Malcolm Gladwell
Article
Malcolm Gladwell is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Million Dollar Murray” by Malcolm Gladwell”; “Ericsson is most famous for being the source of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of practice to become an expert” meme”. It most often appears alongside Bay Area, Florida, North Carolina.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 29, 2022
- Last seen: June 27, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Bay Area (2 shared issues)
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- Florida (2 shared issues)
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- North Carolina (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- 10,000 hour rule (1 shared issues)
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- 2 Hour Learning, Inc (1 shared issues)
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- 2-hour Learning (1 shared issues)
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- A History Of Mankind (1 shared issues)
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- ACS (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Amplifier (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander Turok (1 shared issues)
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- Alice K (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I think that the canonical reference when talking about a data driven approach to the homeless problem should be "Million Dollar Murray" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell cites Dennis Culhane's research on homelessness that produced a surprising outcome: the most frequent period of homelessness is a single day. The second most frequent duration? Two days.
Take 10% off your time to run a mile Workshops in the afternoons are the “fun” part of school. They are the equivalent of the music, theater and art classes that fill in a traditional school schedule (just more focused, measurable and creative). The check charts both exist to fill in the gaps on important things that are missing from the academic program (like public speaking and typing) and to teach the students the importance of agency – there is no one standing over them with deadlines on the check chart. They just won’t move on to the next level with their friends if they don’t get everything on the list done. All of these elements are held together by the thing that the PR program does not mention – the thing that, when most parents hear about it, they recoil in horror: Incentives (aka, bribes) Part Four: How Alpha Works (Part 2): Incentives People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn. Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided). There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books. So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character. The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”. I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids). Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect. Tell a kid to read a book or show up on time and they know what they need to do to get the money. Tell them to get higher scores on tests and, while they have a rough idea how to do that (pay more attention in class, study longer and more efficiently), the actual things they need to do are not entirely clear and the inputs they put in (studying) are not directly tied to the outputs (test scores) – and the incentives have no impact. As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group. When we pay kids to take on new habits, the habits tend to stick after the incentives go away. Is this that different from incentivizing your kids to eat their vegetables and then rewarding them with dessert? The hope is that they will build the habit of eating vegetables and will eat them without external rewards when they are older and understand the value of the habit you have built for them as children. None of this should not be too surprising for people who have read Anders Ericsson’s work on building expertise. Ericsson is most famous for being the source of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of practice to become an expert” meme. Ericsson was not impressed by Gladwell’s simplification of his findings and he wrote an excellent book detailing what his findings really meant. That book describes the study Gladwell used to get to 10,000 hours. At the elite music school in Berlin, the Hochschule für Musik, Ericsson sorted students into three groups by ability: future soloists, future orchestra professionals, and future teachers. He found that the three groups did not differ systematically in most characteristics. As groups they had the same IQs, the same age of starting music, and the same quality and quantity of instruction. The only measurable difference he found between the groups was the number of lifetime hours they had committed to “deliberate practice”. From age eight onward the future soloists logged almost three times more practice hours per week than the future teachers. On average the soloists had clocked in 10,000 hours of practice by the time they started at their elite music college. That was where Gladwell got his 10,000 hour rule. (One of Ericsson’s problems with Gladwell’s simplification is that he saw nothing special about 10,000 hours. There was a significant range among the elite students – 10,000 was just the average; Also the elite students were still just ‘students’ and while they were on track to become world class, none of them were world class yet. Ericsson estimates that would take another ten years of practice putting most of their total practice time to achieve world class performance well over 20,000 hours) Ericsson’s next question was WHY did some students practice more than others? All of these kids wanted to be great musicians and have careers as musicians and all had dedicated large parts of their life to the craft, so why did some choose to practice more than others? His initial hypothesis is that some people just enjoyed practicing more than others. He dismissed the idea that some kids were just more talented than others, and replaced it with some kids, whether for genetic or environmental reasons, were just more “into practice” than others. But when he questioned the students he found that was not true at all. The future elite soloists of the music world all hated practicing. And so did everyone else. All of the musicians at the school did not like the process of practicing. They enjoyed playing. They enjoyed being good musicians. They just hated the process of practicing to get good. So why did they do it? Because they wanted to be great musicians and they knew that they needed to practice to become great musicians. According to Ericsson, the key to being great is deliberate practice. The key to deliberate practice is motivation. Ericsson dug further to figure out where the motivation came from and he found it grew over three stages: Parental and authority approval: Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don’t. He gives examples of mom saying “if you don’t practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor”.