Out liars

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest magazine article padded to book length, is yet another argument by anecdote. It blames an airline crash on cultural factors influencing the Colombian pilots, who were running out of fuel. The first officer, he says, was reluctant to overrule the captain, and both did not want to push back against brusque New Yorkers at air traffic control:

To [Sri Lankan pilot] Ratwatte, the silence in the cockpit made no sense… Ratwatte began to talk about what had happened to him that morning on the way over from Dubai. ‘We had this lady in the back… We reckon she was having a stroke. Seizing. Vomiting… She was an Indian lady whose daughter lives in the States. Her husband spoke… only Punjabi… He looked like he had just walked off a village in the Punjab, and they had no money… I was actually over Moscow when it happened, but I knew we couldn’t go to Moscow. I didn’t know what would happen to these people if we did. I said to the first officer, “You fly the plane. We have to go to Helsinki.”‘

The incident goes on in this vein. The pilot’s point is that to land heavy (without dumping fuel) in Helsinki required 20 minutes of nonstop calculation and chatter between all parties. While in the case of a hierarchical culture, like that of the Colombian crew, the voice recorder showed long periods of silence.

Gladwell recites another interesting fact about counting systems:

The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on. The difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children… Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence… It’s five-tens-nine. ‘The Asian system is transparent…’

English counting is most irregular in the numbers 11 through 19, and middle class Hindi speakers are far ahead of Americans in math regardless of Hindi’s similar irregularity (bees, thees, chalis). Don’t let hard facts ruin the fun of this book’s anecdotes. It would take a cold heart indeed not to feel a shiver reading transcripts of cockpit crews ignoring imminent crash warnings. Just don’t take these oversimplied arguments seriously.