Malcolm Gladwell Answers Research Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I don't care how many tabs you have open I care what the tabs are if they're 42 porn tabs you have a problem if they're 42 really interesting Tabs go for it go to 50. I'm Malcolm Global as an author and journalist I do a lot of research so today I'm here to answer your questions from Twitter this is research support [Music] question number one at Super cyanation supersization how reliable is Wikipedia really well it's not bad I mean it's really interesting to compare Wikipedia entries to their counterpart in an encyclopedia so Encyclopedia Britannica for example they would go and find an expert in a field and have that expert write the entry with Wikipedia you get a mixture of people who are real experts and people who just want to participate so when I look on my Wikipedia page for example there's a lot of a lot of weird stuff on that page that isn't terribly true on the other hand if you want to very quickly figure out what I've written and the things I'm interested in my Wikipedia PD page is pretty good Wikipedia is really good if you lower your expectations it is a gateway to research so use Wikipedia to start your search and use it for clues about where to go next add a rune grape it asks how are libraries still going who's going to a library in 2022 yours truly goes to libraries that's because lots of things are only in a library the the amount of stuff that you can get on the internet is a tiny fraction of the sum total of knowledge in the world tons of books aren't online the person who asks is going to diss them but I'm about to diss them they're clearly uninterested in anything that happened before I don't know the year 2000 or 2010 which by the way if you're trying to be a smart person in the world is a crazy way to live your life what the internet is really good at is directed search libraries are great for serendipitous search and I'm reading a book and I'm that's next to it on the shelf or 10 books down on the Shelf it catches my eye I pick it out I flip through the index I see something that's really useful that's Library search serendipitous search is how you come up with new ideas the other great thing about libraries is librarians a library has an actual set of experts who are there to help you out whereas you know who's helping you when you're messing around on Google at 2AM at Nelly 101 asks is it me or did McDonald's fries taste better as kids Nelly it's not you they absolutely did we did a podcast episode on this in revisionist history all about how McDonald's changed the formula the recipe for their fries in the 1980s in response to this totally bogus bit of research that suggested that the cooking oil they were using was somewhat bad for your heart as it turns out it's not bad for your heart but they moved away from they used to use a kind of uh beef Talent it was beef fat and they moved to vegetable oil and actually the research suggests that vegetable oil is worse for you not only do fries taste worse cooked in vegetable oil than the old way but the fry itself is now probably worse for your heart than the old fry was at John all press 52 says is the Ten Thousand hour rule real or make believe well now he's referring to uh an idea I wrote about in my book outliers in looking at research in cognitively complex Fields what we find overwhelmingly is that people need about ten thousand hours of practice before they become experts ten thousand hours is you know it's roughly 10 years so it takes 10 years to be good at something it's basically what the rule says if the thing is hard chess players it's very hard to find someone who can reach the level of of uh Grand Master who hasn't been playing chess for 10 years very hard to find someone who can be an elite point guard in the NBA who hasn't been playing point guard for 10 years I mean this is famously a problem in in the NBA in evaluating um rookies you draft someone to play point guard and you say oh they're they're a disappointment and the reason is it's too early because that's the most demanding position on the court in basketball it's not make believe this is a real Rule and the research suggests that and a good average for how long you need to spend on that is about ten thousand hours at a kid named Sig asks the word research has become so watered down like do you really think a five second Google search the topic or Point you're trying to make and clicking the first three results that pop up is research couldn't agree with you more when you're looking for a definitive factual answer Google's really good but when you get into more complicated questions you need to do a little more research I think it's useful to be a little bit skeptical about the information you get on the internet and I think the reason we don't do that all the time is that being skeptical is exhausting checking is also slightly problematic because the question is well how do you check it the thing you're using to check the original fact is itself a trustworthy Source writing to riches asks what is the biggest predictor of success if you only choose one factor social skills IQ Etc biggest predictor of success is probably having a rich parent I tried to answer this question in my book outliers and my answer was it's a it's it's impossible to boil it down to one thing what we do now is that your IQ is probably a smaller is a smaller role than you think and your own efforts play a smaller role than you think it's probably more to do with luck and good fortune and having people around you help you those are probably the things that make the biggest difference at Ross Showalter asks how do non-fiction writers know when to stop working on a piece you never really know you know when to stop when they take it away from you I actually think that's the wrong question the right question is most people I think work too little on the pieces all the serious writers I know do way way way way way way more drafts and work much longer on their writing than other people if you think you should stop working on it you probably need to do another draft at John picciuto asks why do smart people do dumb things my podcast came up with a hypothesis at least in the case of Will Chamberlain and many of his friends he didn't shoot free throws underhanded he did for one season and in that one season he was suddenly a fantastic free-throw shooter and then he went back to shooting free throws the old way reverted to being a terrible free-throw shooter and by the way it was the only flaw in Wilt Chamberlain's game had he been able to shoot free throws well he would have been hands down the greatest basketball player of all time and Wilt said he didn't want to look like an idiot people would rather not look like an idiot then become the greatest basketball player of all time why do smart people uh do dumb things because they don't want to look like an idiot at Oxley teaches ing asks what is bad science exactly oh man there's many different definitions of bad science but science committed by people who think they know the answer before they start is there's a guy named John Lott who writes about guns and crime and he's the only person who claims that the more guns you have the less crime you have but then you realize that John lot is like ideologically committed to the Second Amendment to gun rights and you really have to ask yourself is his research honest the gold standard for figuring out whether something's good or bad is can it be replicated so if I do a study that says the experience of New York City over the last 25 years and I draw the conclusion that more guns equals less crime can someone else take a look at that same database and reach the same conclusion at honestly atheists how do you attempt to overcome confirmation bias information bias is it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to interpreting data a good example would be you've decided that getting a coveted vaccine will cause all kinds of illness well every time you hear a story about somebody who had a bad side effect from getting their coveted shot you say see I told you this thing's crazy it's killing us now what you're neglecting is that 99.99999999 of people who get a coveted shot are not only totally fine and healthy but actually prevent themselves from getting all kinds of diseases that's confirmation bias you selectively find information in the world to support your erroneous conclusion how prevalent is that example how many times does it occur you can't just rely on your own uh personal anecdotal experience Anna pinata ass how do you get yourself excited about writing your research paper when you've lost interest if you dislike something or getting bored with something you probably haven't done enough work on it in other words boredom is a intermediate stage it's a kind of plateau you get on after you've scraped the surface but you've got to go beyond that and everything virtually everything is interesting if you dig deep and hard enough so my advice would be to keep going in that situation at is a asks why is country music so sad I'm crying Iza funny you should ask I did a podcast episode on this very question it was called the king of Tears in that episode king of Tears a reference to a really brilliant bit of research that was about the specificity of song lyrics so it looked at all kinds of popular song lyrics from you know rock music folk music country music and the question is how complex were the nurse make a specificity scale rock music's on the far end of the non-specific end of the scale and country music's on the far specific end of the scale the argument in King of Tears was that what moves us emotionally is specificity and complexity Olivier Talbot 27 asks how did writers research before the internet than all kinds of emojis of people before the internet we went to libraries and we call people up on the phone who knew things and asked them questions both strategies I would wholeheartedly endorse for anyone who's interested in learning about the world in a profound way at antithesis 1 asks what is an intelligence failure which is often cited as the cause of unwanted events well the classic intelligence failure would be 911. there was a famous study conducted by the senate in the aftermath of 9 11 which said look all the clues were there why didn't we why didn't we pick up on them and prevent 9 11. this is intelligence failure let's say we could find 10 pieces of intelligence that pointed directly to what Al Qaeda was planning on 9 11. they're buried in a mountain of a million different data points it's not an easy matter to find the ten that matter out of a mountain of a million I would say be suspicious of people who use the term intelligence failure after the fact at another Panacea asks has any psychologist been worse for the world than Philip zimbardo fake the Stanford Prison Experiment and help create the justifications for broken windows policing We'll add another Panacea could not disagree with you more zimbardo didn't fake the Stanford Prison Experiment this is the famous experiment where zimbardo gathered together a bunch of volunteers and said to one group of them your prison guards to another group said your prisoners and he ran a simulation over the course of I think several days what he discovers is that the prison guards take it very seriously and end up doing things that they would never ordinarily do and he was trying to understand why ordinary Germans would have been capable of committing such terrible offenses during the second world war this different prison experiment is controversial because it's complicated did zimbardo overstate his case did he draw conclusions he shouldn't have it's not faked it's just difficult second part of your question broken windows policing which was an idea that was uh first put forward by a very brilliant researcher called George Kelling that idea says that if you tolerate small acts of disorder large acts of disorder will follow so it's why in the subway in New York they realize the first step in cleaning up the subway was in cracking down on people who jump the turnstiles you cracked in on the small act and what that does is it sends a signal to everybody else now you can take it to extremes and there's departments that did take it to extremes but the the idea itself is something that has been I think verified on many occasions in research at doomed hippo asks I have a research question looking into paranormal stuff and having a hard time I'm mostly seeing blogs parroting the same people Legends say and not getting first-hand reports of hauntings how do I get to the actual primary sources of these stories So my aunt would always say that the living room in her house in Jamaica was haunted can I verify it did I take a picture did I write it up in a scientific journal no it's the story We Tell in our family I suspect that's where stories about ghosts are found their stories told from one person to another they're not written up in the literature and searchable on Google the problem you have uh uh at doomed hippo is that you're in a pretty kind of squishy area it's not like there are a ton of scientists at reputable universities who are doing case-controlled studies on paranormal sightings so the minute you start moving away from the mainstream you are going to be Reliant overwhelmingly on anecdotes doing first-hand research yourself probably the best approach finding people who have seen ghosts and bring a tape recorder and putting in front of them and asking them about their experience shoot me an email I'll tell you my ghost story the question is from Natalie is blue and she asks why do most wealthy people play golf this is a reference to our revisionist history episode which was called a good walk spoiled in the course of which I talk about a really fascinating study it's called a natural experiment when you can find data that's just out in the world serious golfers register their rounds of golf on the U.S whatever the U.S Golf Association services and so this guy this young brilliant Economist he had a database that allowed him to predict exactly how much golf CEOs of companies played there was a correlation between how well your company was doing and how much golf you played the more golf you played the worse your company was doing to answer your question Natalie why do most wealthy people play golf well probably because it takes a lot of money to play golf probably because they have a lot of time in their hands but also because they're more concerned about their leisure time than running the companies that they're supposed to run at everyone cares asks trying to figure out if it's normal that I have 42 tabs open at once on my laptop because I'm totally going to read research looking to this soon how many tabs do you have open usually I don't know 10 to 15. I actually aggressively close and open just because it stresses me out I know someone who thinks that a great interview question for somebody is have the subject of the the interviewee take out their laptop and show you how many tabs they have open on their browser and by looking at the things they're interested in you can get a really good sense of what they're like so I guess I would say if they're 42 really interesting tabs about stuff that pops into your head Go For It Go to 50. at Sprucey 1969 asks is there a word that describes the action of digging out yet more sources to research rather than actually writing other than procrastination what you've described is are going off on getting getting lost in tangents which I don't know if that's a bad thing if you're enjoying yourself why not so those are all the questions for today I thought there were some great questions a lot of you clearly have been reading some of my books and listening to some of revisions history podcasts those of you who haven't have your work cut out for you uh thanks for watching research support [Music]

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: 10000 hours explained, how to research, innovation, malcolm gladwell, malcolm gladwell 10000 hours, malcolm gladwell outliers, malcolm gladwell research, malcolm gladwell wired, ott tech support, research in 2022, researching explained, researching things, science & technology, tech support malcolm, tech support malcolm gladwell, tech support researching, wikipedia, wired, wired interview malcolm gladwell

Id: 0n-lKlqVZkE

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022