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Somehow I've come around to liking Malcolm Gladwell. The first time I read one of his books, I hated it. Loathed it. Was so incensed by it that I was moved to fling it between the rolling stacks in the library, and slowly roll them together on it. I didn't actually squish his book, because it was examinable material in a class that I hated. At first. Eventually I came around to appreciate its charm, just like with Malcolm Gladwell, whose writing is supremely readable, if a bit too pat at times.
The thing about Gladwell, is that he's big on patterns. He takes big, big samplings of not-very-interesting data, where one piece of information seems to have only the slightest relation to another piece of data, and figures out how they fit together. He finds a pattern, and then applies it outwards, and ever outwards. Eventually he comes to some incredibly clear, too-easy explanation for some phenomenon. This makes for great reading, but at times, can seriously piss me off. (Like Freakonomics - the same potential for wow-factor and hate).
His latest book is Outliers: the Story of Success. I really, really want to read it. The Guardian has a long extract. Here's a sampling:
Also interesting--Macleans did an interview with him about the book, in which they asked him about his fixation with the relationship between IQ and performance.
This is an insight that I like to hang on to, even while indulging in genre fantasies of ninth level intellects that can do it all. (Hello Lex Luthor! Yes, I'm talking about you). It's something that keeps me from allowing myself the excuse of inability. Hey, when stumbling blocks come along, as they inevitably do, I can always fall back on the excuses of social barriers to entry, laziness, and sheer bloody mindedness.
The thing about Gladwell, is that he's big on patterns. He takes big, big samplings of not-very-interesting data, where one piece of information seems to have only the slightest relation to another piece of data, and figures out how they fit together. He finds a pattern, and then applies it outwards, and ever outwards. Eventually he comes to some incredibly clear, too-easy explanation for some phenomenon. This makes for great reading, but at times, can seriously piss me off. (Like Freakonomics - the same potential for wow-factor and hate).
His latest book is Outliers: the Story of Success. I really, really want to read it. The Guardian has a long extract. Here's a sampling:
The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971, in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The university's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, "like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey". Off to the side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student" by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a "no-date nerd". He had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and he was hooked.
From then on, the computer centre was his life. He programmed whenever he could. He got a job with a computer science professor, so he could program over the summer. In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' ".
Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting Unix, a software system developed by AT&T for mainframe computers. Joy's version was so good that it became - and remains - the operating system on which millions of computers around the world run. "If you put your Mac in that funny mode where you can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I remember typing in 25 years ago." And when you go online, do you know who wrote the software that allows you to access the internet? Bill Joy.
After Berkeley, Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley firm Sun Microsystems. There, he rewrote another computer language, Java, and his legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as Bill Gates. He is sometimes called the Edison of the internet.
The story of Joy's genius has been told many times, and the lesson is always the same. Here was a world that was the purest of meritocracies. Computer programming didn't operate as an old-boy network, where you got ahead because of money or connections. It was a wide-open field, in which all participants were judged solely by their talent and accomplishments. It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
Sport, too, is supposed to be just such a pure meritocracy. But is it? Take ice hockey in Canada: look at any team and you will find that a disproportionate number of players will have been born in the first three months of the year. This, it turns out, is because the cut-off date for children eligible for the nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old league and so on is January 1. Boys who are oldest and biggest at the beginning of the hockey season are inevitably the best. And so they get the most coaching and practice, and they get chosen for the all-star team, and so their advantage increases - on into the professional game. A similar pattern applies to other sports. What we think of as talent is actually a complicated combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage.
Does something similar apply to outliers in other fields, such as Bill Joy? Do they benefit from special opportunities, and do those opportunities follow any kind of pattern? The evidence suggests they do.
Also interesting--Macleans did an interview with him about the book, in which they asked him about his fixation with the relationship between IQ and performance.
Q: Why do you keep coming back to IQ as a topic?
A: Because everyone always says, and this drives me crazy, “Yes, we know that IQ is not the be-all and end-all,” and yet we continue to act as if [it is].
Q: You mean by restricting access to top universities to those with high scores on standardized tests like the SATs?
A: Yes. They’re saying, “You must be above a certain IQ even to be considered for admission.” That is an intellectually and morally bankrupt notion.
Q: But there is some relationship between IQ and ability, isn’t there?
A: There’s a threshold, and for those who are above it, it ceases to be important. You need to have an IQ of about 110 in order to be able to be, say, a professional. And you need to have an IQ of about 120 in order to be capable of society’s most challenging cognitive feats, like getting a Nobel Prize.
Q: Where do those numbers come from?
A: Here’s a classic study: take a pool of 200 very prominent scientists and look at their IQs. You’ll notice that all their IQs are above 120, but the person who has an IQ of 120 is as likely to have won a Nobel as a person with an IQ of 180. So it’s important to be above that threshold of 120, but once you are, IQ ceases to be relevant. But at a lot of elite institutions, they’re trying to make distinctions on the basis of IQ in that range above 120, when no distinctions are possible.
This is an insight that I like to hang on to, even while indulging in genre fantasies of ninth level intellects that can do it all. (Hello Lex Luthor! Yes, I'm talking about you). It's something that keeps me from allowing myself the excuse of inability. Hey, when stumbling blocks come along, as they inevitably do, I can always fall back on the excuses of social barriers to entry, laziness, and sheer bloody mindedness.
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