Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion 'Outliers', anyone reading it??

So far a pretty fun read, I am about half way through. Not sure how much of it I completely buy, but the idea of circumstance/chance and plain old practice playing such a massive massive role in whether people get by, much less hit their potential, is very interesting.
The sports team info is jaw dropping.

At the same time the authors sort of states that iq can be easily negated by these other factors he also vindicates the parents/community efforts to make the circumstances meet a child's potential.
The tooth and nail fights many of us have to get our kids into a program where they are not bored out of their skulls does indeed appear to be the thing to do, at leat according to this one author/book.

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Stor...mp;s=books&qid=1227360296&sr=8-1

I could use more charts/data, but it is certainly thought provoking.

Curious if anyone else is reading this.

I saw this about Outliers today and am adding it to my library list.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/11/21/malcolm.gladwell/index.html

Since I have a background in aviation, I'm especially interested in learning more about this:
Which countries?!

Hi Chris,

My DS14 just read it and thought it was a very interesting book. DH then started reading it and said it was "right up {my} alley". I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell. I have it on my bedside table in the giant stack of books I want to read.

Cym

I'm also half-way through. One thing that the author is not stressing but implied, is that talent is necessary, too (whether IQ is the same as talent, well, I won't go there). For example, he talks about the "10,000 hours" rule being somewhat true for music students in conservatories: those who practise harder will be better musicians. But the fact that these students are already in a prestigious conservatory means that they are all talented. Same with the hockey story. The talented ones need the right circumstances to thrive, it doesn't mean that *anyone* will be a hockey star given the right circumstances. I think he actually said in the book that what he is advocating is for "the talented" to not miss out.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the book. And I am also happy that, according to this book, we parents who are doing everything we can to find a good match between our kids and the educational environment are really helping our kids.

Well, I borrowed the book from a friend, and am through the introduction.

DS12 wants to know what all the fuss is about.

I told him that it says that it takes more than high IQ to succeed, that one needs hard work too.

DS12 cracked up. Really? He said sarcastically, I though one could sit in a room playing video games the whole time.

I can hardly wait to get deeper into the book and hear what DS has to say about the rest of it.

Smiles,
Grinity

I'm with Grinity's DS12 - the book seems to me a nice corrective to a straw man.

Well, maybe not a total straw man. I suppose that there probably is a tendency in our society to think that once you've quantified something you've found its essence. And insofar as the point of Gladwell's book is that a high iq isn't sufficient for success then I suppose it works against that tendency. But still, my impression was that Gladwell's talent lies in taking a not-very-deep point and writing very well about it.

That said, there is a deep question in the area. Namely, if iq doesn't measure success - and perhaps isn't even a very good measure of intelligence itself - then what is? The book that seems to me to address that issue head-on and in an interesting way is Thomas Flynn's What is intelligence?. Has anyone read that one?

Flynn is the psychologist after whom the "Flynn Effect" was named. The Flynn Effect measures the rise in mean iq scores relative to a given normed sample from 1947 to the present. (It also retrodicts a pattern back to 1900 or so.) Flynn argues that the effect - an average increase of 0.3 iq points per year - shows either that iq isn't measuring pure intelligence or that our grandparents were all mentally retarded (the phrase he uses). He prefers the former explanation to the latter.

The crux of the discussion is organized around the various ways in which social factors enter into one's success on the tests. There is an interesting discussion of re-norming, and of the history of the various revisions to the WISC and SB, and he attempts to explain why the aptitudes they test for are so much easier to come by in the general population now than they were 100 years ago. All this leads him to resist the idea that cross-generational comparisons tell us anything about relative iq, while still insisting that within a generation they can be relatively effective. There is a heartbreaking discussion of how scoring an exam relative to obsolete norms can artificially inflate the iq scores of death-row prisoners, some of whom become eligible for execution as a result of the mistake.

I'm not at all sure what I think of Flynn's new proposed model of intelligence (which has iq as one factor), and I'm not even sure what I think of his explanation of the Flynn Effect in the first place. But the topic overlaps with Gladwell's book considerably, and I felt that I was in the hands of a much more interesting and insightful thinker.

I'd love to know if anyone else is reading this book, and if so what their impressions are.

BB

I have not read either book, but your review made me want to read both, BBDad. Very interesting! Thanks!

I'm so glad you found it helpful, Kriston. I'm busy avoiding a deadline (3.5 hours now - argh!), so it's nice to know that at least some avoidance strategies can be productive...

BB

LOL! I wish I had no idea what you mean (said the woman who could be writing...).

I got it on cd for my dad for Christmas (he drives a lot), but it didn't arrive on time... I thought it sounded intruiging. I'll pop it in the car tomorrow!