gladwell.com

Underdogs

My latest New Yorker piece, on how David beats Goliath, is here. 

I've been very pleased with the reaction. I did want to respond, though, to a number of comments that have been made about the parts of the piece dealing with Rick Pitino and college basketball. (Nothing is quite as fun as arguing about sports,)

Since most of the commenters make the same arguments, I'm going to pick a post  by Ben Mathis-Lilley, over at New York magazine's blog. He writes, in part:

The truth is that almost every team tries to make its opponents work for all 94 feet in some fashion, and not every underdog is born to run a full-court press. For example, take a team of mediocre players plus two pretty good athletes — one a tiny but quick guard, the other a big man who’s strong but slow on his feet. If that team ran a full-court press, the opposition would exploit the big guy by sending the player he guards sprinting down the floor on a fast break, while the small guard would be wasted guarding someone who probably doesn’t have possession, since the standard reaction to a press is to pass the ball around. A better strategy would be for the quick guard to pressure the opposition’s ball handler while the other players retreat, giving the big guy time to lurk near the basket and shot-block.

The first sentence--that almost every team makes its opponents work for all 94 feet--is, of course, nonsense. But the rest of the paragraph makes perfect sense. The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath, so it's surprising that more underdogs don't use them. The data on underdogs in war is quite compelling in this regard. But it's also true on the basketball court.  The press isn't perfect. But given its track record, surely it is under-utilized. Isn't that strange?

        The New York piece then goes on:

The most misleading part of Gladwell’s case concerns Rick Pitino, the Kentucky coach who was famously defeated on a last-second play by Duke in the 1992 NCAA tournament when he decided not to guard Grant Hill, who was inbounding the ball (ignoring the inbounder is a key component of the press).

Hmmm. Small point. Ignoring the inbounder is not a key component of the press. It is a key component of someversions of the press. Pitino also uses a version of the press that does guard the inbounder. (Also Pitino is no longer the coach at Kentucky. He's now the Louisville coach.) The piece then objects to my attempt to "shoehorn Pitino's teams into the underdog category" because Pitino's 1996 Kentucky team "featured featured a staggering nine players who would go on to play in the NBA." A number of others have pointed this out, and I'm still somewhat baffled by the criticism.

Pitino has been a college head coach since 1978 at four schools--Boston University, Providence College, Kentucky and the University of Louisville. At BU, he took over a team that had won 17 games in the two years before his arrival. He went 91-51 in five years, and took the team to the NCAA. At Providence, he took over a team that had gone 11-20 the year before. Two years later, he won 25 games and went to the Final Four with what may have been one of the most spectacularly untalented teams to have ever reached that level. And at Louisville he took his team to their first final four in 19 years in 2005. The star of that squad? Francisco Garcia. Ever heard of him? Exactly. Not to mention this year's Louisville squad which reached the Elite Eight with really only one NBA caliber player. You can also make an argument (and Bill Simmons at ESPN does) that Pitino did an awful lot with a very little while at the Boston Celtics, briefly, in 1998. Pitino's Kentucky experience is an anomaly. And by the way the nine players who got drafted into the NBA off that anomalous 1996 Kentucky squad consisted of eight journeymen and one, marginal star--Antoine Walker. Pitino has had a fraction of the talent that his contemporaries at Kansas, Carolina, Duke or Connecticut have had.

      

Brooks on Outliers

David Brooks wrote a very thoughtful column in the New York Times yesterday on "Outliers." Much of what he said was very flattering.

I have just two comments in response.

1. Brooks argues that I "slight the centrality of individual character and individual creativity" by focusing so much on the cultural and contextual determinants of success. Successful people, he says, must begin with two beliefs--"that the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so." I completely agree.  The chapter on lawyers, for example, is devoted to the idea of "meaningful work," which is just what Brooks is talking about here, the perception that there is a connection in our daily life between effort and reward. It's such that I think that the belief in meaningful work is socially constructed. Those highly successful children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who are the subject of that lawyers chapter were not successful because each, independently, happened to be endowed with the magical genetic trait of self-efficacy.  They were successful because their very fortunate cultural circumstances gave them that belief in meaningful work. Nurture here is driving nature, not the other way around.

2. Brooks suggests that Outliers represents a kind of social determinism. But that's an odd comment to make in the context of a column championing the role of nature over nurture. It's only nature that is unchangable and deterministic. Nuture, by definition, isn't. And the last half of Outliers is devoted to showing that when we confront our cultural legacies--whether it's in the cockpit or the classroom--we can make a big difference in how well we do our jobs. 

Teachers and Quarterbacks

My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing  NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem.  There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an enormous non-elite pool to fill that need.  So, the response has gone, it's apples and oranges.

Precisely! But of course non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless.  What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?

 What makes an idea thought-provoking, to my mind, is the extent to which we are forced to make an effort to assimilate apparently contradictory or at least antagonistic notions. Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has a wonderful book out on this very idea ("The Opposable Mind").  He argues that what distinguishes successful business leaders is their ability to reconcile apparently irreconcilable options.  So, for example, the genius of Izzy Sharpe, the founder of the Four Seasons chain, is that he was the first to understand that a hotelier doesn't have to choose between the advantages of a large hotel (breadth of services) and the advantages of a small hotel (intimacy). For years everyone assumed those were mutually exclusive categories. Sharpe realized that you can, in fact, do both. Martin's book made me think that there is value in pushing the envelope on comparisons.

All of this is a long way of saying that instead of resisting the implausibility of the pairing of NFL quarterbacks and teachers, it is actually more interesting to embrace it. And what happens when you do that? You discover that the psychological situation facing the gatekeeper in both cases is identical: that confronted with a prediction deficit, the human impulse is to tighten standards, when it fact it should be to loosen standards.

Second point:

One weakness of the piece, I think, is that I didn't spell out another of the parallels between good quarterbacks and good teachers. One of the obvious implications of the notion that the college experience does not predict professional quarterback success is that professional quarterbacking is a skill learned only in the pros. That is, what matters more than anything in predicting professional success is the quality of the learning environment that the quarterback is drafted into, not the quality of the experience he was drafted from.  (Think Matt Cassell's rather remarkable performance this year: surely that's a consequence of being drafted into one of the league's best learning cultures).

My brother, an elementary school principal, believes very strongly along these same lines: that effective mentoring of a new teacher can make an enormous difference in that person's ability to become a "star" teacher. But the problem, he argues, is that the process of mentorship is much too haphazard. As he says, "It's like training NFL quarterbacks by randomly sending them out to teams - some CFL teams, some Division III teams, some Division I College teams, some community teams, and a few to NFL teams." 

It strikes me that one very logical response to the quarterback problem is not just to lower entry standards, and be willing to make after-the-fact judgments of quality, but also to spend a great deal more time and attention on the issue of talent development. If Matt Cassell can thrive in the NFL, after essentially zero college quarterback experience, what exactly is New England doing right? And what can the rest of the league learn from them? Maybe that should be the subject of a follow-up piece.

Outliers update

In my new book "Outliers," I spend a chapter trying to explain why Asian schoolchildren perform so much better at mathematics than their Western counterparts. The principal source of data on international math achievement is what's called TIMS--which is a standardized test adminsitered to kids around the world every four years. At the time of writing, the results of the 2007 TIMS were not yet in. But now they are, and they reaffirm what I was trying to address in Outliers. The gap between the Japan, South Korean, Hong Kong, Tawian and Singapore--and the rest of the world--is enormous and growing. Here's the relevant paragraph from the TIMS executive summary:

Remarkable percentages of students in Asian countries reached the
Advanced International Benchmark for mathematics, representing
fluency on items involving the most complex topics and reasoning skills.
In particular, at the fourth grade, Singapore and Hong Kong SAR had
41 and 40 percent of their students, respectively, achieving at or above
the Advanced International Benchmark. At the eighth grade, Chinese
Taipei, Korea, and Singapore had 40 to 45 percent of their students
achieving at or above the Advanced International Benchmark. The
median percentage of students reaching this Benchmark was 5 percent
at the fourth grade and 2 percent at the eighth grade.

A more modest gap between Asian and the rest of the world could, I think, be safely explained with conventional arguments about differences in pedagogy, or school funding or some such. But 40 percent versus 5 percnet? Differences of this magnitude require more fundamental explanations, which is why I felt it necessary to make such a strong cultural/historical  claim in my book.

Outliers!

My new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success," is coming out on Tuesday, after long last.  I'm very happy with it, and I think anyone who liked Tipping Point or Blink will like this book too.  I'll be blogging more about it, in the near future.  In the meantime, there is a short Q and A describing the themes of Outliers from my website, here. And you can buy it here.

I also wanted to announce two of the dates on my book tour.

For those of you in England, I'll be giving two shows at the Lyceum Theater in Soho on Monday November 24th. The times are 5:45 and 8:30. Tickets are available here.  There are still some good ones left, but they are going fast, I'm told.

For those of you in Canada, on Monday December 1st, at 5:00, I'll be at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, for a conversation with Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Business.  Roger is, I think, one of the finest minds in the business world. This should be fun. Tickets are available here.

The Uses of Adversity

My latest New Yorker article on Sidney Weinberg and the benefits of outsider-ness is now up on my website here:  here

Since writing the piece, I've continued to think a fair amount about this idea of the advantages of disadvantages. If dyslexia can--under certain circumstances--be advantageous, what are other disadvantages that can have the same effect?

In the article, I mention, in passing, the question of class size, and the data on class size is really quite fascinating.  Time and time again studies fail to show any significant advantage to reducing the size of classes--except in the case of very poor children in the very earliest of grades.

This, of course, defies common sense. We know that teacher feedback is a big component in learning. So why wouldn't learning be enhanced by lower teacher: student ratios? One answer might bethat large classes are a disadvantage with advantages: that in coping with the difficulty of competing for teacher attention, kids learn something more important--namely self-reliance. This might also explain why the highest achieving schools--those in places like Japan and Korea--tend to have much larger classes than in the United States.

Late-Bloomers

My latest article, on the work of the economist David Galenson, is now up on the New Yorker website here.

Tall Tales

A number of people have asked about a story I told at the Moth about my early days in the newspaper business.

     The Moth is a weird and wonderful club in New York City founded a few years ago by George Green, who wanted to recreate the late-night story-telling sessions of his childhood in Georgia. Every few weeks, a bunch of people get together in a dark and boozy room somewhere in Manhattan and try and outdo each other.  I told a Moth story several years ago, and last month it was picked up by the NPR show This American Life. (You can find it  here)

     There is a disclaimer at the end of the This American Life broadcast, to the effect that the Moth is a place where "people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales." As I think should be obvious if you listen to it, my story definitely belongs to the "tall tale" category.  I hope you enjoy it.  But please do so with a rather large grain of salt. 

ei

War on Drugs, con't

Just to be clear: I'm not advocating that steriods be legalized. In fact, I think that's probably a terrible idea.  I'm simply puzzled. The professional sports establishment is in the midst of a major witchhunt against alleged users of performance enhancing drugs. But no one--so far as I can tell-- has articulated a coherent explanation for what should be banned and why.

"James," one of the commenters on the "Free Fernando Vina" post brought up the issue of Lasik eye surgery. That's a very good example.  It is perfectly legal for an athlete to undergo "performance enhancing" eye surgery, that moves him from, say, the 50th to the 95th percentile in sight. It is not legal for that same athlete to take "performance enhancing" hormones that move his testosterone from the 50th to the 95th percentile--even thought the additional advantage of the eye surgery may be greater than the additional advantage  conferred by the exogenous testosterone. Now, there may be a perfectly valid distinction between those two interventions. But what is it? Shouldn't it be spelled out before we drum Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame?

Similarly, it is perfectly legal for an athlete to get  painkillers after an injury, so he can continue playing (and, I would point out, risk further injury.) It is not legal for that athlete to take Human Growth Hormone, in order to speed his recovery from that same injury.  Again, why? What is the distinction? Why is it okay to play hurt but not okay to try and not play hurt? There may be a perfectly valid reason here as well.  But don't we need to spell out what it is?

I realize that the people running major league baseball and the NFL are not philosophers. But the intellectual sloppiness with which this current crusade has been conducted is appalling.

The War on Drugs

From the January 14, 2008 Sports Illustrated:

Page 36:  "Then, on a late touchdown run against Arkansas on Nov. 23 [LSU quarterback Matt Flynn] separated his throwing shoulder. Two painkilling injections allowed him to stay in the game."

Page 51: "In the moments before kickoff, some players listen to metal and some listen to rap. Some talk to God and some talk to themselves. Seattle Seahawks defensive end Patrick Kerney wraps a black graphite glove around his neck, wires it to the portable neurmuscular stimulator in his locker and sends small currents of electricity into his body. He literally energizes himself . . . When  Kerney goes home to his house in Bellevue Wash., he climbs into a hyperbaric chamber to infuse his body with oxygen. Then he falls asleep under silver-threaded "earthing" sheets plugged into an electrical outlet. . . "

It's such a relief "performance enhancing drugs" are banned from professional sports, isn't it? We have no idea what their long-term health consequences are, and there's a real possibility they offer users an "unfair" advantage.