gladwell.com

Pit Bulls...

A number of readers wondered what happened to the little boy attacked by a Pit Bull whose story I told in "Troublemakers."  The answer is that he had a bite on his cheek. Dog bites are graded one through six—with six as the most serious—and his bite was a one. The adults who intervened on his behalf had to get a bit more medical attention. But the damage, in their case, was also slight. The little boy's father had two stiches in his hand. In some ways, I don't think the severity of the bites matters much, which is why I didn't dwell on it in the story. Clearly, the attack could have been much more serious. If everyone hadn't run to the defense of the boy so quickly, and if the boy's mother hadn't done exactly the right thing (lying down, with her body covering the boy) the boy could easily have been badly injured. The attack was horrifying, even if no one was seriously hurt, and dogs should not be permitted to run free and bite people.

      On the other hand, part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who get hysterical about  Pit Bulls is to pretend that every dog bite is a medical catastrophe. And that just isn't true. If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you'll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites—which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end. Janis Bradley's book, which i mentioned in a previous post, is awfully convincing on this point.

Gladwell v. Gopnik con't

I realize I forgot to provide a link to the long-ago debate between me and Adam Gopnik on the Canadian health care system. Here it is.

www.washingtonmonthly.com

Why have I changed my mind? Some of my reasons are in the piece on moral hazard I wrote for the New Yorker last summer.

The bigger reason is simply that I woke up one day and realized what much smarter people than me (Adam Gopnik) realized a long time ago, which is that the idea of  employer-based health care is just plain stupid—and only our familiarity with it and sheer inertia prevent us from rising up in rebellion. I always try to think of a suitable analogy and fail. The closest I can come is to imagine if we had employer-based subways in New York. You could ride the subway if you had a job. But if you lost your job, you would either have to walk or pay a prohibitively expensive subway surcharge. Of course, if you lost your job you would need the subway more than ever, because you couldn't afford taxis and you would need to travel around looking for work. Right? In  any case, what logical connection is there between employment and transporation? If you can answer that question, you can solve the riddle of the U.S. health care system. And maybe I'll change my mind back. 

Wait! Was Blink right after all?

An intriguing paper from Science on why important decisions may be best made without deliberation.

www.sciencemag.org

Gladwell v. Gopnik

Adam Gopnik just emailed me to tell me that, for some strange reason, a debate that he and I did for the Washington Monthly on the Canadian health care system six years ago has now been resurrected on various blogs. I just took a look. Here's one of my favorite comments: "Very like their roles at The New Yorker, Gopnik is the voice of bourgeois sense, and Gladwell of extravagant, contrarian sensibility." (I'm not sure Adam would be as happy with that descriptor as I am). In our debate, Adam vigorously defended the Canadian system, and I attacked it. But wait! That was six years ago! I've now changed my mind. I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said. In fact, I shudder when I read what I said back then.

mea culpa

In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker. What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written. If you look on my website, on the "Blink" page, you’ll see an expanded notes and bibliography, which mostly consists of copies of emails sent to me by readers. Well, I think I’d like to start posting reader comments for everything I write, and this is a perfect place for that.

There are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right.

Let me give you a small, immediate example. In my October 10th article for the New Yorker, "Getting In" I quoted from a fascinating study done a few years ago on the graduates of the elite Hunter College elementary school in Manhattan. But I didn’t get give the title of the book or its authors. Why? Well, the New Yorker is not an academic publication: we don’t footnote every source the way people do in scholarly journals. There are all kinds of things that any of us who write for the New Yorker read and that influence our writing but that we never acknowledge, because we don’t run bibliographies at the end of articles. That’s a constraint of the popular magazine business, and whether sources get mentioned is up to the judgment of writers and editor. In this case, though, I think I erred. I quoted from the book. I should have referenced it. So here goes. If you want to read a great account of what happens to those admitted to elite primary schools when they grow up, take a look at: "Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up" by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers and Allan Wasser.

     I also have a few amendments to the piece I wrote recently in the New Yorker about Pit Bulls entitled "Troublemakers." As soon as the article appeared, a dog trainer named Janis Bradley sent me a book she’s written called "Dogs Bite" (James and Kenneth Publishers, Berkeley CA: 2005). I wish I’d seen it before I wrote the article, because it is the most devastating and convincing indictment of the hysteria over dog bites that I’ve ever read. I won’t try and summarize Bradley’s arguments here. But if you’re interested in the issue I strongly recommend the book.

     One of my regrets in the piece is that I didn’t get a chance to discuss David Harris and his book "Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work." Harris’s book was the first thing I read when I started research on my article. I interviewed him at length, and his thinking had a big influence on how my article turned out. But he’s no where to be found in the piece. That happens all the time in journalism: a typical rule of thumb, at least for me, is that I interview at least ten people for every one I end up quoting. That fact doesn’t make it easier, though, particularly when the book is as good as Harris’s, and I wish I’d found a way to work him in.

     I also have some second thoughts about Frederick Schauer’s "Profiles, Probabilities and Stereotypes." Schauer’s book is actually the reason I ended up focusing on Pit Bulls. He devotes an entire chapter to generalizations and Pit Bulls—only he thinks that Pit Bull bans are a good idea. It was because I disagreed so strongly with him that I decided to write about why Pit Bull bans are a bad idea. I mentioned Schauer's book in the piece, and quote him. But I don't mention that he has strong feelings about Pit Bulls as well. Should I have? Should I have mentioned that my article was, in part, a response to his book? It's another one of those judgment calls, and I'm not sure, in retrospect, that I made the right decision. I think I should have devoted more time to Schauer, and I'm sorry about that. While I'm at it, I should also take the opportunity to say that  (with the exception of the Pit Bull chapter) Schauer’s book is really, really good. And even though I didn't agree with everything in it, It certainly helped me a great deal to organize my thoughts about generalizations. across. I recommend it highly.

In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker. What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written. If you look on my website, on the "Blink" page, you’ll see an expanded notes and bibliography, which mostly consists of copies of emails sent to me by readers. Well, I think I’d like to start posting reader comments for everything I write, and this is a perfect place for that.

There are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right.

     I also have a few amendments to the piece I wrote recently in the New Yorker about Pit Bulls entitled "Troublemakers." As soon as the article appeared, a dog trainer named Janis Bradley sent me a book she’s written called "Dogs Bite" (James and Kenneth Publishers, Berkeley CA: 2005). I wish I’d seen it before I wrote the article, because it is the most devastating and convincing indictment of the hysteria over dog bites that I’ve ever read. I won’t try and summarize Bradley’s arguments here. But if you’re interested in the issue I strongly recommend the book.

     One of my regrets in the piece is that I didn’t get a chance to discuss David Harris and his book "Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work." Harris’s book was the first thing I read when I started research on my article. I interviewed him at length, and his thinking had a big influence on how my article turned out. But he’s no where to be found in the piece. That happens all the time in journalism: a typical rule of thumb, at least for me, is that I interview at least ten people for every one I end up quoting. That fact doesn’t make it easier, though, particularly when the book is as good as Harris’s, and I wish I’d found a way to work him in.

     I also have some second thoughts about Frederick Schauer’s "Profiles, Probabilities and Stereotypes." Schauer’s book is actually the reason I ended up focusing on Pit Bulls. He devotes an entire chapter to generalizations and Pit Bulls—only he thinks that Pit Bull bans are a good idea. It was because I disagreed so strongly with him that I decided to write about why Pit Bull bans are a bad idea. I mentioned Schauer's book in the piece, and quote him. But I don't mention that he has strong feelings about Pit Bulls as well. Should I have? Should I have mentioned that my article was, in part, a response to his book? It's another one of those judgment calls, and I'm not sure, in retrospect, that I made the right decision. I think I should have devoted more time to Schauer, and I'm sorry about that. While I'm at it, I should also take the opportunity to say that  (with the exception of the Pit Bull chapter) Schauer’s book is really, really good. And even though I didn't agree with everything in it, It certainly helped me a great deal to organize my thoughts about generalizations. across. I recommend it highly.

Power Law Distributions

There are, I think, no end to the examples out here of the power-law problems I discussed in "Million-Dollar Murray" last week in the New Yorker. Medical care is obviously a great example. Here's another, from Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times, who writes:

Reading [your] piece on the homeless took me back to 1996, when, as a reporter, I covered the collision of two commuter trains in New Jersey, in which three people died.  It quickly became clear that the engineer driving one of those trains - who was one of those killed - had run a red light.  New Jersey Transit disclosed that over his career, he had been cited four times for "serious" moving violations, including two for running red lights, which might be the most dangerous infraction of all. 

What we did not know—and they would not tell us—was whether four was a lot or a little.   So we demanded to see the safety records (names redacted) of all the engineers at New Jersey Transit, Metro-North Commuter Railroad, and Long Island Rail Road—about 1,000 in total. After months of wrangling, we got them.

How many engineers had more than four serious violations than the four this man had? Only one, who had five.
How many had the same number of serious violations, four, that this man had? Two.
How many had three serious violations? Two.
How many had run more red lights than this man had?  None.

The engineer who had probably caused this very rare fatal accident had what may have been the single worst safety record of 1,000 people driving commuter trains in the metropolitan area.  Only five were even in his dubious ballpark. The great majority of engineers had no safety violations at all.

And here's the kicker: about 8 percent of the engineers accounted for about half of all the violations. Yet not only were they allowed to continue working, they were under no particular scrutiny.  Worse still, these three railroads actually did more to police the engineers than most railroads, and more than was required by federal law.  The results made me think of the Christopher Commission report, which I had also covered, and the finding that 44 of 7,000 officers caused the bulk of the problems.