Daniel Goleman

[gusl]

via patrissimo
This is a very harsh review of Daniel Goleman (the Emotional Intelligence guy)'s writings, including "how he misled the public". I never suspected this, but I'm leaning towards agreeing with it.

Apparently, he disses nerds a lot. Some have called "Emotional Intelligence" "Revenge of the jocks".

(The author of the critic has also written about emotional honesty and emotional literacy.

See also Salon's piece.

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I read Emotional Intelligence a little over a decade ago, and at the time it seemed like an epiphany, but I think it was more just me realizing for the first time "oh! IQ isn't the ONLY thing that matters for getting ahead. Maybe I should learn some social skills and empathy."

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it was made up. Speaking of which, have you seen the Penn and Teller Bullshit episode where they make fun of Men Are From Mars, Women are from Venus? One of the things I never realized, when my Mom first started raving about it, was that the guy got his "PhD" from one of those non-accreditted online universities just so he could put "John Gray, PhD" on the front of the book. No doubt, this helped sell a lot of copies.

avoid the "PhD"s

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

MR on counter-signalling

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Yes, popular books in the self-help genre tend to focus on giving a simple overall message, which may be positive... and they often do this by repeating their points over and over again.

The problem arises when the case at hand is more complex, or when the reader is the questioning type.

Btw, I once found a blatant probabilistic fallacy in Hallowell & Ratey's ADD book: it was a simple and direct contradiction of Bayes's rule, something like "people who have A are more likely to have B; but people who have B are no more likely than the average person to have A."