Connections

Last week, I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell which is an entertaining and thought provoking effort that purports to analyze who, how and why success is achieved. It best works as a reminder that achievements are not always the result of overwhelming merit, but rather a mixture of talent with healthy doses of luck and circumstance. For example, the correlation of professional hockey players in Canada to early year birthdates (the Canadian hockey school league cut-off date is January 1 and Gladwell’s thesis is that older kids are bigger/more mature and thus receive disproportionate benefits such as better opportunities to play and additional coaching), although not a huge revelation to parents of elementary school age children, is eye-opening as to the extent of the “birthday” effect on youth athletic league opportunities. As the book progresses, however, the insights and conclusions become more attenuated. I remain unconvinced that China’s rice-based economy fully explains the sweep of Chinese culture from ancient times to today. There are many times where I thought the book fell into the logical trap of ex post facto, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Books like Outliers, and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt fall into the recent wave of pop sociology/economics books, and are entertaining to read, but may do no better matching correlations to causation than the rest of us. We know that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but I would offer that causation does not necessarily mean correlation. By that I mean that many events are the result of a convergence of happenings and non-happenings that are very hard to discern and often unique. This is not to say that the effort to find underlying causes is not worth undertaking. Many of the advances of civilization have come from recognizing and exploiting patterns of causation. It’s just that the connections we find may not be the ones we expect.

All I'm saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.