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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.
I just listened to the audiobook. I was actually considering writing a book review but didn't think there was much value in i. It isn't particularly worth reading imo. It's not really about "Talking to Strangers" like it claims so much as it looks into systematic/psychological reasons for why one of the BLM cases Sandra Bland got pulled over and it went so wrong beyond the leftist explanation of "racism" and rightist explanation of "just a bad apple".
It presents three reasons. The first is that most people are predisposed to trusting others, and it takes a lot of evidence to convince someone that a person is lying. But some people (like the cop in the Sandra Bland case) are very distrusting/paranoid and start off suspicious of people. His ultimate point on this was pretty unclear since he spent a long time praising the suspicious guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's fraud long before anyone else, but also seemed to conclude we shouldn't encourage/place paranoid people in power like the cop since it'd cause society to break down. That we need trust for meaningful and smooth interactions. He never addresses high trust/low trust societies and just kind of assumes everyone is as trustful as Americans, implying some studies using college students are indicative of the ancestral environment, which I think is pretty bad. He also doesn't really mention how, instead of a simple paranoid/trusting binary, we could maybe try to work harder at actually examining whether the evidence that someone is lying is strong or nonsense. This section was just generally too narrow and shallow imo.
His second point is all about how body language and facial expressions can be very misleading. That while you could practically understand an episode of Friends with volume off because the body language and facial expressions are so over the top, in real life things are much more unclear but people don't realize that. And they think they can determine guilt/innocence based off how people act but that's really pretty much nonsense, even for the most skilled interrogators. I think this is all true but doesn't really have much depth to it, no point in reading 50 pages on it.
The third section was about a particular policing policy. In Kansas City in the 90s, they had really bad crime, and they did lots of research and experiments into how to lower it. The conclusions they eventually came to after trying lots of things was that much of the crime was isolated to very small geographic locations, like just one or two blocks, or a stretch of street. You might see something like 80% of the crime in the city in like 3% of its geographic area, or something like that, I forget the exact numbers or if it was just certain subsets of crime but they were very dramatic. And that the best way to reduce crime was for cops to go into those high crime areas at high crime times(e.g at night in the dark) and constantly search people's cars. Make up some excuse like a broken taillight or that they didn't signal or whatever, use that as an excuse to question the driver, and if the driver looks suspicious search the car. And that had high rates of catching people with illegal drugs and guns and vastly reduced crime. But the rest of American police departments only heard the last part about "pull people over for dumb reasons and look for excuses to search them", without the part about "only do this in high crime areas", and then police started annoying people and wasting money and even arresting lots of innocent people for dumb reasons which was very bad. I don't really know enough about policing to know if this section was completely accurate but it sounds plausible to me based off what I do know. I've been meaning to make some sort of post somewhere discussing this section because doing this sort of policing right, being extremely heavy handed in high crime areas but extremely light handed in other areas, sounds like it'd be a major step up and I'm curious if it's true.
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