{"id":27198,"date":"2026-03-10T15:23:01","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T22:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=27198"},"modified":"2026-03-13T14:53:29","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T21:53:29","slug":"malcolm-gladwell-the-tipping-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2026\/03\/10\/malcolm-gladwell-the-tipping-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Malcolm Gladwell, THE TIPPING POINT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Subtitled: “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”
\n(Little, Brown, March 2000, 279pp, including 20pp endnotes, acknowledgements, and index)<\/em><\/p>\n

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This was a popular and well-received book when published back in 2000, and launched\u00a0Gladwell<\/a>‘s book career. Most of his books follow a similar pattern: identifying counter-intuitive things about how the world works. In this book, the theme is in the subtitle. In BLINK, it was about the power of snap judgments (contradicting considered wisdom *not* to rely on intuition); OUTLIERS explores the role of environment (and by extension, chance) in success stories. I read those too. Next was WHAT THE DOG SAW, a collection of essays, which I haven’t read, then three others, which I didn’t even buy. Most recent is REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT, in 2024, which revisits some of the themes of the first book, from different perspectives.<\/p>\n

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Gladwell has been criticized on a couple grounds, one for oversimplifying complex ideas, two for relying too heavily on anecdotes. But he inspired many other writers, who were often more rigorous than he was in analyzing data, since they were scientists and he was not; one that comes to mind is Jesse Bering’s THE BELIEF INSTINCT (reviewed last year here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This book and his others came to mind recently what with a couple of my running themes.<\/p>\n

First, the world is complex, in contrast to the simplistic takes of many conservatives. This is because our “common sense” and intuition (like Trump’s gut feelings) are evolved responses to living in the ancestral environment that humanity moved away from only about 12,000 years ago, and so don’t necessarily apply in the modern environment (which is far more complex).<\/p>\n

Second, because I now perceive several parallel trends in book publishing and ideas of the past thirty or more years. One are the similar books on parallel themes, as with Levitt & Dubner’s FREAKONOMICS in 2005, that also uncovered non-intuitive truths behind things everyone thought they understood, in economic terms. (That book had several sequels and inspired a long-running NPR radio show, running to this day.) Second is the theme of psychological biases that lead people to believe “weird” things, as Ariely and Shermer and many others have written about. And another are the discoveries of physics, going back at least to the 1980s, that reveal how reality does not work in predictable manners, and in fact can exhibit amazing complexity as a result of some basic concepts: recursion, fractals, chaos, complexity, emergence, and of course evolution. The big picture writers, like Deutsch and Carroll, show how they fit together. (And all of their insights constitute the “literacy” about the real world I’ve mentioned recently; one could contrast that with the “demon-haunted” world of the intuitivists and the gullicists.)<\/p>\n

And so for example Gladwell’s idea of a tipping point is analogous to the notion in chaos theory that a single event, like the fluttering of a butterfly, can trigger enormous, unpredictable events, like hurricanes. That’s the way of the world, at multiple levels.<\/p>\n

So here are the notes I took on this book, even though the general principles just outlined are my point today, more than the particulars of Gladwell’s examples.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n