> It troubles me that the empirical truth of so many issues is
> conflated with their political utility. As a trivial example,
> the thesis of Outliers about the 10,000 hour rule could be
> substantially true and at the same time it could be that he
> or others may use that fact to support the status quo.
I wasn't saying that the 10,000 Hour Rule supported (or doesn't) the status quo; I was saying that the examples of actual outliers in the book (again: the 10,000 Hour Rule doesn't say anything about outliers, and doesn't belong in the book at all!) like Bill Gates or Robert Oppenheimer tends not to support the status quo, because the status quo (in this case) is that hard work will make you successful -- or as Joanna said, Bill Gates works 100,000 times harder than you.
Bill Gates is not an example of this status quo, and Gladwell actually makes this point. Poorly.
See how awful the book is? :-)
> For that matter, we can say to some extent what factors
> go into being hit by lightning.
And yet: it isn't significantly meaningful to do so.
Despite your conclusion's "truth value":
> How not to be a lightning outlier: 1. Don't live in a region
> typified by frequent electrical storms. 2. Don't live in a flat
> area with few tall buildings 3. Don't work outdoors on a farm
> your whole life.
... this is meaningless advice. You may follow it and still get hit; you may not follow it and get hit. Or not. Your advice is statistically independent of the outcome of getting hit by lightning!
Getting hit by lightning isn't an important statistical question, because you can't significantly alter your odds one way or another -- because statistically it's an outlier: it cannot be adequately (or truthfully) explained by statistics. For some large numbers of standard deviations, it doesn't actually ever happen. Something like 500 people per year get hit in the US; that's far too small of a number to say anything meaningful about getting hit, let alone the related (but different) question of how not to get hit.
/jordan