And Now For Something That Isn't The Constitutional Crisis

In my latest effort to avoid having to actually do my goddamn Procedure reading, I read this article about the problem with Malcolm Gladwell. It's very interesting stuff and I think I basically agree with its broad point, though I don't have any independence expertise with which to judge it. I do have one thought to add, though: Gladwell apparently claims that many dyslexic people become very successful (incontrovertibly true) and that, in fact, these people may become successful because of their dyslexia. The obvious rejoinder to the former claim is that it omits any discussion of, you know, proportionality: are "successful" people, whatever that means, more or less dyslexic than people in general? If, say, 3% of the population and 1% of "successful" people are dyslexic, then yes, dyslexia is not a total bar to "success," but it seems to be making it a lot harder. (No comment offered on whether this is because dyslexic people genuinely lack the capacity to be "successful" or because society unjustly places additional burdens in their way should they attempt to "succeed.") But that's not my point, because I think there's an even stronger response to be made to the second part of the claim.

Of course any dyslexic people who become successful will have become successful because of their dyslexia. Or, slightly more precisely, of course the path any successful dyslexic took to achieve their success will have been influenced by their disorder. If I put a roadblock up on your way to some destination, and you are thereby forced to take an alternate route but nonetheless reach your destination, then you took a successful path and I forced you to take it. Or, to use a perhaps more accurate metaphor, if you're wandering around in the fog and the dark with no idea of where you're trying to go, and I put a big ol' wall in front of you, maybe even a wall of infinite length that forecloses an entire portion of the world to you, and your further wanderings deposit you somewhere that's a very good place to be, it is entirely true that you reached that good destination because I obstructed you. So if there are extremely successful people who are dyslexic, then with every single one of them you will be able to tell a story of how their dyslexia shaped their lives in a way that led them to their successes. Tautologically. And because it's a tautology, it's uninteresting except as a matter of biography, in which context it could well be fascinating, or, perhaps, in the therapeutic context, i.e. in trying to help a further individual dyslexic person work on having a "successful" life despite their troubles. The societally interesting questions then become, okay, how does dyslexia affect the odds of becoming "successful," if you want to, and sure, is there some social value in having some people be successful in the different way that successful dyslexic people are successful?

Those are interesting questions and I might have more to say about this topic, but it's 1:06 a.m. and I have 30 pages of reading for a class that starts in all of seven hours, fourteen minutes, so I should stop writing and go do that. Yeah...