What The Dog Saw - Part 2

  

Amazon - What the Dog Saw

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My summary of Malcolm Gladwell's book What The Dog Saw is being done in three parts over three days.  Here is my write up of the second part of his book.

Part Two

The seventh chapter deals with the now defunct energy company, Enron.  It details how almost all of the info needed to to know it was vulnerable financially were in its quarterly filings but there was just lots and lots of minutia to sift through.  It was hidden in plane site.

The eighth chapter is called  Million - Dollar Murray.  Many things in behavioral science obey a Gaussian Distribution or bell curve.  For example in first year psych most students will be fairly near the average with less near the extremes, zero and perfect.  This chapter deals with behavior   where the outliers might still might be extreme but cause most of the problems and Gladwell calls this Power Law distribution.  He uses examples of homelessness.  Of all the homeless people in Reno only a handful are in the hospital so much (due to severe inebriation) that their public funded yearly hospital bill is close to 100k.  This is staggering considering this is a 15 year old book.  He suggests that just helping out these chronics would save the tax payers millions.  He uses another example of car emissions in Denver where a small percentage of cars produce most of the toxic emissions yet all older cars are subject to testing.  Again just going after the outliers with technology would solve the problem.   He also talks about this with the policing issues with the LAPD.  A great chapter.  “ power law solutions have a little appeal to the right, because they have all special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment and have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggest the cold number crunching of Chicago school cost benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely  compensate for such discomfort.”

The ninth chapter is called the picture problem.  It had much to do with WW 2 photo recon, the Gulf War Satellite recon and mammogram and mammography.

The tenth chapter is called Something Borrowed and deals with plagiarism and intellectual property rights.  A play on Broadway actually used some of Gladwell’s work and he was not accredited with it.  There is mention of music such as  Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and the guitar lick from Boston’s More Than a Feeling.

The eleventh chapter dealt with intelligence reform such as after 9/11 or other bombings .  In retrospect if you just look at selected evidence it is easy to say why couldn’t intelligence agencies just connect the dots but it is never that easy as there is always so much noise.

The twelfth chapter is  called The Art of Failure.  It deals with the difference between choking and panicking.  It concludes with Greg Norman’s epic choke to Nick Faldo at the 96 Masters.

Blowup is the thirteenth chapter and mostly deals with the Challenger explosion of 1986 and a bit of the Three Mile Island near nuclear meltdown of 1979.  He brings up that “ under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organization safer in fact don’t. Why? Because human beings have fundamental tendency to compensate for less risk in one area by taking greater risk in another.”  He gives as examples that more people get hit by cars crossing the street at cross walks than not because we let down our guard there.  Similarly when childproof lids were put on medicine bottles, it lead to increased child poisoning because people became less vigilant about keeping pill bottles out of the reach of kids.