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Notes -
Is anyone here familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know? Is there a high-quality review anywhere that summarizes what I should know going into it? I understand that Gladwell has a bad reputation around here generally; is there a good general summary of his offenses to help me keep an appropriately skeptical mindset?
I realize that there's probably some irony in worrying about being biased toward excessive trust in someone who's writing in part about how people are biased toward excessive trust.
The only book of his I've read is Blink. It's a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing book to read, but it's a bit sad reading it years after it came out, after probably an absolute majority of the psychological studies it cites have been hit by the replication crisis. The book's thesis is also a bit confused: he says it's about the value of relying on your intuition and snap judgement over cold dispassionate analysis, but there's a whole chapter on what happens when your snap judgement goes wrong (the shooting of Amadou Diallo). There's a big chunk of the book where he talks about how the single biggest factor determining whether a doctor faces a malpractice suit is how nice the doctor is to the patient, which he takes as a point in favour of his thesis when to me it sounds like an indictment of it: a competent doctor who did everything in his power to help his patient but got sued anyway because of his substandard bedside manner (while his charming Chad of a colleague, who wouldn't know a foley catheter from his elbow and is on regular rotation in M&M conferences, gets away scot-free) sounds like whatever the equivalent of blackpilling is for medics.
I remember reading an article critical of his whole approach to writing; I think it was this one but I'm not sure.
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