Download File Firmware and Flashtool plus Video Tutorial compressed:
do not forget there are some additional tips from me:
How To Flashing hitech amaze s411
prasad setty: goodafternoon everyone. welcome to our talks atgoogle session today. we are very fortunate tohave a guest amidst us who doesn't needany introduction. seriously, how many peopleneed an introduction to malcolm gladwell? [laughter] prasad setty: malcolm wasthe bestselling author of "the tipping point,""blink," "outliers," et cetera.
he's received many honors. but i think what he'sprobably proudest of having accomplished in hislife must be the fact that he was our very first authorsat speaker way back in 2006. and so that has startedauthor's tradition where we now have had morethan 1,000 speakers come over to google and sharewith us their ideas. malcolm has recentlywritten a new book called "david and goliath."
and that is what we'llbe talking about today. the format for this,as you can guess, is more of a fireside chat. i have a set of questions thatmany colleagues have shared with me, things that they'dbe interested in hearing malcolm's perspectives on. but we'll certainly open it upfor a q&a with all of you folks too. and so there are mikes.
and when it's time, i'll askyou to line up out there. and then we do havecertainly books to pass around of"david and goliath." so let's give a very warm roundof welcome to malcolm gladwell. [applause] prasad setty: malcolm,just to kick this off, what would you like totell us about this new book and why you chose to write it? malcolm gladwell: well,it's a book called
"david and goliath." and it's aboutunderdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. it's about a number of things. but it's principally aboutasymmetrical conflicts and the strategies that areavailable to the weaker side. and then sort ofsecondarily it's about the accuracy of ourassumptions about advantages and the nature of advantagesand disadvantages.
so is our perception in anasymmetrical conflict of one side is the favorite and theother side as the underdog accurate? or is it an illusion basedon our own faulty assumptions about the nature of advantage? and then the thirdargument in the book has to do withwhether adversity is a more useful way of learningcertain kinds of lessons than conditionswithout constraint.
so it's called"david and goliath" because the storyof david and goliath is in fact aperfect illustration of this very thing. david's choice ofweapon, the sling, is actually an incrediblydevastating weapon. you place a rockin a leather pouch, and you swing it aroundat roughly six or seven revolutions per second.
you release one of the chords. the rock goes forwardat speeds, depending on the weight ofthe rock, speeds of probably 30meters per second. the stopping power of a typicalprojectile launched in that way is the equivalent ofa 45 caliber handgun. and the accuracy of peoplein those years with one of these thingswas extraordinary. we know from primitivetries that somebody
with a couple ofyears of experience could hit thecenter of that clock very easily fromwhere i'm standing. so david up against goliathhas superior technology. routinely slingersdefeated heavy infantry, which is what goliath is,in combat in ancient times. in fact, ancientarmy's had slingers on their kind of payrollfor that precise purpose. the minute hetakes out the sling
and it changes the rules ofcombat, he is the favorite. he's not going to lose, right? there's only goliath,who's lumbering. and then the otherfascinating about that story is that goliath-- there'sbeen all this speculation in the medicalliterature about what's going on with goliathbecause there's all these weird things he does. he moves very slowly.
he's led on to the valleyfloor by an attendant. and the thinking is that hehas what's called acromegaly, which is the conditioncaused by a benign tumor on your pituitary glandthat causes overproduction of human growth hormone. he's tall. he's a giant. giants are often-- you know,andre the giant had acromegaly. we think abrahamlincoln had acromegaly.
when people are unusually tall,that's one of the explanations. and acromegalyhas a side effect, which is that it compressesthe optic nerves. and people with acromegaly oftenhave severe vision problems. goliath is probably halfblind, in other words. so a guy who'shalf blind goes up against another guy with anincredibly lethal weapon, accurate to withina hair's breath from 50 yards away and with thestopping power of 45 pistol.
and yet for 3,000years we've insisted that guy is an underdog. it's insane, right? it's the most irrationalreading of the allocation of advantages anddisadvantages in that conflict. so the question is if weare so profoundly irrational in the way we have read therelative strengths of the two parties in that mostfamous of conflicts, how many othersituations do we misread?
and that's whatthe book's about. and i think the answer is lots. prasad setty: and youdo talk about quite a few real underdogsin the book as well. and one of the examples youwere mentioning at lunch today was about this girl'sbasketball team. tell us about that andhow that was shaped. malcolm gladwell: well thisis one of the reasons i got started writing the book is iran into a guy who some of you
may know, the guy who foundedtibco, vivek ranadive. i met him at a conference anddidn't realize who he was. weirdly, by the way, ihad another experience in this exact same thing wherei met someone at a conference, did not realize whothey were, and just had a conversation withsports as a result. the first person i didthis with was larry page. i met him yearsago, and i thought he was just a graduate student.
and i had no idea. and so i was like, wheredid you got to school? he's like, oh,i'm from michigan. so we just talked aboutmichigan state basketball for about 45 minutes. and then afterwards,people were like, do you know who youwere talking to? i had no clue. anyway, i did the samething with this guy, vivek.
so he startedtelling me about how he coached his 12-year-olddaughter's basketball team. and because he's indian, hehad no clue about basketball. so he goes to-- i mean-- prasad setty: ican relate to that. malcolm gladwell: ok. good. just checking. there was no naturalreason to assume
he would know a lotabout basketball. prasad setty: underdogs. malcolm gladwell:that's right, exactly. although, only an india, acountry of a billion people, could claim to be an underdog. so vivek goes and studies-- inhis kind of software engineer kind of way-- goes tostudy basketball games and becomes convinced thatamericans are completely irrational in the waythey play basketball.
because he doesn'tunderstand why, if you are the weakerparty in a game, you don't do the fullcourt press all the time. because you're going tolose otherwise, right? and by not playingthe full court press, you are allowing your opponentto do precisely the thing that your opponentexcels at, which is to pass and dribble andexecute choreographed plays. why would you give themthe easiest possible route
to doing the thing thatmakes them better than you? so he says your onlyhope is to slow them down and to defeat them at the thingsthey're not expert at, ie, play the full court press. if it fails, so what? you're going to lose anyway. but at least you'veraised your chances of losing from 95% tosomething less than 95%. this is relevant to him becausehis daughter's team is utterly
without any talent whatsoever. these are the very, very,very skinny, somewhat nerdy daughters of programmersfrom silicon valley. malcolm gladwell:so he does this. and his strategyis we're not going to learn how to shoot,dribble, or pass. we're not even going to practiceany kind of offensive plays. what you're goingto do is i'm going to get you in really,really good shape.
and i'm going to teach you todo this for the entire game. and what happens is that ifyou do this for the entire game in a basketball game madeup of 12-year-old girls, the other team will not advancethe ball past mid court. and so vivek'steam starts to win by scores like eight, nothing. malcolm gladwell:and they advance to the national championships. it's such a hilarious story.
and, of course, theopponents are so flummoxed by this, first ofall, and then outraged because the thing that vivekis playing with his girls is not actuallybasketball, right? if you don't dribble,pass, or shoot, and have no intention of sodoing, and if the score at the end of the game issomething like six, nothing, that's not basketball. that's another sport.
and so they throwchairs on the court. they challenge him to fistfights in the parking lot. they scream at the refs. and he is sort ofmassively different. to him this is more ofthe strange idiosyncrasies of the americansporting personality. and that is a lovelyillustration of my very point because why is he compelledto follow this strategy? because he's got nothing, right?
he's got bupkis. his girls are incapable ofplaying the game of basketball, right? so what does that do? it spurs him to find acompletely alternate strategy that's far more successful. and this is, of course, thegreat story of innovation, that nothing actsts a greater spur to innovation then theabsence of advantage.
so if that's the case,there must be situations where it is not advantageousto have advantages, right? the only situationwhere he's better off is if his girls arereally talented. so there's a seriesof conditions. you could have no talent,you can have massive talent, and you can beanywhere in the middle. the only situationwhere he could also have reached thenational championship
is in the 99th ninthpercentile condition where his team ismassively talented. but had he been atanything other-- so he's in the 1% condition. that's advantageousbecause that forces you to play thefull court press. the 99th percentilecondition is advantageous. but the two through98 is not advantageous because you have noincentive from to two to 98
to try anything new. your instinct is justto play the game the way the game is supposedto be played. so had his girls beeneven a little bit better, they would've been worse off. prasad setty: soyou're saying we should be as bad as we can be? malcolm gladwell:well, i'm saying there are situations where beingbad is highly advantageous.
and i don't go intothis in the book, but if you've read"innovator's dilemma," that's what "innovator's dilemma"is all about, right? the disruptiveoutsider is the one who is incapable of meetingthe marketplace needs as the market istraditionally defined. they can't do it. so what they do they do? they try a completelynew half-assed approach,
which in the beginning,doesn't work. but by that very nature oftrying something completely outside themainstream, they end up upending the--were they any good, they would never beforced to do that. so it's the samekind of principle. prasad setty: one ofthe things that you talk about in thebook which hinders your chance ofimproving your success
is something that you saythat we're all susceptible to. and the acronym that you useis eicd, elite institution cognitive disorder. tell us about thatbecause that's something i'm sure wedon't know anything about. malcolm gladwell: igave a talk on this at the googlezeitgeist conference. and because i washaving fun with it, i invented the acronymfor the conference.
it's not actually in the book. elite institution cognitivedisorder is the mistaken belief that attending the most eliteinstitution you can get into is always in your best interest. this is false. there are a number ofmany, many situations where it is not in your bestinterest to go to, for example, the best schoolyou can get into. but rather it's inyour best interest
to go to, at the verymost, your second choice, and probably, ideally, yourthird or fourth choice. the reason is as follows. the best predictor of successin a highly competitive environment like, for example,law school, or more relevant, the one i use in my bookis getting a stem degree, getting a science and mathdegree-- science and math education at theuniversity level is marked by dropout ratesthat are north of 50%.
most people who try to get ascience and math agree fail. so the question is if you wouldlike to get a science and math degree, what is theoptimal strategy? and the optimalstrategy is not to go to the best school you get into. why? because the best predictorof success in getting a degree is not your absolutelevel of intelligence but your relativelevel of intelligence.
it's your class rank. it's your rank relative toyour peers in your class, not your sat score or your iq. so basically anyone, if youfall in the bottom third of your class, yourchances of dropping out rise astronomically. so you should basicallyfollow a strategy that minimizes yourchances of falling in the bottom thirdof your class.
what does that mean? don't go to a goodschool, right? now what's fascinatingabout this, the amazing thingabout this, is that we appear to haveconsistently undervalued the psychologicalcosts of finishing in the bottom half of anycompetitive situation. in other words,what we overvalue is the prestige ofthe institution.
and what we undervalueis the cost to you of not succeedingat that institution. and so there's abeautiful illustration of this in this study thatwas done of economics phds. so what we do is we takethe top 30 phd programs in economics in america. and we break thestudents down by how they rank in theirgraduate class. and then we look attheir publication rate
six years out ofattaining their phd. these are those whotake the academic route. so in something like economics,we use your publication rate as the number ofpapers you get accepted by prestigious journals. it's used as a proxy foryour success as an economist. what do we find whenwe look at that? what we find is the95th percentile student at harvard, stanford,princeton, mit, et cetera,
publishes a lot of papers,as you would expect. they're brilliant. but the drop off from the95th to the 80th percent is astronomical. and by the time you get tothe middle of the phd class at elite schools, they'renot publishing at all. in fact, the 95thpercentile student at the worst phdprogram you can find will publish more and be amore successful economist then
the 75th percentile studentat harvard, mit, and stanford. now, there are manyexplanations for that. but the mostparsimonious explanation is it is so traumatic andhumiliating and overwhelming to be in an elite program andsee a handful of people just beat the crap out of you, butyou are permanently impaired. and my message atgoogle zeitgeist was that i thinkthe logical response to this line of reasoningis that you should hire only
on the basis ofclass rank and not on the basis of institution. in other words, youshould have don't ask, don't tell when it comes tothe name of your undergraduate and graduate institution. we should be indifferent towhere you went to school. we should onlycare about how you ranked because if it's sodevastating to be in anything other than the topthird of your class,
i don't want you if you weren'tin the top third of your class, now i'm being playfula little bit here. but the point isdo you see how we have allocated our strengths? and our notion ofwhat is an advantage and what is a disadvantage areallocated in an irrational way. we've become obsessed withthe advantages of prestige. we have not paid attention tothe disadvantages of prestige. and that's a mistake.
prasad setty: butsome people seem to get motivated by beingsurrounded by people smarter than they are, right? so that's sort of-- malcolm gladwell: noteconomic phds apparently. malcolm gladwell: no, i mean,intuitively, i agree with you. i want to find reasons tolike elite institutions. all my friends wentto elite institutions. should i havechildren, i would want
them to go toelite institutions. but the problem is that whenwe go and systematically look for those advantages,we can't find them. i don't go into it in my book. but there's a longand rich tradition in economics inwhich people hunt for the value ofan elite education. and they can't find it. so we know that it is thecase that a student who
goes to harvard earns more moneyin the course of their career than a student who goes tothe university of tennessee. ok. but that doesn't tellyou anything at all. what you really need to do is tofind two students, both of who get into harvard,one of whom goes and one goes touniversity of tennessee. and then comparetheir career earnings. and when you equalizefor the person,
you can't find any difference. in other words, it'snot that harvard is making you a lot of money. it's the kind of person whogets accepted by harvard makes a lot of money. and then there is an evencleverer line of things. there's now been liketen studies on this, and it's so interesting. they now look atelite high schools.
so what is the benefit of goingto a selective high school? now, intuitively, you wouldthink it must show up. you must be able to see, whetherin test scores, or the quality of the college you goto, or somewhere, we must see some impact of that. and we can't find advantage. once you do thatequalization thing, if you are a smartkid, in other words, it doesn't matterwhat school you go to.
smart is smart, which isan intriguing finding. prasad setty: [inaudible]. thank you. i want to switchtopics a little bit. you know, you doa remarkable job of popularizing social sciences. and by the way, i forgotto introduce myself. i'm prasad setty. i'm part of people operations.
and i lead theanalytics group, which is composed of manysocial scientists who love the fact thatmalcolm's work gets their kind of thinkinginto the public limelight. how do you distill and aggregateall of this research that's done in the socialsciences and come up with what you think arethe most cogent arguments? because as you'vementioned, there are lots of studiesdone on similar topics.
and some of them pointtowards one direction. others point towards adifferent direction, et cetera. malcolm gladwell:well, you're looking for trends in the research. and so, for example,the studies i was just mentioningabout trying to measure the value of elite schools,that's a very clear trend. and you've got acluster of studies that have been done in thelast two or three years using
pretty rich datasets that are all coming to roughlythe same conclusion. so that's the sort ofthing i'm looking for. what you want to steer clear ofare the one really wacky study that is sitting all by itself. that doesn't mean it's wrong. it's just you have toapproach it with more caution. but there's no shortage. i mean, the thing that'sfascinating about being
a sort of studentof academic research is that the number of thingsthat on an academic level-- ideas that are beingpursued and conclusions that are being drawn that arequite dramatically at odds with conventionalwisdom is enormous. if you're in the gameof, in other words, looking in academicresearch for ways to challenge the waywe think about things, there's an embarrassmentof riches out there.
i mean, it's not hard to do. so to me, what alwaysamazes me, is how much fascinating anduseful material lies buried in academia, justnever sees the light of day because no one bothersto go and write about it and popularizing it. i mean, it's astoundinghow-- you know, if you talk to academics,the list of things that they think that the restof the world is doing wrong,
it's like this long. so it's not a verydifficult process. prasad setty: related question. you use a lot of stories tobring your thoughts to life. and the stories add a lotof emotional richness, and we can reallyconnect with them. but how do you ensure that thestories that you're picking are the most representativeof the phenomenon that you're trying to describe?
because you couldprobably find a story to fit any theory thatyou want, one story. malcolm gladwell: yeah. so there's a whole setof trade offs here. storytelling, bydefinition, has one great disadvantage, whichis you are representing a single narrative,a single experience. on the other sideof the equation, story telling has amassive advantage,
which is there is no better wayto communicate and move people than through story. so what i've always triedto do is-- the reason i try to balance storytellingand kind of social science research is thati'm trying to find some kind of middle ground. i'm trying to findan observation that is being made in theliterature or by academics and illustrated bymeans of a story.
so it's rare that thestory comes first. it's not that i hear somethingcool and then hunt for data to fit that. it's the other way around. i look for an idea that'sbeen expressed in academia. and i say, well, how can imake that story resonant, make that, sorry,observation resonant? so you hunt for storiesthat match this kind of idea that you feel has somefirepower behind it.
but that said, it's anecessarily imperfect process. all my books aremassively imperfect. i don't imagine thatanyone will ever agree with 100% ofthe things in my book. i don't even want themto agree with 100% of the things in the book. that's not what you want. you're not looking for converts. you want people tostart conversations.
and writers who are lookingfor converts are scary. i think what you'relooking for is you want people toengage with the ideas. i did a piece for the "newyorker" a couple weeks ago about doping in sports. and i'm a big runner. i'm a huge fan oftrack and field. if my favoriterunners were found to be using some kind ofpeds, i would be devastated.
nonetheless, my piecewas all about look at it from lance armstrong'spoint of view, right? or look at it from alexrodriguez's point of view. i simply pointed outthat the arguments that we use to justify ourprohibition on performance enhancing drugs or really lame. they're insanely lame. and you can't run aroundcondemning people and suing them and putting themin jail, whatever we do,
on the basis ofinsanely lame arguments. so lame argument numberone, for example, the one that i cannot get overis in baseball you are allowed, if you're a pitcher, to replaceyour ulnar collateral ligament in your elbow, which is theprincipal ligament you use when you throw a baseball-- to takeit out and replace it with a tendon taken from another partof your body or from a cadaver if you so choose. this tendon will haveperformance characteristics
that are infinitelysuperior to the ligament that nature gave you. you can swap it out, bringin the bionic ligament, extend your career, be ableto the throw the ball harder. and what do we do? we think that's fantastic. 75% of pitchers inthe major league have had this procedure done. no one bats an eyelash.
the guy who pioneeredthe procedure is considered to be a hero. alex rodriguez isa baseball player who decides totake testosterone, a naturally-- he's not takingsomething from a cadaver. he's taking a naturallyoccurring hormone approved by the fda andavailable through prescription to everyone in this room. and he's decided to take it.
and what happens? he's considered tobe a massive villain. lance armstrong takes hisown blood, his own blood, and reinjects himselfwith his own blood, and he's considered a villain. so wait a minute. on the one hand,people are importing tendons taken from cadavers,which profoundly alters performance characteristicof the arm they use to pitch.
and that's fine. but you can't takeyour own blood and reinject yourself with it. and if you do that,you're a cheater. explain to me why that's-- i amperfectly willing to go after lance armstrong oncesomeone makes sense of that contradiction. so there's a casewhere do i expect to convince all ofyou of this argument?
no. but if i, by writingstuff like that, force people to just sitdown and actually come up with better arguments for whywe hate performance enhancing drugs, then i willhave succeeded i think. prasad setty: iguess that gives us a new benefits idea for google. bionic ligaments forour software engineers so they can code faster.
prasad setty: you talk abouthow lots of studies in academia never find it tothe outside world. what can we, as society, do toimprove the chances of that? because there is so muchknowledge, and it seems like it could be usefulin every day life. malcolm gladwell: it's areally interesting question. in general, i thinkwe have to understand that the appropriate attitude ofnon specialists to specialists ought to be one of respect,not necessarily enthusiasm.
you shouldn't always acceptwhat the expert says as true. but you should be respectful ofwhat they know and you don't. and i think that that is anongoing-- unless you take great pains as a society toconstantly reinforce that idea, that expertsdeserve our respect, experts will not get respect. this is on displayright now, right? you have a groupof lawmakers who have no respect for theexpertise of the economics
profession. i saw a guy on tv theother day, some lawmaker from somewhere, who islike, i don't know anything about economics. i know something about whatit takes to run a household. this is a guy who's in congress. malcolm gladwell: i mean,that's problematic, right? but there has to be a kindof-- this is something that you can't ever letup on enforcing that
as a core ethic ina technologically complex society. expertise is at the heartof all progress, right? and you have to createthe social conditions under which expertiseis respected. and if you let down yourguard at all on that, crazy things start to happen. you have peoplerunning around saying that they don't want tovaccinate their children.
and you have people runningaround saying that it's fine if we defaulted in two weeks. you know, there's this kind ofmadness that will take over. i mean, that's not ananswer to the question because it's reallyhard to inculcate that. but the people inthis room and me, we're all the people whohave to do that kind of work. prasad setty: makes sense. why don't folks startlining up at the mikes?
i think we have one out hereif you want to ask a question. but i'll keep goingon until you do. as you think about all thework that you have done, has there been aninsight or two that you have captured that'sreally profoundly shaped your own behavior,your own life? malcolm gladwell:that's interesting. well, "blink," mysecond book, it so profoundly undermined mybelief in my own capacity
to make gooddecisions that i feel i floundered forseveral years after. but in all kinds of ways ijust came away from that book realizing the degreethat we massively underestimate the role of theirrational in our own lives. and we're constantlymaking up stories that make it sound toourselves like we are behaving in a logical,commonsensical manner. and we're simply not.
one of the guys i run withis a social psychologist. and he was telling me about thisstudy that was done recently that looked at how thewillingness of a judge to grant parole variedby the time of day. so right before lunch, judgesare really, really crabby and don't grant parole at all. and then when they come backfrom lunch, their rates soar. that's the kind of thing where iwould imagine that if you lined up all the criminaljudges in america
and you told them that,they would dispute that so vigorously. they're convinced that theyapproach every case the same. and you do thesimplest analysis, and you discover a verydisturbing pattern. now, maybe some part ofthat is auto factual. who knows? but it certainly meritssome investigation, right? well, i feel like there'sversions of that everywhere.
and we're so resistantto kind of acknowledging that about our lives. prasad setty: why don't we takeone of the audience questions. audience: so i was reallyfascinated by your zeitgeist talk about elite institutions. and thinking if we takegoogle as a potential elite institution, i'mcurious of your thoughts on the potential damage wemay be doing to ourselves and our employeesbecause not everyone here
can be the superstar. and yet most of thepeople coming here were superstars before. so i'm curious if you haveany research or thoughts on the impact of thatfor organizations. malcolm gladwell: so thisis an interesting question. so how do you restructureorganizations such that you minimize thepsychological damage of people at the bottom of the hierarchy?
so one way is to limit thenotion of hierarchy, right? so the thing that is so toxicabout elite colleges in science and math programs isthat necessarily there is a hierarchy. you give out grades, andyou know were you rank. and you're in a classroomsetting where you're all trying to do the same thing. so you can easily compareyourself to your peers and know whether you're behind.
those conditionsdon't necessarily apply in the workplace. it's possible toconstruct work places that don't have the toxic element ofhierarchy to the same degree. audience: we shouldn'tgive grades then at google? malcolm gladwell: well, i don'tknow how you-- no, i mean, it wouldn't be asexplicit as grades. but i'm saying that you canorganize a workplace in a very, very hierarchical way oryou could choose not to.
the other thing itwould tell you is it would say something aboutthe size of teams as well. i mean, it wouldseem to argue, i would think--although maybe not. it's really about thestructure of teams. to the extent that you cankeep things that are as flat as possible, i think youminimize the damage caused by hierarchy's. audience: hi.
thanks for coming to speak. so i just started in peopleoperations about a month ago. and since i'vebeen here, i've had a lot of people recommend"strength finder" and other books like that,and i've taken a look at it. and i can't help butthink that things like that are kind of, as thegreat skeptic james randi said, "flim flam," or like modernday pseudo social science. and i'm wondering if youhave any insight into those
because i know companiesspend a lot of money buying those kinds of booksfor their employees. malcolm gladwell:i have to confess i've never read any of those. i mean, i know thatthey're very successful. audience: in sales or inwhat they set out to do? malcolm gladwell: in sales. malcolm gladwell: buti guess i would only say it's interestingthough that there
is such a hunger forthat kind of thing. i will say this, people areexperience rich and theory poor. most peoplenecessarily lack access to organizing principlesin their life. if you're not immersedin the world of academia and you don't have theleisure to follow and acquire grand theories, you don't havetheories to explain things. so whenever someone comes alongwith an explanatory mechanism
for something that you'reexperience rich in, it's enormously attractive. so if "strength finder" islousy, it's incumbent on us just to come up with betterand more sophisticated ways of-- but it'sclear that there is a massive demand forsomething to allow people to organize their experience. audience: hey malcolm. my name is mike.
thanks for being here. my question iskind of going back to the value of eliteinstitutions again. so you talk abouthow someone who goes to harvard,someone who goes to the university of tennessee,they are intrinsically going to do the same if they areon the same intelligence level. so i guess myquestion is, you know, you hear you're kind of theaverage of the five people
you hang around. you surround yourself withpeople who are smarter than you, you will naturallyelevate your level. do you believe in that? or do you believethat's kind of-- it seems like yourtheory kind of puts demerits towardsthat thought process. malcolm gladwell: well,there's a couple of things. one is that one of theimplications of that argument
is that there are a lotmore very able people at non-elite institutionsthan we think. and actually this is kindof a fascinating thing. so to take a step backwards,the larger question is how efficient are eliteeducational institutions as search engines for talent? what percentage ofqualified students do they actually uncover? and the answer is we used tothink they were very efficient.
what we havediscovered recently is they're actuallyquite inefficient. in other words, enormous numbersof very, very intellectually capable people never even comeclose to the 250 top colleges in the country. so non-selective collegeshave a much larger share of the intellectual aristocracythan we would imagine. so to your question, if you goto the university of tennessee, you can find lotsand lots and lots
of very, very intellectuallycapable people to hang around with. and if you are that kid whocould have gone to harvard, you will probablygravitate to those five. so you'll be surrounded by peerswho may be every bit as able. but the difference is thatyou will almost certainly be the top of yourclass as opposed to running the risk at beingin the middle or the bottom. so you're getting two benefits,intellectual benefits,
as opposed to maybe only one. the other thing, of course,is that-- well, i'll leave it at that. there are many, many parallelarguments along these lines. now, of course, not everyonecan follow this strategy. if everyone does, itceases to work, right? everyone can't go down a notch. so the whole thing is if you'regoing to follow this strategy, do it quick before i sell toomany books and the advantage
is wiped out. audience: so you said inresponse to a previous question that it would be useful toeliminate some hierarchy so that you get rid of this problemof people being at the bottom. but how do we know that's thebigger issue as opposed to it's just a great boost to peoplewhen they are at the top? and if that was thepredominating factor, then maybe we should just havemore awards or more ways to recognize people.
malcolm gladwell: oh, i see. you mean have a kindof pretend hierarchy where you give everyonea pat on the back? audience: or maybewe should have even more levels of hierarchy. well, so the classic study--let's see if i get this right. the classic studyin this regard, which i talk about in thebook, is this famous study that was done.
the largest psychologicalstudy ever in the united states was done during the secondworld war of american soldiers. and one of the mostinteresting insights was a comparison ofcommissioned officers in the air force, the air corps, theprecursor to the air force, and commissioned officersin the military police. and the question waswho was more satisfied with their promotionprospects, the openness of their institutionto rewarding talent?
and the answer was that thepeople in the military police were way moresatisfied with that than people in the air force. this was very puzzling becausealmost no one got promoted in the military police,and everyone got promotions in the air force. so why would peoplebe more satisfied in the military police? well, the answer is that so manypeople got promoted in the air
force, that getting promotedwas meaningless, right? the median conditionin the military police was not getting promoted. so if you didn't get promotedin the military police, you were like, well, no one is. that's fine. if you didn't getpromoted in the air force, oh, man, you're devastatedbecause everyone's getting promoted.
and if you did get promoted,it's like, who cares? everyone's getting promoted. so it's like thistotally inverted thing. you think that you'remaking life better by promoting everyone. but you're not. you're simply altering theset of existing expectations. so, yeah, i don't know whetheryou could-- messing around with hierarchies is avery, very, very, very
tricky business. and it's probably better just totry to avoid them when you can. prasad setty: go ahead. audience: thanks for coming in. my question is a littlebit around, i guess, your media diet. obviously, as someone who writesa lot about social science, you have to go through alot of academic journals. but what i was actuallyreally interested to see
was that you had a reallycogent and fluent conversation with bill simmons onhis blog about sports and different topics. so i was wondering a little bitabout your media diet outside of the academic journalsphere, and, like, how you kind of keepyour mind and horizons broad across different topics. malcolm gladwell: well,i'm a huge sports fan. so there's an enormousamount of consumption
of sports related stuff. and particularly these days ispend enormous amounts of time watching obscureeuropean track and field meets on sort of live streamsof 2:00 in the morning. so there's that. but i think, you know, mystrategy has always-- you have to very consciouslydifferentiate yourself from where you thinkyour professional peer group is going.
so to the extentthat people migrate to things that areaccessible online, i feel i shouldmigrate to things that are inaccessible online. or to the extent thatpeople stop reading books, i feel i need toread more books. so what i've beentrying to do is to kind of-- it's whyi spend a lot of time in actual physical librariesreading things in hard copy
because there's akind of serendipity that you get when you--and this is not in anyway meant as a criticism, bythe way, of search engines, for example, whichare incredibly useful. but they also have limitations. they reward a certainkind of serendipity, and they punish anotherkind of serendipity. and if you you're interestedin serendipitous learning, as i am-- much of what i uncoveris uncovered serendipitously--
you have to be a student ofall of the different mechanisms of chance encounters with theunusual and the insightful. and so that means that notonly do i spend a lot of time screwing aroundonline on databases, but i also very,very consciously make sure that i go tophysical libraries and walk through the stacks. and even something as simple asyou're interested in one book and then you goand you just look
at all of the booksthat surround it. and the connectionsare not always-- there are connectionsbetween them. but it's a differentkind of connection than they would beconnected online. it's not a keyword connection. it's a thematic connection. so there's allthese sorts of-- you have to be a student of thedifferent ways in which ideas
cluster. and i've thought a lotabout that in recent years as a way of distinguishingmyself from other journalists. have a quick question. in your last book, "outliers,"you spoke about the advantages of, whether it's beingborn in a certain year or having access to the earliestcomputers and stuff like that. and in this book youhave a whole new section called the disadvantagesof being advantageous.
i was wondering if yousee a contradiction, or how do you reconcile the two? malcolm gladwell: well,i have several answers to that question. so there's clearly adifference between-- the notion that i play with in this bookis called desirable difficulty. and desirabledifficulty is a class of difficulties that haveparadoxical outcomes that force you to do things thatend up being advantageous.
so there's a wholeschool of research around these people atucla called the bjorks who try to uncover specific examplesof desirable difficulties. a good one would be, forexample, a simple one would be studying strategies. to the extent that you canmake your studying process more difficult, you willretain more information. so the bjorks havethis beautiful data that says if you're learningsomething very complex,
the best thing to do is tolearn it in small chunks. so say i have three tasksthat require mastery. i have two choices. i can master the first, masterthe second, master the third. or i can break up all thelearning into 10 minute chunks and do 10 minutes, 10minutes, 10 minutes. they say do the lattereven though it's harder, even though you have tostart over every time. you go ten minutes,ten minutes, then
you come back tothe first thing. you're like, oh, whatwas i doing again? it's this reentry problem. the reentry problemis not a problem. it's why you will rememberand master it way better. it's forcing your brain to kindof go into a different mode. so the idea isthat, yeah, there's a set of things-- gettingaccess to-- if learning programming requires10,000 hours of mastery
and you're in a conditionwhere access to computers is constrained, earlyaccess to computers will be an unalloyedadvantage, right? but that doesn't mean thatthere aren't other situations that we could find where whatlooks like access to something preferentially may lookadvantageous and not be advantageous at all. so my discussion ofdyslexia in the book is all about conditions underwhich not knowing how to read
can be advantageous. because the strategies thatyou might follow to work around your reading problemcan end up being more helpful toyou then reading. so i have this longthing about david boies. he's the lawyer whobasically can't read and as a result developed anincredible capacity to listen and an incredible memory. if you're a triallawyer, believe or not,
it's more important tohave an amazing memory and be an incredible listenerthan it is to know how to read. not if you're a litigatoror a corporate lawyer. but if you're atrial lawyer, yeah. not if you're, sorry,a corporate lawyer, but if you're a trial lawyer. we can clearly say, look, thereare desirable difficulties and there areundesirable difficulties. that said, on abroader, macro level
is there a possiblecontradiction? yeah. malcolm gladwell: but so what? we're all adults. i don't know why people areso terrified of contradiction. i think contradiction is fine. i mean, i can identifyhundreds of contradictions in my own life. all of you can.
in fact, this nextproject i'm working on is all about thecentrality of contradiction in human behavior. and the idea has always beenthat as human beings, what we seek to do is to locateand extinguish contradictions. i think that's nonsense. and there's a lot of veryinteresting social science research which suggeststo the contrary. what we do is we exploit,we aggressively exploit,
our contradictions. they enable us to do all kindsof-- not always good things. so i'm very interested in--i was talking about this at lunch-- very interested inthis notion that we sometimes behave generouslyor pro-socially towards an outsidergroup in order to justify turning on themin some future situation. and the incredibleexample of this is adolph eichmann,the architect
of the final solution, whospends the 1930s pretending, not pretending, convincinghimself that he's a zionist. he reads books on zionism. he goes to jerusalem. he hangs out withthe rabbis of vienna. he teaches himself hebrew. and he does this. and what that means is thatwhen it comes time to-- and he's responsible in the '30sfor deporting thousands of jews
from vienna to palestine. what does that do? it enables him, when heturns to exterminating jews, to be able to say to himself,in his grotesque way, i don't hate jews. i was deporting them. i was saving them. i was reading hebrewand going to jerusalem. and at one of the deathcamps that he sets up,
he builds a library. and he imports judaica froma prominent jewish library in prague. and he would go and visitthis place, this grotesque concentration camp,and sit in the library and read ancienthebrew manuscripts. at his core, this man hada massive contradiction. and he was driven to resolve it. he used it tojustify everything he
did over the course of the war. now that's a horrible,extreme, grotesque example. but my point is that we all havewithin us these contradictions. and i think that's part ofwhat it means to be human. and just as you canuse contributions for terrible ends,like eichmann did, they are also, at the sametime, the ways in which we explore new ideas and exposeourself to risky things and do all kinds of thingsthat are ultimately positive.
and if you're not willingto tolerate contradiction in your own life, i thinkyou're limiting yourself in a certain sense. you're also running huge risks. the eichmann route isthe risky route, right? but at the sametime, someone who insists that everything beabsolutely consistent is leading an impoverishedlife, i think. so, yeah, i [inaudible].
audience: thank you. prasad setty: why don'twe take one more question? audience: in thecontext of google and "the innovator'sdilemma" that you mentioned earlier,when you are a giant, how do you stay a giant andkind of, towards the book, not be slayed by a david? malcolm gladwell: oh, wow. well, you know you willbe eventually, right?
malcolm gladwell:i mean, give me an example of-- inyour space there's kind of ibm, which does thisthing which in retrospect seems unbelievable, thatthey've managed to kind of resuscitate themselvesand transform themselves. but they might be a sui generis. maybe they were just insuch an unusual position and were so deeply rooted inso many parts of the world and had such a deep benchthat that was possible.
but the rule is youdon't get to-- it's not going to last longerthan a generation or so. maybe part of the answeris, that's fine, as long as you don't think about google,as long as you think about you, so years ago, iremember doing this-- it was the first timethis hit home for me. i went to rochester. and in rochester, it usedto be a high technology hub, kodak, xerox,bausch and lomb.
but one of the biggestemployers in rochester, high tech employers in the1960s, was general dynamics, i think general dynamics, oneof the big defense contractors. they employed vastnumbers of engineers. and basically theirbusiness model implodes after the vietnam war. and they shut down theiroperations in rochester and moved away. and everyone said, oh, my god.
it's over. one of the biggest employersin town has folded. and what happened, if youwent back 10 years later, was you discovered that thetalent that was kicked out of general dynamicswent on to start so many start-ups inrochester that they sparked a whole second wave thatended up actually being, in terms of employment andincome brought into the city, greater than the benefitsgeneral dynamics had risen.
in other words, google mayfall one day, probably will. but you won't. you guys will all,hopefully, many of you, will go on and do otherincredibly cool things because of what you learnedwhile you were here. so you can look at it two ways. there's a pessimist view. but there's also a viewthat says, no, it's part of the natural cycle.
you probably don'twant to be working at google-- is thishorrible to say? malcolm gladwell:--25 years from now. and nor does society want youto be if this company doesn't evolve in dramatic--maybe it will. i mean, i'm just usinggoogle as a stand in for-- let's useanother company. malcolm gladwell: let's say-- audience: microsoft.
malcolm gladwell: microsoft. i mean, at this point wouldthe world be better off if microsoftdisappeared tomorrow? malcolm gladwell: how manyunbelievably talented people are trapped working on theumpteenth version of word, malcolm gladwell:like, that's not a good use of 150 iq points. so i'd be more kind ofsanguine about this problem than you might be at the moment.
prasad setty: thank you. i can't think of abetter note to end on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment