Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Little, Brown and Company, 2005, p. 177.
Bush had advised FDR to go ahead with the research and development program to try and develop an atomic bomb. He was the only Government Official who Roosevelt discussed the idea with. At the time, Bush as a government official supervised and directed many thousands of scientists, and was one of just a few scientists who monitored and advised on the Manhattan Project to develop the Bomb. Here he is one of the first people to notice, understand and articulate the dilemma of specialization in science. To the degree it was a problem in 1945, it became a geometrically greater problem 65 years later satellites were capturing more high resolution of the universe every week than all the astronomers in the world could examine in a year. Ironically, Bush called for a type of precursor to the Internet to cope with this problem which the Internet helped with. Using computers to observe and analyze the many images helped much but all of science became weighed down with this problem of specialization and the explosion of knowledge.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell CM is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published six books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); and Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
