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Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell Books

Journalist

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“We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child. If every coach is assumed to be a podophile, then no parent would ever let their child leave the house. And no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth even when that decision carries terrible risks because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise.”

TrustCoach
Book:Talking To Strangers: What We Don't Know About Strangers
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“Trocmé was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich, and Wyatt Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth. And the beauty of the disagreeable is that they do not make calculations like the rest of us. ... had nothing to lose ... warned that he was risking his career. He was heckled and abandoned by his peers... but he had been through worse. ... what was left was stubbornness and defiance. He didn't care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. ... The excess use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”

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Book:David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
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“On average the people watching the videos correctly identified the lairs 56% of the time. Other sociologist have tried similar versions of the same experiment, the average for all of them? 54%. Just about everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists even CIA officers running big spy networks. Everyone. Why? Tim Levine answer is called Truth-default theory.”

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Book:Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know
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“The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction… If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.”

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Author:Malcolm Gladwell
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“¿Vemos ahora las consecuencias del modo que hemos decidido concebir al éxito? Cuando lo personalizamos tan profundamente, omitimos ocasiones de elevar a otros a un peldaño superior. Hacemos las reglas que frustran los logros. Amortizamos a la gente antes de tiempo como fracasados. Sentimos demasiado respeto por los que tienen éxito y demasiado poco por los que no. Por encima de todo nos hemos vuelto demasiado pasivos. Pasamos por alto el papel tan grande que desempeñamos — y este "nosotros" significa la "sociedad"— a la hora de determinar quién lo consigue y quién no.”

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Book:Outliers: The Story of Success
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“[smart scientist (Climberg??)] and his team built an artificial intelligence system. They fed it the same information that prosecutors had given judges in those arraignment cases. Information such as the defendant's age and criminal record. They told the AI to go through those 550,000 cases and make its own list of 400,000 people to release. It was a bake-off - man vs machine... who's list committed the fewest crimes committed while out on bail and was most likely to show up for their trial date? The results weren't even close. The people on the computer's list were 25% less likely to commit a crime.. than the 400,000 people released by the judges of NY City.”

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Book:Talking To Strangers: What We Don't Know About Strangers
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“We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well,” says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. “I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.”

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Book:NOT A BOOK: Outliers the story of success and 7 habits of highly effective people personal workbook 3 books collection set
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“What Lempert is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about — how well its graduates do in the real world — minority students aren’t less qualified. They’re just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren’t as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they’re still above the threshold. They are smart enough. Knowledge of a law student’s test scores is of little help if you are faced with a classroom of clever law students.”

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Book:Outliers: The Story of Success
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“[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.”

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Book:Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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“If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.”

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Book:Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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“. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often.”

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Book:Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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“The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.”

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Book:Outliers: The Story of Success
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“La clase de errores que causan los accidentes de avión suelen ser invariablemente de trabajo en equipo y de comunicación. Un piloto sabe algo importante y por algún motivo no se lo dice al otro. Un piloto hace algo mal y el otro piloto no se percata del error. Hay que resolver una situación difícil dando una compleja serie de pasos, y por alguna razón los pilotos no logran coordinarse y olvidan uno de los pasos.”

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Book:Outliers: The Story of Success
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“I'm drawn again and again to obsessives. I like them. I like the idea that someone could push away all the concerns and details that make up everyday life and just zero in on one thing - the thing that fits the contours of his or her imagination. Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can't see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world's but also their own narrow interests. But I don't think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”

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Book:The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
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“Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture," once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. "Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear" (p.251).”

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Book:Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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“Marita doesn't need a brand-new school with acres of playing fields and gleaming facilities. She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with a PhD, or a bigger apartment. She doesn't need a hight IQ or a mind as quick as Chris Langan's. All those things would be nice, of course. But they miss the point. Marita just need a chance. And look at the chance she was given! Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work.”

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Book:Outliers: The Story of Success
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“We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It’s a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning.”

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Book:David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
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“In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.”

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Author:Malcolm Gladwell
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