Revenge of the Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

Twenty five years on after his seminal book The Tipping Point, post "Covid pandemic" and maybe just maybe looking for his next income stream Malcolm Gladwell returns with The Revenge of the Tipping Point. It is interesting in its own right, he is not reviewing his old material in a new light but rather bringing compelling insights focus. How much change is needed to change a system? The answer seems to be between a quarter and a third of a population (from opinion, voting patterns or contagion). Beware also the superspreaders that break mathematical models of the scientific experts as the under researched "superspreaders" exhibit transformational powers to the system. It is scary, spooly and seemingly uncontrollable [chaotic] stuff - which relegates everybody to "watchers" rather than "controllers" (see below, he will make you think about simple stuff in a deeper way):  

Malcolm Gladwell always gives you an interesting conceptual framework to rattle, he fills it with interesting nuggets (thought experiments and facts), not overpopulated and invites you to to give it a good shake. The noise is pleasing and generates new ways of seeing things. Outliers, Blink, Revenge of the Tipping Point read. "The Bomber Mafia" is on my wish list. Maybe then I will go back to the original Tipping Point or turn to "Talking to Strangers", "What the Dog Saw" or "David and Goliath". Nice to know there is plenty of reading out there still to be done. 

Note: I do hold small reservations over believing everything I read, as the famous Shackleton advert (but then he is no different to many others who have fallen into that same pothole of urban myth).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton#cite_note-FOOTNOTEKoehn201730-113

In December 1913, Shackleton published details of his new expedition, grandly titled the "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition". There is a legend that Shackleton posted an advertisement emphasising the hardship and danger of the planned voyage, so that he could better narrow down the selection of candidates for his expedition, but no record of any such advertisement has survived and its existence is considered doubtful.

The jury seems to be out on this!

Read to Some Interesting Books: Blink and Novocene

The first one was a holiday read, "thin slicing" a problem by intuition and good old Millennium Challenge - when is a wargame really an exercise (see below, a good read as it showed the potential of how to avoid making silly/needless mistakes):

The second was more more of a frightening listen (I used my Jabra headphone) to James Lovelock's scientific book aimed at the general reader (see below):

Frightening in that he is convinced that we can only but welcome our robotic (or rather cyborg) overlords and hope they treat us well as they realise we are necessary to keep Gaia in balance. Oh, spoiler alert for humanity the best we can hope for is to be treated as a 'loved pet'. Best enjoy my free will while I can and go buy some more model soldiers to paint.

Maybe I should go for a romance next?