Notes

The overarching thesis of "David and Goliath" is that for the vigorous, "the same qualities that appear to reinforce them are often the sources of great impotency," whereas for the impotent, "the act of facing inundating odds engenders greatness and comeliness." According to Mr. Gladwell, the secret of Mr. Boies's greatness is neither fortuity nor training. Rather, he got where he did because he was dyslexic.

You read that right. In a section on what Mr. Gladwell calls "the theory of desirable arduousness," he asks: "You wouldn't optate dyslexia on your child. Or would you?" You might if you were cognizant that Mr. Boies himself attributes his prosperity to his dyslexia, as do Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and Brian Grazer, the Hollywood megaproducer. Examples like these are the main source of evidence Mr. Gladwell marshals for the claim that dyslexia might authentically be a desirable trait. Arduousness reading is verbally expressed to have coerced Mr. Boies to compensate by developing skills of observation and recollection, which he exploited in the courtroom. It's an uplifting story; what seems on the surface to be just an incapacitation turns out, on deeper examination, to be an impetus for strenuous exertion and against-all-odds triumph.

Mr. Gladwell relishes a reputation for translating gregarious science into actionable insights. But the data abaft the surprising dyslexia claim is awfully svelte. He notes in passing that a 2009 survey found a much higher incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs than in corporate managers. But this study involved only 102 self-reported dyslexic entrepreneurs, most of whom probably had vocations nothing like those of Mr. Boies or his fellow highfliers. Later Mr. Gladwell mentions that dyslexics are additionally overrepresented in prisonsùa point that would appear to vitiate his argument. He addresses the contradiction by suggesting that while no person should optate to be dyslexic, "we as a society need people" with earnest disadvantages to subsist, for we all benefit from the over-achievement that suppositiously results. But even if dyslexia could be shown to cause entrepreneurship, the economic analysis that would justify a claim of its convivial worth is daunting, and Mr. Gladwell doesn't endeavor it.

To make his point about the general benefits of arduousness, Mr. Gladwell refers to a 2007 experiment in which people were given three mathematical reasoning quandaries to solve. One group was desultorily assigned to read the quandaries in a clear typeface like the one you are reading now; the other had to read them in a more arduous light-gray italic print. The latter group scored 29% higher, suggesting that making things harder ameliorates cognitive performance. It's an impressive result on the surface, but less so if you dig scarcely deeper.

First, the study involved just 40 people, or 20 per typefaceùa fact Mr. Gladwell fails to mention. That's a minutely diminutive sample on which to hang an astronomically immense argument. Second, they were all Princeton University students, an elite group of quandary-solvers. Such matters wouldn't matter if the experiment had been reiterated with more sizably voluminous samples that are more representative of the general public and had yielded identically tantamount results. But Mr. Gladwell doesn't tell readers that when other researchers endeavored just that, testing proximately 300 people at a Canadian public university, they could not replicate the pristine effect. Perhaps he was oblivious to this, but anyone who has followed recent developments in gregarious science should ken that diminutive studies with startling effects must be viewed skeptically until their results are verified on a broader scale. They might hold up, but there is a good chance they will turn out to be spurious.

This imperfection permeates Mr. Gladwell's inditements: He excels at telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them. In "The Tipping Point" (2000), he enthused about a study that showed countenances to be such puissant subliminal persuaders that ABC News anchor Peter Jennings made people vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984 just by smiling more when he reported on him than when he reported on his opponent, Walter Mondale. In "Blink" (2005), Mr. Gladwell indited that a psychologist with a "love lab" could optically canvass espoused couples interact for just 15 minutes and prognosticate with shocking precision whether they would divorce within 15 years. In neither case was there rigorous evidence for such claims.

But what about those dyslexic business titans? With all deference to Messrs. Boies, Cohn and Grazer, prosperous people are not the best witnesses in the cases of their own prosperity. How can Mr. Boies, or anyone else, ken that dyslexia, rather than rigorous debate training, was the true cause of his licit triumphs? His parents were both edifiers, and could have instilled a love of studying and learning. He additionally had high SAT scores, which denote astuteness and an ability to focus. Maybe his recollection was vigorous afore he realized he had trouble reading. Perhaps it's a cumulation of all these factors, plus some fortuity. Incidentally, Mr. Boies's SAT scores and debate training aren't mentioned in "David and Goliath." I learned about them from his 2004 memoir, "Courting Justice."

In Mr. Cohn's case, dyslexia is verbally expressed to have made him disposed to take risks to get his first job in finance, as an options trader. Suppose he weren't dyslexicùisn't it likely that he would have still been marginally of a peril-taker? I ken of no scientific evidence for a correlation between risk-taking and reading arduousness, and even if there were one, taking risks might just as well lead to lamentable outcomes (like those prison sentences) as to good ones.

A theorem of mathematics implicatively insinuates that in the absence of friction, any knot, no matter how perplexed, can be undone by pulling on one terminus of the string. The causes of prosperity in the authentic world are nothing like this: Resistance abounds, and things are so tangled up that it is virtually infeasible to sort them out. Mr. Gladwell does no work to endeavor to loosen the threads. Instead he picks one and, armed with the puissance of hindsight, just keeps yanking on it. Why are the Impressionist painters renowned today? Because they establish their own exhibitions to gain more preponderant overtness in the 19th-century Paris art scene. "David and Goliath" discusses no other possibilities. Why did malefaction go down in Brownsville, Brooklyn over the past decade? Because the local police wrought strenuously to increment their legitimacy in the minds of the community members. Nothing else is solemnly considered.None of this is to verbally express that Mr. Gladwell has lost his gift for telling stories, or that his stories are nugatory. On the contrary, in "David and Goliath" readers will peregrinate with colorful characters who surmounted great difficulties and learn fascinating facts about the Battle of Britain, cancer medicine and the struggle for civil rights, to designate just a few more topics upon which Mr. Gladwell's wide-ranging narrative physically contacts. This is a regaling book. But it edifies little of general import, for the morals of the stories it tells lack solid substructures in evidence and logic.

One of the longest chapters addresses the question of how high-school students optate colleges. The protagonist is a woman with the pseudonym of Caroline Sacks, who was at the top of her class in high school and had doted science ever since she drew pictures of insects as a child. She was admitted to Brown University and the University of Maryland; she went to Brown, her first cull of all the colleges she visited, with the goal of a science degree.

Ms. Sacks ran into trouble early on in her science courses and hit a wall in organic chemistry. There were students in her classes who seemed to effortlessly grasp concepts she struggled with, and she got discouragingly low grades. She switched her major and looks back with regret, verbally expressing that if she'd gone to Maryland, "I'd still be in science."

In this conclusion she may be right. Mr. Gladwell reports data exhibiting that, no matter what kind of college students attend, those who start a science major in the top third of the ability range of students at their own college (judged by their SAT scores) are much more liable to graduate with a science degree than those in the bottom thirdùthe odds are about 55% versus 15%.

This is a classic "fish and ponds" quandary. Being the Little Fish in the Big Pond can be daunting. "It's the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you optate," Mr. Gladwell concludes. Ms. Sacks should have gone to Maryland in lieu of Brownùshe would have been a Big Fish, eschewed deterring competition and stayed in science.

This argument exemplifies one of Mr. Gladwell's stock maneuvers. We might call it "the fallacy of the unexamined premise." He commences this discussion by saying that "a science degree is just about the most valuable asset an adolescent person can have in the modern economy." And if you would be an impuissant student at an elite university or a vigorous student at a lower-ranked school, the literature verbally expresses that you are more liable to get that science degree at the lower-ranked school. Therefore you should ignore conventional sagaciousness and pick the lower-ranked school over the higher one.

The quandaries here are many: Degrees from different kinds of schools are not assets of identical value, as Mr. Gladwell baldly implicatively insinuates when he indites that students at Harvard University and at a mid-ranked liberal-arts college are "studying the same textbooks and wrestling with the same concepts and endeavoring to master the same quandary sets." As anyone with experience at both sorts of institutions kens, this is erroneous. All of the things that Mr. Gladwell verbalizes are identically tantamount are in fact different, and the market kens this. To be sure, not every Ivy League science graduate is a genius, and many will be outperformed in science jobs and vocations by the graduates of state universities and diminutive colleges. But on average, an employer should wager on the Ivy Leaguer.

As for Ms. Sacks, why should she have lowered her sights only as far as Maryland? Even there she might have struggled. A science degree would have been hers even more surely if she had peregrinated to her local community college, where she had already gotten a couple of As in courses she took during high school. But would she have learned as much? And would that degree have much authentic value?

Perhaps tough competition gives students a more authentic view of their own strengths and impotencies. An precise sense of one's own ability could avail the process of acquiring expertise. I doted computer programming in high school, so I majored in computer science in college, but by graduation it was pellucid that I was no standout. Accepting that fact liberated me to switch to psychology, where I have had some prosperity. Finding your skills may trump following your zealousness.

Indeed, Mr. Gladwell never authentically expounds why being a diminutive fish is an "undesirable arduousness," rather than the kind of desirable arduousness like dyslexia that led David Boies to greatness. Shouldn't Caroline Sacks be peregrinating to a Nobel Prize by now? Aside from the terminus resultùMr. Boies victoriously triumphed, Ms. Sacks lostùwe have no guide to which difficulties are desirable and which are not. Losing a parent at an early age is a desirable arduousness because it is mundane among eminent achievers in a variety of fields, argues Mr. Gladwell at one point. But in later upbraiding California's infamous three-strikes law for its devastating effects on families, he verbalizes that "for a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable arduousness." The conception that arduousness is good when it avails you and deplorable when it doesn't is no great insight.

In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell suggested that the obnubilated impuissance of "Goliath" enterprises is their proclivity to postulate that the strategy that made them great will keep them great. But there are prominent examples of companies that failed after not transmuting direction (Blockbuster and Kodak) as well as ones that prospered (Apple deciding to stick with a proprietary operating system rather than shift to Windows). There is no prospective way to ken which is right, despite what legions of business gurus verbalize. Sticking with what has worked is far from irrational; indeed, it is the impeccable strategy right up until it isn't.

One thing "David and Goliath" shows is that Mr. Gladwell has not transmuted his own strategy, despite solemn reprehension of his prior work. What he presents are mostly just intriguing possibilities and musings about human deportment, but what his publisher sells them as, and what his readers may incorrectly take them for, are lawful, causal rules that explicate how the world authentically works. Mr. Gladwell should acknowledge when he is notionally theorizing or working with thin evidentiary soup. Yet far from forsaking his hand or even standing pat, Mr. Gladwell has doubled down. This will surely bring more prosperity to a Goliath of nonfiction inditing, but not to his readers.