Asymmetric Warfare: How Malcolm Gladwell's "How David beats Goliath" fails as a persuasive essay

When Malcolm Gladwell's ultra-best-seller Outliers came out, there was a pretty large critical backlash towards the book in particular, and his writing in general.  He was criticised for hyperbole, over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, for cherry-picking data and just being generally dishonest and misleading.  If he or his editors saw any of these criticisms, they didn't take them to heart, judging from his new piece in The New Yorker, "How David beats Goliath" which is filled with so much little-supported conjecture and sketchy reasoning that it reads almost as a self-parody of his distinctive style.

I won't summarize the article.  Like all of Gladwell's essays, it's a good read, and you should just go and read the thing.  But, if Gladwell wanted to silence the critics, he could've done better than an article completely lacking in compelling evidence, especially an article about basketball that demonstrates a really inexcusable ignorance of the sport.  Though it's received criticism throughout the blogosphere, sports bloggers, in particular, have not been kind.

The problem with this article (and a lot of Gladwell's work) is that he confuses illustration with evidence.   An essay, ideally, presents an argument (the thesis) and then presents evidence to support the thesis.  To be effective, this evidence must be credible and convincing.  If the argument is difficult to understand, the author can also supply illustrations to make a complex argument more accessible, even though they are not credible or comprehensive enough to serve as effective evidence.

The biblical story of David and Goliath cited in "How David beats Goliath" is a great example of an illustration.  While it neatly demonstrates the argument ("underdogs can defeat a stronger opponent by use of unconventional tactics"), it is not credible because it is from a fictional (or at least highly dubious) account.  It is not convincing as evidence.  And that's fine, it's really a nice, familiar anecdote to clue people in who hadn't gotten the point of the article yet.  That's what illustrations are for.  

But the problem is that Gladwell's article is all illustrations and no evidence.  The story of the eighth-grade girl's-basketball team that leads the article (it's something of a convention in these New Yorker pieces to lead with an illustration), the stories of Lawrence of Arabia and George Washington, of the war-games player Doug Lenat, and the account of Rick Pitino's playing and coaching days are all anecdotes that are too-specific to draw meaningful conlcusions from.  The only numerical data that Gladwell brings up to support his point is a study of 200 wars by a political scientist named Ivan Arreguin-Toft.  Now, apart from the fact that the study, as referenced by Gladwell, compares who "won" a war with who was "stronger" and that both are almost-mind-bogglingly sketchy and hard-to-exactly-define criteria for a stastical study, the fact that his only numerical evidence is a study with 200 data points is, really, really weak coffee.

Here's an idea, Mr. Gladwell:  You discuss basketball in this article.  In fact, this article, apart from being about asymetrical warfare, is mostly about basketball.  Basketball, unlike most wars, has almost perfectly defined winners and losers.  The winners and losers of basketball games are a matter of publically available (and effortlessly accessible) statistical record.  Also falling in the "not difficult to research" category is which basketball teams run the unconventional tactic of the full-court-press.  Maybe, you could like, find out if teams that switch to the full-court-press do better after switching.  That would be pretty credible and convincing evidence of the effectiveness this unconventional tactic.

But he didn't do this.  I can guess why.  The full court press, as pointed out by many, many sports bloggers, is not a particularly effective principle to base your basketball team around, especially if your basketball team is already awful.  It seems, ironically, to be most effective as a way for a physically superior team to bully a much weaker opponent.

Now, I think Gladwell is actually correct in both his thesis (which, as presented in the article, is so obvious and banal it scarcely needs to be argued at all) and his particular argument that the full court press can be an effective strategy for a basketball team.  He's actually right: the press allows the defense to dictate the pace and style of the game and thereby gain an advantage.  When a team is running a full-court-press the entire game, especially when combined with a similarly sped-up offensive style, they're not playing basketball, they're playing "full court press," a similar game, but one that prizes different skills and abilities than basketball.

Where he's wrong is that this is a game that allows a team with inferior basketball skills but more "hustle" to be effective.  You need a much more athletic team, in particular a better conditioned one, to run the press effectively.  It's a particularly apt strategy when you're outmatched in size, but possess a large advantage in speed, depth, organization and endurance.  This doesn't mean Gladwell is right when he argues that basketball teams are stupid for not pressing more.  Most teams don't have the personnel that you need to be successful with the press.

There's also a reason that you generally see press-centric teams stop being effective at around the major conference level in NCAA basketball, since elite-level basketball players are generally all in such great physical condition that 40 minutes isn't enough to tire them out sufficiently to make running the press worthwhile.  Perhaps if you had a team that was just outrageously athletic, it could even work at the highest levels of Division I.  Like say, Rick Pitino's national championship Kentucky team, which Gladwell cites as under-talented, but actually had nine members go on to play in the NBA.

But more importantly for the article, there's also a reason why the full-court-press isn't run much in eighth-grade girls' leagues.   Consider the following passage from "How David beats Goliath:"

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

Now, ignore the disturbing racial undercurrents for a moment.  Why is the opposing coach getting so angry?  The goal of (most) youth-level basketball isn't to win at all costs, it's to teach basic basketball skills.  When you elect to play "full court press" instead of basketball, you give yourself an advantage in winning the game, but you're subverting the goal of the league.  If your goal is to teach "basketball" to a group of 13-year-old girls, being forced by the other team to lose badly in "full court press," a game that they weren't prepared to play (presumably, California, middle-school-level girls' basketball teams don't employ a network of scouts to size up the competition) is a demoralizing and frustrating experience.  The opposing coach's anger is totally justifiable.  Ranadive is playing within the rules, but ignoring the purpose of the endeavor.

Pretty much the exact same complaint can be lodged against the chapter in Gladwell's Blink about the disasterous war-games operation run by the US military in the lead-up to the Iraq war (I'd give the name of the chapter and cite a page number, but I've regrettably loaned the book to a friend).  Gladwell celebrates the commander who brilliantly and subversively won the war-game by use of unconventional tactics.  This ignores the fact that the point of war-gaming in a military context is not to win by any means allowed in the rules of the game, it's to simulate a hypothetical conflict.  As I understand it, General Von Riper (if I recall his name correctly), won by using several tactics that, while clever, seem simply impossible in a real world scenario, much less a valid simulation of Iraqi military capabilities.  Gladwell tries to paint the decision to replay the disasterous first day of the game under stricter parameters as one that presaged the inside-the-box thinking that lead to US defeats in the actual Iraq war, rather than a decision to boot out an asshole that was playing the war-game like it was a game of Risk instead of a simulation.

Malcolm Gladwell is a talented writer.  In fact, after the suicide of David Foster Wallace, it's possible he has the most purely literary talent of anyone writing non-fiction today.  He's so talented, in fact, that a lot of writers who should know better are falling over themselves to make excuses for this really weak essay.  Ezra Klein writes on his blog:

But Gladwell isn't an academic and he's not a traditional reporter. Insofar as he has a beat, it's modern fables. Stories with a point. He's like Aesop for the corporate class. To wit, the grasshopper isn't really a lazy insect. But then, the point of that story is the importance of hard work, not the characteristics of different bugs. And it's true that hard work is important. Similarly, full court press doesn't guarantee victory for weak basketball teams. But the point of that story is that weak agents need asymmetric tactics, which is also true. You get this in his books, too. Gladwell's core competency is finding fun stories that illustrate interesting -- and even true! -- concepts. It can be a bit precious and, in terms of the stories, occasionally wrong. But it lets him explore useful theories in a readable way. If you want to attack the work, you really need to go after the legitimacy of the basic theories. Questioning the stories doesn't get you very far.

Look, if you're trying to write fables, you don't throw in dubious stastical data like the political scientist's study.  And you certainly don't make a fundamentally dishonest point about the easily verifable talent level on Rick Pitino's Kentucky basketball teams. Why lie and exaggerate if you're just "fable writing?"  Make no mistake, Gladwell writes essays, and some, like this regrettable example, are awful.