I hate that this style is shoehorned into absolutely everything, though. I can barely stand to read most nonfiction books anymore, even highly regarded ones about subjects I'm interested in. The part of my brain that likes a good story is very different than the one that's ready to refine my model of the universe, and it's jarring to have Malcom Gladwell artificially stitching together unrelated events, people, and ideas in order to form his pet narrative. I guess he does it to cover the fact that he has absolutely no useful insights about the world and is just trying to give the reader the impression that they're getting smarter, but even people with meaningful things to say end up copying that style. I find myself neither learning anything nor being engaged in the story, because it's much more boring than an actual novel where the story is the point. I really just don't get why so much non-fiction is this way now.
Non-fiction is a vast universe and Malcom Gladwell is a famously superficial writer. The torrent of books getting to market each years is never high in average quality. But I never had a problem finding good factual content to read.
Has anyone attempted to analyze the NYT hardback and softback lists for superficiality, by year? As Po Bronson remarked, I fear we are getting superficial, but maybe even worse, we're (intentionally?) losing touch with any compass to objectively assess that. A lot of these titles feel like massaging people's egos to feel okay about doing bad or arbitrary things, while telling them how smart they are. Seems there's a growing market for that.
One example of massively overrated MBA-school schlock: "Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life" - Stuart Diamond (2012).
No, it's not accidental mediocrity, it's actual malice.
Stuart Diamond's book is stuffed with underwhelming anecdotes teaching people to be pushy and manipulative with people in low-wage, low-security service jobs [in the US], but moreover selling them that this is being a "master negotiator with elite MBA-school skillz", not just super-pushy, annoying, entitled, whiny. Like the 'cure' for empathy. The only thing I took from it was "Wow it must really suck to work a low-wage, low-security service job in the US these days". I used to think "emotional labor" was hyperbole, but this sort of schlock would change my mind. ("one of the world's leading experts on negotiation. His book, has sold more than 1 million copies, making it world's largest selling book on the subject since it was published in 2011."(!?))
This is much worse than merely the empty superficiality that Po Bronson warned about, which seems harmless by comparison.
>No, it's not accidental mediocrity, it's actual malice.
I agree it's there. But there's always been people willing to push out bad books for money. And there's also people putting as much, if not more, effort on quality content. I really don't think content is getting worse on average. There's a lot of fluctuation in the noise levels.
But maybe the signal to noise ratio is getting worse. I don't systematically analyze this. Just honestly don't think it's harder to find good books now then 10 or 20 years ago. I did move from a country and language with a fraction of the publication volume you can find in English, and to a country with many high quality physical bookstore that I trust for curation and discoverability of material so I'm biased there.
My point was not that authors like Stuart Diamond exist, but that a garbage book like his made it to the top of any bestseller list, let alone the NYT list, or was widely praised as some treatise on "negotiation", which it clearly wasn't, yet very few reviewers described it for what it actually was. Plus, the outright weird insinuation ("branding!") that this sort of stuff is elite MBA-school wisdom; it isn't, it's normalizing bad behavior, doesn't matter how many letters you have after your name.
Even old-school stuff like "How to Make Friends and Influence People" clearly implies that your behavior in interactions is not some consequence-free zone, the people/organizations on the receiving end of your influencing attempts have memories, and there are social limits on what behavior is too aggressive, greedy, pushy, unreasonable, manipulative.
As well as boosting this sort of manipulative garbage, the NYT also runs articles on customer-service nightmares and dead-end jobs (and (gasp) 'authenticity'), which seems to having their cake and eating it. Maybe they'll empathize with anything, if the price is right.
No, I pay a lot of attention to content which influences the behavior of 100 million people, especially in a destructive way, especially when that influencing attempt is in itself dishonest. And stop with the ad-hominems. It's not about inferring my or anybody's emotions.
It's about 100m people extolling that sort of book as some bible that it isn't.
There's something zeitgeisty to the book and the reception it got, which is why I keep referencing the Po Bronson speech. Diamond's book an apologia for an entire generation being unreasonable and manipulative, which is noteworthy, just as previous books that captured a zeitgeist.
What ad hominem? I'm not refuting anything you said. I just have no idea what is the point you're getting at. Do you want to crusade against bad books? I'm getting a lot of sentiment and no real argument or actionable advice in your comments.
'not actionable' and 'no real argument' seem weird things to say to a critique of a bad book, bad author, genre, bad reviews and bad bestseller list (NYT); each person can make their mind up without needing me or anyone to tell them what to do.
If I was in the business of telling people what to do I'd say "Avoid these things, also learn telltale signs of superficial reviews and groupthink".
On a deeper level I suggested it's worth considering what led to Diamond ever being lauded as a phony expert on negotiation (or, if you think it's self-evident that the NYT is not worth paying attention to and blurbs and Amazon reviews are shilled, then I'd appreciate where you find better book recommendations, other than word-of-mouth.)
> Do you want to crusade against bad books?
I don't see that calling a bad book and author bad constitutes crusading; that seems like twisting a straightforward discussion. Instead of trying to impute motives, I think you're just saying "it seems to me futile to object to superficiality, just ignore it", is that right? (Conversely, do you want to crusade against HN posts which you deem to be non-actionable? Presumably you don't either.)
I did also nod towards a wider ongoing discussion about superficiality vs authenticity as pops up in Po Bronson, Chuck Palahniuk, HN [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=superficial], Susan Cain, Haemin Sunim, Viktor Frankl... that took me a couple of sentences, still not a crusade.
