VCP-410

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 9L0-827
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.

May 13, 2

David Brooks wrote a very thoughtful column in the New 9L0-827 Dump
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.
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 9L0-827 Exam
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 9L0-827 Braindump 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 standa

found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed 9L0-624
him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by 9L0-624 Dump

someone who runs a pre-employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate—as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long)—the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called “Niners Nation.” I have enormous respect for Professor Pinker, and his description of me as “minor genius” made even my mother blush. But maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks, we should agree that our differences owe less 9L0-624 Exam
to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.
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 9L0-624 Braindump
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:

than they currently are. The New England Patriots clearly have taken some of Thaler’s lessons to heart, for example. There has also been a real effort by the folks over at Pro Football Outsiders to come up with a more useful algorithm for making quarterback selections. David Lewin’s “career forecast” zeroes in on career college starts 9L0-623 Dump
and career college completion percentage as the best predictors of professional performance. I took the position in my essay “Most Likely to Succeed” that I didn’t think that quarterbacking (as opposed to other positions on the field) was predictable in this sense—that there is so much noise in the data, and so much variability between the college and professional games—that attempts at rationalizing draft day decisions have real limits. I’m still of that inclination. I’m willing to be convinced, though. I’d love to see more statistically-minded people weigh in on the Lewin analysis, and I’d also like to have a better handle over how the recent innovations in college offenses—particularly the use of ever more aggressive spread formations—affects the accuracy of that algorithm.

November 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (49)
Pinker on “What the Dog Saw.”

Steven Pinker reviewed my new book “What the Dog Saw,” in 9L0-623 Exam
the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday. I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do want to make one small observation about his comments.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze forty years of National 9L0-623 Braindump
Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they

its weakest teams by giving them the highest draft picks—but those picks are actually not the most valuable picks in the draft.

It is important to note here that we are talking about relative value. Personnel decisions in the NFL have clear opportunity costs: if you pay $15 million for a quarterback who only gives you $10 million of value, then you hve $5 million less to pay for a good linebacker. As they write: “To be clear, the player taken with the first pick does 9L0-062 Exam

have the highest expected performance . . . but he also has the highest salary, and in terms of performance per dollar, is less valuable than players taken in the second round.”

What Massey and Thaler are saying, in essence, is that NFL general managers are not rational decision-makers. That’s why I think its so useful in this particular discussion. Those who believe that draft position is a good predictor of quarterback performance are essentially voting for the good judgment of the people who make draft decisions. And what Berri and Simmons in particular—and Massey and Thaler in general—remind us is that that kind of blind faith in the likes of Matt Millen and Al Davis simply isn’t justified. And, by the way, why should that fallibility come as a surprise? We’ve known for a long time that it is not easy to making decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Here is Massey and Thaler from their conclusion:

Numerous studies find, for example, that physicians, among the most 9L0-062
educated professionals in our society, make diagnoses that display overconfidence and violate Bayes’ rule. The point, of course, is that physicians are experts at medicine, not necessarily probabilistic reasoning. And it should not be surprising that when faced with difficult problems, such as inferring the probability that a patient has cancer from a given test, physicians will be prone to the same types of errors that subjects display in the laboratory. Such findings reveal only that physicians are human.

Our modest claim in this paper is that the owners and managers of National Football League teams are also human, and that market forces have not been strong enough to overcome these human failings. The task of picking players, as we have described here, is an extremely difficult one . . . Teams must first make predictions about the future performance of (frequently) immature young men. Then they must make judgments about their own abilities: how much confidence should the team have in its forecasting skills? As we detailed in section 2, human nature conspires to make it extremely difficult to avoid overconfidence in this task.

This brings up the second question. Is it possible to ever 9L0-623
accurately predict which college quarterbacks will succeed in the pros? Both the Thaler analysis and the Berri analysis hold out the real possibility that teams can be a lot smarter

to argue against interventions to boost academic performance of minorities), J. Philippe Rushton (who, since 2002, has been the president of the Pioneer Fund, and who has argued that the size of what he terms the “Negroid brain” is inversely related to that of the Negroid penis); Rushton’s colleague Douglas Jackson (best known for arguing that men are significantly more intelligent than woman), and Seymour Itzkoff (a eugenicist who holds that blacks and whites have such distinct evolutionary histories as to belong to different subspecies).

Fifth, the APA’s own report on the subject,“Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” which Pinker suggests is in sympathy with his position, was largely directed against IQ fundamentalism. For example, it 9L0-008 Braindump
noted that IQ results correlated well with total years of education—in part because high scorers receive encouragement, and are placed in “college preparatory” classes where their peers provide encouragement, too. The amount of education someone receives then itself has an effect on social status. (”In summary, intelligence test scores predict a wide range of social outcomes with varying degrees of success. Correlations are highest for educational achievement, where they account for about a quarter of the variance.”) The paper points out that one reason intelligence scores predict occupational level is that “admission to many professions depends on test scores in the first place,” and also explores the evidence that “workplaces may affect the intelligence of those who work in them.” It delves into the Flynn effect, and the various possible explanations for it; and suggests that what little evidence is available “fails to support the genetic hypothesis” for the black/white differential in psychometric scores.

I don’t mean to suggest that Professor Pinker agrees with the more eccentric positions of the some of the 52 signatories. (Though the Pioneer Fund website does describe one of his books as a “must read”; the New Yorker, where I work, was less generous). The fact that ideas are sometimes supported by people with unsavory connections does not make them invalid. An ice floe is not necessarily a bad place to be. It’s just that if you are plainly floating on one, it doesn’t make much 9L0-062
sense to insist that you are standing on solid ground. A few more thoughts on quarterbacks:

There are two separate issues with respect to quarterbacks. The first is whether, historically, NFL teams have done a good job of predicting which college quarterbacks will succeed in the pros. Dave Berri and Rob Simmons’ paper in the Journal of Productivity Analysis (that I relied on in the essay “Most Likely to Succeed” in my new book “What The Dog Saw”) proves pretty convincingly, I think, that the answer is no. One of the best parts of that paper is how Berri and Simmons demonstrate how much NFL teams tend to irrationally over-weight “combine” variables like speed, height and Wonderlic score.

There’s a second wonderful paper on this general subject by Cade Massey and Richard Thaler—Thaler being, of course, one of the leading lights in behavioral economics—called “The Loser’s Curse.” The argument of the Thaler-Massey paper goes something like this (and I encourage anyone who is interested in sports to read the whole thing, because I can’t do it justice here). By looking at the trades that NFL teams make, we can estimate the “market value” of a draft pick. And what we find is that teams place a very high value on high first round picks. The first pick in the draft, they write, has historically been valued as much as “the 10th and 11th picks combined, and as much as the sum of the last four picks in the first round.” Then Thaler and Massey 9L0-062 Dump
calculate the true value of draft picks, using what they call “surplus value.” The key here is that all NFL teams operate under a strict salary cap. So a player’s real worth to a team is the extent to which his performance exceeds the average performance of someone making his salary. And what do they find? That market value and surplus value are radically out of sync: that teams irrationally over-weight the importance of high first round picks. In fact, according to their analysis, the most useful draft picks are in the second round, not the first: that’s where surplus values tend to be highest. Hence the title of the paper: “The Loser’s Curse.” The NFL rewards

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions 9L0-008
were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association. . .

A few things here are worth mentioning:

First, the editorial in question made a number of other arguments that, I think, most observers would agree fall on one end of the nature-nurture continuum: that all IQ tests measure the same thing, that heredity is more important than environment in determining it, that group differences are relatively unaffected by schooling or socioeconomic factors. It also said that the IQs of different races cluster at different points, with the average IQ of blacks falling about a standard deviation lower than that of whites, and that these differences show no sign of converging over time.

Second, two thirds of the editorial board of the journal Intelligence declined to sign the statement.

Third, the statement originally appeared on the op-ed page of 9L0-008 Dump
the Wall Street Journal in 1994, explicitly in defense of “The Bell Curve,” a book whose supporters are typically quite happy to call one of the most controversial books of the past 25 years.

Fourth, fifteen of 52 signatories to the Wall Street Journal statement have had their research supported by the Pioneer Fund. For those who have not heard about the Pioneer Fund, here is a brief description of its history from “The Pioneer Fund: Bankrolling the Professors of Hate,” by the historian Adam Miller:

In 1937 the Pioneer Fund was founded by Wicklife Draper, whose New England textile fortune started the fund’s endowment and helps finance it today. Harry Laughlin, the first president of the fund, was a well-known eugenicist who in 1924 was instrumental in pushing through legislation blocking U.S. Entry to Jews fleeing pograms in Russia. Before Congress he testified that IQ data proved that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were born feeble-minded and therefore were a threat to the nation’s economy and genetic makeup. Laughlin subsequently lobbied to keep those barriers in place, successfully cutting off sanctuary for Jews seeking refuge from the Third Reich.

In 1922, Laughlin also wrote the Model Eugenical Sterilization 9L0-008 Exam
Law which was adopted in one form or another by 30 states and resulted in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the United States.

Among the fifteen Pioneer Fund-sponsored signatories were Arthur R. Jensen (who has cited the heritability of IQ

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