The Charlatan

Dear Malcolm Gladwell,

What you are doing and have done is bad enough. But the catastrophic consequences of what you are about to do? I don't think even you can imagine.

There are times in a man's life when his persona gains leverage over his person, when the hype engulfs the man. You're not yet a demagogue, but soon you will be. And you will become the leader of an egalitarian movement that, by the Law of Unintended Consequences, secures the power of a totalitarian regime.

The Tipping Point was a nice debut for you. It got your name out there. The phrase is part of today's American culture. Never mind that the fact that it's hogwash social science, Black Magic coated in sugary language. Your thoughts are so compellingly uttered as to render them dangerous. It's a sad choice you made not to be a novelist. I think you could have been one of the all-time greats.

And Blink? To my mind, it's the most irresponsible book of the 21st century. And I can say that having read or read about all the books up to the Nuclear holocaust of 2029. Ain't no more books being written where I came from. Blink told all the W's out there to go with their instincts. It suggested first thought, best thought, no more thoughts, that the mind is smarter than the methods we created to vet our instincts. Blink was a step back in the evolution of human thought. Anything you wrote after Tipping Point was going to be front and center in the book world. And you chose to suggest that we make decisions in the blink of an eye?

Forget about Outliers. Now you're just mailing it in. Soon, you'll get bored of this social science and yearn to be a national leader. You won't think you're pursuing demagoguery, but as your latest article about the full-court press proves, you've lost all sense of reality. How can you possibly state with any seriousness that a full-court press moves an underdog's chance of winning from 0% to 50%? That statement betrays a gross lack of understanding of both basketball and statistics.

The Princeton teams of the 1990s proved how underdogs win: minimize possessions, which effects a smaller sample size, allowing for more randomness. Try to get open threes, pack it on defense in an effort to get the other team to shoot outside shots instead of pounding it inside. The Roy Williams philosophy is a direct response to that. He realized that the favorite needs to run, run, run in order to increase the sample size of possessions, allowing for less randomness. And running nets you more easy shots like dunks, layups, and wide-open threes. As much as the Princeton offense is a way to get open shots in the halfcourt, the North Carolina offense is a way to a get open shots without letting the D set up in the halfcourt. A fullcourt game benefits the favorite; a halfcourt game benefits the underdog. Why, beyond the statistics? The favorite, in basketball, is generally the more athletic team. And you can't full-court press a team that's more athletic than you. No matter what Malcolm Gladwell says.

What you do, Malcolm, gets worse and worse. Stop now, when all you've done is tell a few lies, incite a few ignoramuses, and insult the game of basketball.