Lecture review: Malcolm Gladwell

by Greg Crook

Editor's note from Blair: Our fearless leader, Mike, had been asking if we knew anyone who was going to see Malcolm Gladwell (Staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Blink and The Tipping Point) at his SMU lecture Tuesday. I could have gone but didn't know it until it was too late. It's a long story but a lesson learned is to check gmail more than once every 48 hours. My friend, Greg Crook, is a Tate Lecture Series veteran and went. He sent this review of the Gladwell evening to me via gmail, which I just checked after checking that other time I should have checked sooner, if that makes sense. How about this? Let's forget my stupidity and get on to how the night went:

It was awesome. He talked about the difference between a mystery and a puzzle, and used this to frame his entire talk. He also defended Jeffrey Skilling of ENRON and was very convincing. Skilling, a SMU grad, should have used Gladwell as his attorney. He started by showing that the prosecutor framed the charge as a puzzle (i.e. by withholding these key pieces of info, investors were defrauded). He showed unequivocally that ENRON was completely forthcoming in all legal filings months before the collapse and that the bulk of that information (literally tens of thousands of pages of legal documents) was freely available for anyone willing to look. In fact, a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Dallas first broke the story by spending two months reading publicly available documents and discussing them with financial professors and industry types. This reporter even met in Dallas with six ENRON executives who confirmed that his interpretation of the documents could be correct; however, they believed their computer models and experts' p-o-v regarding the same figures was different AND more accurate. Any investor could have had access to those documents. Skilling does have culpability but the entire affair is a mystery in which more information only overwhelms the person looking at the data; with a mystery, you need selection of data, not collection (as a puzzle would be). The prosecutor and Congress (with their "reforms") framed it as a puzzle which doesn't do the complexity of the situation justice.

He adapted this argument to the practice of urology over the last thirty years---moving from a practice that was a puzzle to one that is a mystery because of the overwhelming and conflicting data available at the fingertips of these professionally trained physicians. He also made brief references to other fields were this idea could be applied.

It was fascinating and the implications for intelligence (something he covered), military tactics, education, politics (especially global warming) seem endless.

For Q&A he passionately discussed racism and how the overuse of the word is destroying its meaning (and for that matter, great implications for all of the English language). And he took to task the NCAA for its ridiculous rules regarding athletes. He even ridiculed Michael Irvin, in a benign but effective way.

It was an intense presentation filled with incredible relevance and amazing insight. I was on the edge of my seat. In my humble opinion it was the best Tate I have heard, and it probably left a lot of professional financial and law types squirming in their seats. Outstanding stuff.

Greg used to be an employee of the Texas Rangers and had members of the U.S. Secret Service draw their guns on him when he was late to work, zooming in the parking lot in an old RX7 behind George Bush when he owned the team.