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I don't care how many tabs you have open, I care what the tabs are.
0:02
If they're 42 porn tabs, you have a problem.
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If they're 42 really interesting tabs, go for it, go to 50.
0:15
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, as an author and journalist I do a lot of research, so today I'm here to answer your questions from Twitter.
0:17
This is research support, question number one at Super cyanization supersization: how reliable is Wikipedia really?
0:32
Well, it's not bad.
0:32
I mean, it's really interesting to compare Wikipedia entries to their counterpart in an encyclopedia.
0:32
So, Encyclopedia Britannica for example, they would go and find an expert in a field and have that expert write the entry.
0:32
With Wikipedia, you get a mixture of people who are real experts and people who just want to participate.
0:55
So when I look on my Wikipedia page, for example, there's a lot of, a lot of weird stuff on that page that isn't terribly true.
1:02
On the other hand, if you want to very quickly figure out what I've written and the things I'm interested in, my Wikipedia page is pretty good.
1:11
Wikipedia is really good if you lower your expectations.
1:13
It is a gateway to research.
1:16
So use Wikipedia to start your search and use it for clues about where to go next.
1:22
Add a rune grape, it asks, "How are libraries still going?"
1:27
"Who's going to a library in 2022?"
1:31
Yours truly goes to libraries.
1:31
That's because lots of things are only in a library.
1:37
The, the amount of stuff that you can get on the internet is a tiny fraction of the sum total of knowledge in the world.
1:43
Tons of books aren't online.
1:45
The person who asks is going to diss them, but I'm about to diss them.
1:48
They're clearly uninterested in anything that happened before, I don't know, the year 2000 or 2010.
1:55
Which, by the way, if you're trying to be a smart person in the world, is a crazy way to live your life.
1:59
What the internet is really good at is directed search.
2:03
Libraries are great for serendipitous search.
2:06
And I'm reading a book, and I'm, that's next to it on the shelf, or 10 books down on the shelf, it catches my eye, I pick it out, I flip through the index, I see something that's really useful.
2:17
That's library search.
2:20
Serendipitous search is how you come up with new ideas.
2:22
The other great thing about libraries is librarians.
2:26
A library has an actual set of experts who are there to help you out, whereas you know, who's helping you when you're messing around on Google at 2 AM?
2:38
At Nelly 101 asks, "Is it me, or did McDonald's fries taste better as kids?"
2:38
Nelly, it's not you, they absolutely did.
2:38
We did a podcast episode on this in Revisionist History, all about how McDonald's changed the formula, the recipe for their fries in the 1980s, in response to this totally bogus bit of research that suggested that the cooking oil they were using was somewhat bad for your heart.
2:38
As it turns out, it's not bad for your heart, but they moved away from, they used to use a kind of beef tallow, it was beef fat, and they moved to vegetable oil.
2:38
And actually the research suggests that vegetable oil is worse for you.
2:38
Not only do fries taste worse cooked in vegetable oil than the old way, but the fry itself is now probably worse for your heart than the old fry was.
2:38
At John Allpress 52 says, "Is the 10,000-hour rule real or make-believe?"
3:33
Well, now he's referring to an idea I wrote about in my book Outliers.
3:39
In looking at research in cognitively complex fields, what we find overwhelmingly is that people need about 10,000 hours of practice before they become experts.
3:56
10,000 hours is, you know, it's roughly 10 years.
3:56
So it takes 10 years to be good at something, it's basically what the rule says, if the thing is hard.
3:56
Chess players, it's very hard to find someone who can reach the level of Grand Master who hasn't been playing chess for 10 years.
3:56
Very hard to find someone who can be an elite point guard in the NBA who hasn't been playing point guard for 10 years.
3:56
I mean, this is famously a problem in the NBA in evaluating rookies.
3:56
You draft someone to play point guard and you say, "Oh, they're, they're a disappointment."
3:56
And the reason is it's too early, because that's the most demanding position on the court in basketball.
3:56
It's not make-believe, this is a real rule and the research suggests that, and a good average for how long you need to spend on that is about 10,000 hours.
3:56
At a kid named Sig asks, "The word research has become so watered down, like, do you really think a five-second Google search, the topic or point you're trying to make, and clicking the first three results that pop up is research?"
3:56
Couldn't agree with you more.
3:56
When you're looking for a definitive factual answer, Google's really good.
3:56
But when you get into more complicated questions, you need to do a little more research.
5:11
I think it's useful to be a little bit skeptical about the information you get on the internet, and I think the reason we don't do that all the time is that being skeptical is exhausting.
5:23
Checking is also slightly problematic, because the question is, well, how do you check it?
5:27
The thing you're using to check the original fact is itself a trustworthy source.
5:32
Writing to Riches asks, "What is the biggest predictor of success if you only choose one factor?"
5:40
"Social skills, IQ, etc."
5:40
Biggest predictor of success is probably having a rich parent.
5:46
I tried to answer this question in my book Outliers, and my answer was, it's a, it's, it's impossible to boil it down to one thing.
5:54
What we do now is that your IQ is probably a smaller, is a smaller role than you think, and your own efforts play a smaller role than you think.
6:04
It's probably more to do with luck and good fortune and having people around you help you.
6:09
Those are probably the things that make the biggest difference.
6:13
At Ross Showalter asks, "How do non-fiction writers know when to stop working on a piece?"
6:18
You never really know, you know when to stop when they take it away from you.
6:22
I actually think that's the wrong question.
6:24
The right question is most people, I think, work too little on the pieces.
6:27
All the serious writers I know do way, way, way, way, way, way more drafts and work much longer on their writing than other people.
6:36
If you think you should stop working on it, you probably need to do another draft.
6:44
At John Picciuto asks, "Why do smart people do dumb things?"
6:48
My podcast came up with a hypothesis, at least in the case of Wilt Chamberlain and many of his friends.
7:18
He didn't shoot free throws underhanded.
7:18
He did for one season, and in that one season, he was suddenly a fantastic free-throw shooter.
7:18
And then he went back to shooting free throws the old way, reverted to being a terrible free-throw shooter.
7:18
And by the way, it was the only flaw in Wilt Chamberlain's game.
7:18
Had he been able to shoot free throws well, he would have been hands down the greatest basketball player of all time.
7:18
And Wilt said he didn't want to look like an idiot.
7:18
People would rather not look like an idiot than become the greatest basketball player of all time.
7:31
Why do smart people do dumb things? Because they don't want to look like an idiot.
7:36
At Oxley teaches Ing asks, "What is bad science exactly?"
7:39
Oh man, there's many different definitions of bad science, but science committed by people who think they know the answer before they start is...
7:48
There's a guy named John Lott who writes about guns and crime, and he's the only person who claims that the more guns you have, the less crime you have.
8:01
But then you realize that John Lott is like ideologically committed to the Second Amendment, to gun rights, and you really have to ask yourself, is his research honest?
8:01
The gold standard for figuring out whether something's good or bad is, can it be replicated?
8:12
So if I do a study that says the experience of New York City over the last 25 years, and I draw the conclusion that more guns equals less crime, can someone else take a look at that same database and reach the same conclusion?
8:26
At honestly atheists, "How do you attempt to overcome confirmation bias?"
8:35
Confirmation bias is, it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to interpreting data.
8:38
A good example would be, you've decided that getting a COVID vaccine will cause all kinds of illness.
8:50
Well, every time you hear a story about somebody who had a bad side effect from getting their COVID shot, you say, "See, I told you, this thing's crazy, it's killing us."
8:50
Now, what you're neglecting is that 99.99999999% of people who get a COVID shot are not only totally fine and healthy, but actually prevent themselves from getting all kinds of diseases.
8:50
That's confirmation bias.
8:50
You selectively find information in the world to support your erroneous conclusion.
9:17
How prevalent is that example? How many times does it occur?
9:21
You can't just rely on your own personal anecdotal experience.
9:30
Anna Pinata asks, "How do you get yourself excited about writing your research paper when you've lost interest?"
9:31
If you dislike something or getting bored with something, you probably haven't done enough work on it.
9:42
In other words, boredom is an intermediate stage, it's a kind of plateau you get on after you've scraped the surface, but you've got to go beyond that, and everything, virtually everything is interesting if you dig deep and hard enough.
9:53
So my advice would be to keep going in that situation.
10:03
At Iza asks, "Why is country music so sad?"
10:03
"I'm crying."
10:03
Iza, funny you should ask, I did a podcast episode on this very question.
10:08
It was called The King of Tears.
10:17
In that episode, The King of Tears, a reference to a really brilliant bit of research that was about the specificity of song lyrics.
10:24
So it looked at all kinds of popular song lyrics from, you know, rock music, folk music, country music, and the question is how complex were the lyrics?
10:40
They make a specificity scale.
10:40
Rock music's on the far end of the non-specific end of the scale, and country music's on the far specific end of the scale.
10:40
The argument in King of Tears was that what moves us emotionally is specificity and complexity.
10:40
Olivier Talbot 27 asks, "How did writers research before the internet?"
10:40
Then all kinds of emojis of people.
10:40
Before the internet, we went to libraries and we called people up on the phone who knew things and asked them questions.
10:40
Both strategies I would wholeheartedly endorse for anyone who's interested in learning about the world in a profound way.
10:40
At Antithesis 1 asks, "What is an intelligence failure which is often cited as the cause of unwanted events?"
11:24
Well, the classic intelligence failure would be 9/11.
11:32
There was a famous study conducted by the Senate in the aftermath of 9/11 which said, "Look, all the clues were there, why didn't we, why didn't we pick up on them and prevent 9/11?"
11:32
This is intelligence failure.
11:41
Let's say we could find 10 pieces of intelligence that pointed directly to what Al-Qaeda was planning on 9/11.
11:51
They're buried in a mountain of a million different data points.
11:51
It's not an easy matter to find the 10 that matter out of a mountain of a million.
11:51
I would say, be suspicious of people who use the term intelligence failure after the fact.
11:51
At Another Panacea asks, "Has any psychologist been worse for the world than Philip Zimbardo?"
12:08
"Fake the Stanford Prison Experiment and help create the justifications for broken windows policing."
12:20
Well, at Another Panacea could not disagree with you more.
12:18
Zimbardo didn't fake the Stanford Prison Experiment.
12:22
This is the famous experiment where Zimbardo gathered together a bunch of volunteers and said to one group of them, "You're prison guards," to another group, "You're prisoners."
12:34
And he ran a simulation over the course of, I think, several days.
12:34
What he discovers is that the prison guards take it very seriously and end up doing things that they would never ordinarily do.
12:34
And he was trying to understand why ordinary Germans would have been capable of committing such terrible offenses during the Second World War.
12:34
This different prison experiment is controversial because it's complicated.
12:34
Did Zimbardo overstate his case? Did he draw conclusions he shouldn't have?
12:34
It's not faked, it's just difficult.
12:34
Second part of your question, broken windows policing, which was an idea that was first put forward by a very brilliant researcher called George Kelling.
12:34
That idea says that if you tolerate small acts of disorder, large acts of disorder will follow.
12:34
So it's why in the subway in New York they realized the first step in cleaning up the subway was in cracking down on people who jump the turnstiles.
12:34
You crack down on the small act and what that does is it sends a signal to everybody else.
13:33
Now you can take it to extremes and there's departments that did take it to extremes, but the idea itself is something that has been, I think, verified on many occasions in research.
13:44
At Doomed Hippo asks, "I have a research question looking into paranormal stuff and having a hard time."
13:52
"I'm mostly seeing blogs parroting the same people, legends say, and not getting firsthand reports of hauntings."
13:59
"How do I get to the actual primary sources of these stories?"
14:03
So my aunt would always say that the living room in her house in Jamaica was haunted.
14:08
Can I verify it?
14:08
Did I take a picture?
14:10
Did I write it up in a scientific journal?
14:12
No, it's the story we tell in our family.
14:14
I suspect that's where stories about ghosts are found, their stories told from one person to another, they're not written up in the literature and searchable on Google.
14:25
The problem you have at Doomed Hippo is that you're in a pretty kind of squishy area.
14:33
It's not like there are a ton of scientists at reputable universities who are doing case-controlled studies on paranormal sightings.
14:43
So the minute you start moving away from the mainstream, you are going to be reliant overwhelmingly on anecdotes.
14:50
Doing firsthand research yourself, probably the best approach.
14:54
Finding people who have seen ghosts and bring a tape recorder and putting in front of them and asking them about their experience.
15:03
Shoot me an email, I'll tell you my ghost story.
15:05
The question is from Natalie Is Blue and she asks, "Why do most wealthy people play golf?"
15:12
This is a reference to our Revisionist History episode which was called A Good Walk Spoiled, in the course of which I talk about a really fascinating study.
15:21
It's called a natural experiment when you can find data that's just out in the world.
15:24
Serious golfers register their rounds of golf on the U.S. whatever the U.S. Golf Association services.
15:33
And so this guy, this young brilliant economist, he had a database that allowed him to predict exactly how much golf CEOs of companies played.
15:42
There was a correlation between how well your company was doing and how much golf you played.
15:49
The more golf you played, the worse your company was doing.
15:51
To answer your question, Natalie, why do most wealthy people play golf?
15:55
Well, probably because it takes a lot of money to play golf, probably because they have a lot of time in their hands, but also because they're more concerned about their leisure time than running the companies that they're supposed to run.
16:07
At Everyone Cares asks, "Trying to figure out if it's normal that I have 42 tabs open at once on my laptop because I'm totally going to read research looking into this soon."
17:00
"How many tabs do you have open usually?"
17:00
I don't know, 10 to 15.
17:00
I actually aggressively close and open just because it stresses me out.
17:00
I know someone who thinks that a great interview question for somebody is, have the subject of the, the interviewee take out their laptop and show you how many tabs they have open on their browser.
17:00
And by looking at the things they're interested in, you can get a really good sense of what they're like.
17:00
So I guess I would say if they're 42 really interesting tabs about stuff that pops into your head, go for it, go to 50.
17:00
At Sprucey 1969 asks, "Is there a word that describes the action of digging out yet more sources to research rather than actually writing, other than procrastination?"
17:00
What you've described is, are going off on, getting, getting lost in tangents, which I don't know if that's a bad thing.
17:00
If you're enjoying yourself, why not?
17:00
So those are all the questions for today.
17:20
I thought there were some great questions.
17:22
A lot of you clearly have been reading some of my books and listening to some of Revisionist History podcasts.
17:30
Those of you who haven't have your work cut out for you.
17:30
Thanks for watching Research Support.