1-Page Cheatsheet: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm GladwellI thoroughly enjoyed the book. Gladwell’s storytelling is better than ever. While Tipping Point had a greater influence on how I view the world, and I found Outliers more engrossing because it featured entrepreneurs like Ron Popeil and Bill Gates, David and Goliath [Amazon Kindle] is a pure expression of Gladwell’s desire to tackle Big questions and answer them in an entertaining, breezily analytical way. He’s like a kind, witty 21st-century Socrates, pushing us to think big and think different.

His arguments and stories are so nuanced, so artfully woven together, that it would have been impossible for me to write an accurate summary without everything being a vulgar generalization. My goal, instead, is to showcase a small selection of his insights and stories. If the book is a 12-course meal at a 2-star Michelin restaurant, this is like the amuse-bouche before drinks are served. I should just call it the 1-page amuse-bouche instead…

David had a gun and Goliath was partially blind

Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun.

What many medical experts now believe, in fact, is that Goliath had a serious medical condition. He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly—a disease caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. And furthermore, one of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems.

Underdogs change the rules, usually because they are outsiders

David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. […] You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.

Smaller classes don’t mean better students; better teachers do

Fifteen percent find statistically significant evidence that students do better in smaller classes. Roughly the same number find that students do worse in smaller classes. After sorting through thousands of pages of data on student performance from eighteen separate countries, the economists concluded that there were only two places in the world—Greece and Iceland—where there were “nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes.”

The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half’s material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year’s material in one year. That’s a year’s difference in learning, in one year. That suggests that there is much more to be gained by focusing on the person at the front of the classroom than on the number of people sitting in the classroom. The problem is that great teachers are rare.

Nature is run by the Inverted-U; our brains tend to ignore it

Psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.”

Here’s my write-up on that paper.

Being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can be better for your career

The very best students at a non–top 30 school—that is, a school so far down the list that someone from the Ivy League would grimace at the thought of even setting foot there—have a publication number of 1.05, substantially better than everyone except the very best students at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago.

Imagine two black law school students with identical grades and identical test scores. Both are admitted to an elite law school under an affirmative-action program. One accepts and one declines. The one who declines chooses instead—for logistical or financial or family reasons—to attend his or her second choice, a less prestigious and less selective law school. Sander and Taylor looked at a large sample of these kinds of “matched pairs” and compared how well they did on four measures: law school graduation rate, passing the bar on their first attempt, ever passing the bar, and actually practicing law. The comparison is not even close. By every measure, black students who don’t go to the “best” school they get into outperform those who do.

An underdog’s early difficulties can serve as the source of later strengths

Sixty-seven percent of the prime ministers in her sample lost a parent before the age of sixteen. That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class—the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among American presidents. Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young.

Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?

Underdogs have less to lose and can take bigger risks

Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

Germany’s Blitz bombing of London backfired

So why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries—spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people—means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it.

More punishment may not lead to less crime; it may be an Inverted-U

Prison has a direct effect on crime: it puts a bad person behind bars, where he can’t victimize anyone else. But it also has an indirect effect on crime, in that it affects all the people with whom that criminal comes into contact. A very high number of the men who get sent to prison, for example, are fathers. (One-fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children.) And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating. Some criminals are lousy fathers: abusive, volatile, absent. But many are not. Their earnings—both from crime and legal jobs—help support their families. For a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.

In the mid-1990s, the IRA was organizing daily bus trips to the prison outside Belfast, as if it were an amusement park. “Almost everyone in the Catholic ghettos has a father, brother, uncle, or cousin who has been in prison,” the political scientist John Soule wrote at the height of the Troubles. “Young people in this atmosphere come to learn that prison is a badge of honor rather than a disgrace.”

Trivia

Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great.

The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Innovators have to be open. They also need to be conscientious. But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to those who have emailed me comments, questions, book recommendations, and even cool research papers. I love to nerd it up.

Why everyone should read some Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton @ TEDLet’s face it, we’re a pretty hypocritical country: we watch porn in record amounts but shun abortion; we drive Toyota Priuses but keep our lights on when we leave the house; we spend billions on diet books and fitness fads then stop by Wendy’s on the way home. It can overwhelm, at times.

I believe it’s partially driven by religion, or the lack thereof. Religious folk struggle to maintain their values in our sex-soaked, technology-obsessed culture; nonreligious folk (call them what you like: atheists, agnostics, the “spiritual but not religious”) struggle to find a sense of purpose, a greater good. We’re conflicted, caught between who we are and who we want to be (and believe). And hypocrisy – Greek for “acting of a theatrical part” – is the result.

That’s why I love reading Alain de Botton, and why I recommend his work. He’s chicken soup for the modern soul.

de Botton believes we’ve secularized, but have done so badly. In our abrupt, aggressive departure from religion, we’ve run away from home but are still wandering the streets without safety or shelter.

Instead of shunning religion, we should learn from it. We should, in the greatest sense of the word, steal pieces of it — for example, a belief in giving back, or love for neighbor and stranger — and make those pieces a part of our lives.

And the best part? It’s not just for nonbelievers: Christians can learn from Hindus, Buddhists can learn from Muslims, and so on.

His solution makes immediate, visceral sense. If humankind aspires to a true global village, this is the culture it must create.

de Botton is better-known in Europe than the States. They’re more secular, for one. His provocative titles, like “Religion for Atheists” or “Atheism 2.0”, would be dismissed forthwith here. Europe is also more removed, if by a small margin, from some of his critiques of what polisci students would call “American soft power.” Even his name is hard to pronounce (try saying “Botton” five times without hearing “bottom”).

But he’s prolific, he’s persuasive, and he’s profound. Start with his Twitter feed, a stream of seemingly simple self-help soundbites. Yes, he might be the intellectual man’s Tony Robbins, but there’s more substance, and nuance.

The bottom line: Alain de Botton has changed how I see the world and what I’d like to accomplish before I die.

The other author I’ve frequently praised on this blog is Haruki Murakami. There’s no obvious overlap with de Botton, not in style, format, or demographic, but they both peel back the layers of humankind, to place the emotional and logical pieces of our species into a broader tableau. Murakami’s tableau is a sensory, magical one; de Botton’s is an orderly, harmonious one.

Below, I’ve compiled a selection of my notes from his work, a sort of buffet-style entry to his arguments:

On status anxiety

  • It’s a problem today because 1) we don’t approve of people who receive their status by birth and 2) we believe status can be earned/achieved and therefore it is limitless
  • There are 2 types of self-help books: 1) the Tony Robbins kind, “become a billionaire by Sunday” and 2) how to deal with low self-esteem; they’re connected because if you’re not a billionaire by Saturday, you have self-esteem problems
  • Tocqueville, on his trip around the world, noted that envy would be the #1 emotion that Americans would suffer (as with most democratic, egalitarian societies)
  • In a “just” society like ours, the rich deserve their success, but the poor also deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)
  • Hundreds of years ago, if you saw a rich person, you would assume he/she was born into it or did something bad to get it; and in ancient Rome, your good fortune was due to the Gods, when something good happened to you, you’d thank God and bless him and sacrifice to him

On why pessimism is healthy

  • Problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, mankind has taken such great strides that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day
  • The secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through things like Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research
  • Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers are instead meant to be tolerated (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”)

On atheism and religion:

  • There’s much to admire about organized religion – the music, architecture, texts, rules, communities
  • Education has two goals – to learn important/technical skills, and to make better human beings
  • We are immensely forgetful beings, which is why religions on average remind people of things five times per day (whereas secular education rarely if ever reviews important lessons)
  • Secular world has religious equivalents, like museums, but they lack power and purpose
  • In 2011, the Catholic Church made $97B. Why is it so successful? Because it’s involved directly in many aspects of peoples’ lives, whereas the academic/intellectual world is more distant, preferring instead to publish books and lecture from afar
  • Religions are like good hosts at a party – bring people together, facilitate intros, help people make things happen

Some videos:

Some tweets:

Some quotes from Religion for Atheists (see here for a longer list):

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit.

The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

Thanks everyone. That was a long post but hope you found it useful. I’d love to hear what authors and thinkers inspire you. Also here is a much longer list of stuff I’m reading and highlighting if you’re into that sort of thing.

The Inverted-U: the research behind why there can indeed be too much of a good thing

The Inverted-U is a journal article by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz. It’s the pillar of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in David and Goliath, which is how I discovered it.

Reading academic papers is tougher than your regular blog posts and nonfiction books. It’s uncomfortable but I try to push through one or two each month. I can’t imagine how grad students (and law students) do it. I suppose as with all things that you get used to it.

Here are my notes. Reader beware – there’s a good chance some of the below is inaccurate, incomplete, or misrepresentative, since this is only one read-through in the eyes of a pure layman.

Adam Grant and Barry Shwartz are professors at UPenn Wharton and Swarthmore, respectively; I’ll refer to them below as GS.

The Inverted-U by Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. – Aristotle

  • The academic term for too much of a good thing is “nonmonotonic inverted-U-shaped effects”
  • Psychology research has proven that certain behaviors increase happiness (eg, sending thank-you messages, spending money on others, making choices to increase autonomy), but GS believe there needs to be more discussion and research on the downsides of excess
  • Aristotle argued people need to find the mean, the “proportionate” response to things
  • Cited studies and examples include:
    • Learning (on the job) is good, but people too focused on learning can divert attention from performance, waste resources, distract from key priorities
    • Complex jobs provide satisfaction and fulfillment, but jobs that are too complex (I’m thinking anything in public office these days) can lead to stress, burnout, dissatisfaction
    • An NBA study showed that practice was helpful and improved performance, but excessive practice (and excessive experience, as measured in years) led to overconfidence, complacency, and lack of creativity
    • Detail-orientation is important to success, but when you are too detail-oriented – especially for simple, mechanical jobs, you can miss the bigger picture
    • Generosity is good, but too much consumes your time and energy. A study of volunteers showed that 100 to 800 hours per year is optimal
  • Other examples of the inverted-U include optimism (too much can lead to under preparation and under estimation of risks), self-esteem (can harm relationships and health), cheerfulness (can lead to engaging in risky behaviors), and life satisfaction (“moderately satisfied” people earned the most, “extremely satisfied” people earned less and had lower levels of education)
  • GS stress that most data are correlational, and thus causality is uncertain. We’re not sure if moderately satisfied people are driven to be more successful, or if more successful people, once they compare their BMW to their neighbor’s Porsche, are less satisfied
  • Why does this happen? I struggled through this part, but here’s my best shot:
    • One reason is “virtue conflicts”. In other words, life is zero-sum, and the more of one virtue you cultivate, the less time and energy you spend on other virtues (helping others is good, but so is investing in yourself)
    • The second reason is “good things satiate and bad things escalate”. So a good burrito is great on the first bite, but not so tasty near the end. And bad things – like substance addiction – can grow in magnitude
    • The third reason is the characteristics of some virtues, where one effect is harmful in excess (eg, motivation is a positive virtue, and increased focus is an effect, but too much focus can be bad for complex, big-picture tasks)
  • GS end by asking a few questions, including:
    • 1. How much of a specific trait is too much?
    • 2. Why does this happen?
    • 3. When – under what conditions, circumstances, contexts – does this inverted-U happen?
  • They believe that applying Aristotle’s concept of the mean and the inverted-U are helpful to understanding behavior and happiness. For example, researchers used to believe that the more choice we had, the better. It was only recently that the same researchers realized too much choice can make you less happy (the paradox of choice)
  • Are there any virtues where more is always better? What is known as an “unmitigated good”?

We believe that the search for the Aristotelian mean represents an opportunity for psychologists to answer fundamental questions about the limits of positive experiences. The inverted-U is a widespread phenomenon in psychology, and we believe it deserves more attention in psychology writ large and in positive psychology especially – Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz

Here’s the original article. Happy reading! I’d love to hear what you think and if you came across different insights than I did.

For more readings, check out my linkblog. There, you can see what I read and highlight. Thanks to Postach.io for building this tool, which integrates neatly with Evernote.

Books I recently enjoyed: Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, and Haruki Murakami

Here are books I finished in October and November. It was a less productive book-reading period, due to a recent obsession with video games and with reading about bitcoin.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Having read his previous books (Tipping Point, Blink, What The Dog Saw, and Outliers), this one shot to the front of my queue when it was released. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Purely a nitpick: the insights are not as foundations-shaking as Tipping Point, for example, but like a great piece of fiction, you’re totally absorbed in his stories even when he’s teaching you fairly academic topics. All educational writing should be like this. It would make school, and learning, a helluva lot more fun. Here’s a great piece on why Gladwell might be underrated, and another that analyzes his writing.

Sidenote: I’d always thought of it as David VERSUS Goliath, not AND. Interesting, the difference one word makes

Neuromancer by William Gibson (audiobook)

Recommended by a friend after I told her how much I enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. William Gibson is like a godfather of the cyberpunk and steampunk genres. Wikipedia editors even believe he coined the term “cyberspace”.

Honestly, I stopped about 3/5 of the way in. I was having a hard time following the story and figuring out who did what to whom and when where why. It reminds me, obliquely, of David Foster Wallace; reading their work is like taking your cerebral cortex to the gym.

But, I’m glad I made the attempt. It’s the sort of writing that expands your universe of what is possible in science and fiction and story-telling.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (audiobook)

This is my 3rd Neil Gaiman written-and-narrated audiobook. The first, and most enjoyable, was The Graveyard Book (thanks to Tim Ferriss’ glowing recommendation). The second, and least-enjoyable-but-still-entertaining, was The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

It’s easy to be jealous of Neil. If good writing were a recreational drug, then Neil’s would be the purest form of cocaine you could buy on the street. Not only that, he has the perfect storytelling voice, which is why I’ve only bought and listened to his audiobooks when they were self-narrated. This is because I was perfectly spoiled by The Graveyard Book, still the best audiobook I’ve chanced upon. I associate audiobooks with reading bedtime stories to kids. This is the purest form of bedtime story-telling. At least, I imagine so, since my immigrant parents didn’t do this :)

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is at his best, or rather I enjoy Murakami’s writing the best, when he’s telling stories best described as a sad sort of love. You know, like nostalgic love, heartbreak, regret in love, longing for love. As I read SOTB, I felt like I was riding a similar wave to Norwegian Wood. I didn’t feel this way with Kafka and Hard-Boiled.

I’m disappointed Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize this year, but after reading Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over The Mountain, it’s hard to begrudge her victory. And Murakami is still young, in a particular type of writer’s years, and still very productive.

That’s it for the past few months. What books have you enjoyed reading? Not that I need to send Amazon more money, but I will.