(Audio) I Hate the Ivy League, by Gladwell
Saturday March 22, 2025
This is the first time I've seen a collection of podcasts packaged as an audiobook. There is no corresponding printed book that you can buy. Sort of weird, but Gladwell is good enough that it works.
I tend to agree with Gladwell. Education shouldn't be an elitist thing based on keeping people out.
One thing Gladwell discusses is two opposing views of what education should do, corresponding to two opposing views of what we need.
He uses basketball and soccer to illustrate the two views, saying that in basketball you win based on your best players, while in soccer you win based on your worst players. So in basketball it's okay to have some weaker players, if your star/s is/are great, while in soccer you might win more by improving your worst players.
I've heard this explicitly, for education. Kai-fu Lee says that good educational "programs seek to identify and realize the potential of the country's top technical minds, an approach suited to creating the material prosperity that can then be broadly shared across society."
From another angle, it's the great man theory against the Ortega hypothesis, roughly.
From another angle, it's conservatism vs. progressivism: individuals should be able to succeed wildly, vs. the poorest should be helped.
Gladwell also relates this idea to the Industrial Revolution happening in England. He attributes it to the abundance of tinkerers/inventors all working on things. (Cf. Power and Progress)
Gladwell doesn't like timed tests. I'm a little torn, but I do have to wonder: Did timed standardized tests influence my work style? Would I have been better off with more focus on longer-term planning and projects?
“Mirror-tocracy”
There's an interesting bit about how Kelly McConville's students reverse-engineered the US News college rankings. It's a place where regression makes sense, because the methodology of the rankings matches up with what regression can do. It also reminded me of my old project on Understanding MyinTuition.
