelligence, athleticism, business acumen, musical talent, etc.) DOES matter a great deal, as does motivation to put that native ability to work. And you can do really pretty well with just that. But the fact is that doesn’t give you the WHOLE explanation for wild, off the scale success. Sometimes you’re born with ability and motivation, but it takes that PLUS being born at the right time, in the right place, and into the right culture to makes you a Bill Gates, a Mozart, a Michael Jordan, or a member of the Beatles. Maybe that’s a little depressing and fatalistic, but cussidness is always gonna be a pain.

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One thought on “Book Review: Outliers

  1. I passed on this one after reading the dust jacket. There are better books on the subject for my taste. I recommend, The Drunkyard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, and The Halo Effect…and the eight other business delusions that deceive managers. They too contain the, ‘yes, some of it is you. But there is a whole lot of luck and timing involved, so don’t blow all your money on a million dollar car just yet.”

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