Accumulative advantage

From Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Page 30.

The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the "Matthew Effect" after the New Testament verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage." The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a little bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still - and on, and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn't start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.

Skewed age distributions

From Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Page 25

Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the "talented" from the "untalented"; and if you provide the "talented" with a superior experience, then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutooff date.

Explaining why most members of a competitive sports league are going to be aged close to the sign up cut off date: the younger adherents are smaller and less developed and therefore get winnowed out by those that are closer to the age cutoff date and therefore are older and stronger.

Success and inevitability

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Interesting to have read it in close proximity to Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Both authors are very gifted, Sowell in argumentation and Gladwell in storytelling. Both grapple with important issues. Both have a knack for spotting the interesting story, occurrence, event or the obscure fact or measure. You are carried along by their argument and have to will yourself to step back and consider just what their argument might be and whether you might agree with it.

Gladwell is an author whose essays appear in the New Yorker and so his books have the disadvantage that they feel as if he has shaped individual articles into support of a broader argument rather than a seamless book length argument. Sowell on the other hand is usually taking a particular proposition and either demolishing it or marshaling supporting evidence across a book length canvass.

Outliers is chock full of interesting information and ways of looking at familiar information in a new fashion and which sheds new light. And Gladwell is certainly a gifted storyteller.

For all that the storytelling is wonderful, there are a couple of significant flaws in the book. The first is that much of what Gladwell is reporting originates out of the academic fields of psychology and social sciences – fields notorious for their fads, their relaxed approach to statistical rigor, and their susceptibility to cognitive bias. The findings can be fascinating and thought provoking but when you discover that they are based on a sample of twenty-four middle class, 20 year old college students (or some similarly constrained and unrepresentative sample) over a four week time frame, suddenly your confidence in the data takes a dive and the novel insight you thought you were drawing from the article suddenly seems more like a sophomoric bull session.

The second challenge for the reader is that Gladwell is selective, as a storyteller needs to be, in the evidence he advances. He has a story to tell and that demands a narrative arc, tension, etc. Data doesn’t often lend itself to such a structure. The upshot is that while you are enjoying the story, you are not getting the whole story or maybe even an accurate story. It feels like science, looks like science but it is storytelling.

It is not perfectly clear to this reader what, exactly, the intended thesis of Outliers is meant to be. The cover blurb claims that “The lives of outliers – those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience – follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.” This is manifestly not what Gladwell is doing. He sheds some light here and there but he does not present a blueprint for making the most of human potential. It just isn’t there.

Rather than a holistic argument, there are a couple of times in the book where you might almost conclude that Gladwell’s argument is that success is substantially a function of luck and that successful people ought to recognize that their success depended on luck and ought to have some humility. While the need for humility is an important one, and sadly absent in much modern discourse, I don’t think that is completely or even primarily what Outliersis about.

It is in fact one of the attractions of Outliers to figure out exactly what is the nature of Gladwell’s thesis. What is he proposing? On his website, Gladwell says

My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think.

The first claim, that success is achieved through ” the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances” is, I suspect, for most people, unexceptional and almost tautological. The outcomes of one’s life have to be the product of the multitudinous inputs and circumstances.

The second claim is a little more problematic. For most of the book, Gladwell seems to be making the argument that people achieve success because they were lucky: they were in the right place at the right time under the right circumstances. This hardly seems consistent with the second argument that “we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think”.

It is indisputably the case, and Gladwell marshal’s some of the evidence for this point, that the most productive societies are the most complex and that it is difficult to isolate, in such a complex environment, the relative contributions of individual effort versus societal organization. Even though a given society may be measurably more productive than others, it is also true that there is always the bell curve at work. Even in a very productive society, some individuals are more productive than others. Pointing out that some places, some times, and some social structures are more productive than others, given particular circumstances, is of relatively little value. The more interesting question is why, given those structures, times, and circumstances, some excel and others do not. Even though his main thesis may not be of particular value, I do think Gladwell is on to some useful things in Outliers and that his real message is that there are many things that we can do to improve our odds of being successful.

From page 19, we have this slightly more detailed explanation of the thesis.

In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grow up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.

So his argument is fundamentally that how far we go in terms of success depends on where we come from and from whence we started. No dispute there. In making this argument though, it often comes across as a claim that people are successful only because they are lucky. But the very stories that Gladwell tells disprove that. Every outlier he identifies share some common characteristics that distinguish them from the full range of humanity. Among these attributes are an extraordinary capacity for hard work, an intense and sustained focus on some area of expertise, a willingness to take considered risks, and yes some luck.

The argument as to whether successful people are talented or just lucky is ill-formulated and is akin to discussions about lotteries. Yes, your odds of winning any substantial lottery are astronomically against you but the only thing more certain than the odds against you winning is the odds of your winning if you don’t play. Likewise with successful people. There is an element of luck in their success but they had to be positioned for that success in the first place and that positioning came about through their own efforts – they had to have the capacity for hard work, intense focus, perseverance, etc. Those were the choices they made that determined whether, when luck brought them a chance, they would benefit from that chance. One is reminded of the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

The alternative way of looking at this is in terms of absolute and relative outcomes. The fact that Bill Gates is a billionaire technology titan is a product of being in the right place at the right time with the right background but it could only have happened through his own efforts. Other than lottery winners and heirs to a fortune, there are no accidental outliers. Nobody gets to the top of their profession or industry by accident. Whether being at the top pays you thousands or millions or billions is a matter of luck and timing. Bill Gates five years older or younger would have a different bank account but likely would have still been a top player in his field. And for every Bill Gates who was there at the right place at the right time, there are hundreds if not thousands that had similar backgrounds but did not become billionaires. If luck and circumstance were similar, how to explain the difference in outcomes? Personal choices.

There is an odd discordance here. On the one hand all the evidence that Gladwell accumulates in his stories points to personal choices as being the real differentiators between those that succeed and those that don’t and yet he seems to also want to make the argument that those that are successful were given the opportunity to be successful in ways that others weren’t. This is where Thomas Sowell becomes especially caustic. The quest for cosmic justice is a chimera. There is no capacity by which to determine what might have been under different circumstances, no way for us to determine how to equalize the playing field a priori. All we can do is to remove barriers, increase transparency, ensure the rule of law, and convey constructive knowledge to all those that wish to avail themselves of it. Or, as Sowell puts it in The Quest for Cosmic Justice.

Much of the quest for cosmic justice involves racial, regional, religious, or other categories of people who are to be restored to where they would be but for various disadvantages they suffer from various sources. Yet each group tends to trail the long shadow of its own cultural history, as well as reflecting the consequences of external influences. The history of every people is a product of innumerable cross-currents, whose timing and confluence can neither be predicted beforehand nor always untangled afterward. There is no "standard" history that everyone has or would have had "but for" peculiar circumstances of particular groups, whose circumstances can be "corrected" to conform to some norm. Unraveling all this in the quest for cosmic justice is a much more staggering task than seeking traditional justice.

If we move away from the effort to ensure that everyone has an equal start, an impossible task, and instead focus on what are the things that anyone can do regardless of their starting point and circumstances, we get into much more fruitful discussion and here is where Outliers is especially interesting. What are some of the lessons learned about success which Gladwell documents. Among the many are:

• Work hard, work long, stay focused.
• Know the rules of the game.
• Pay attention to the process
• You can’t rely on IQ alone
• Culture is consequential and predictive
• We are not constrained by culture – we can change our ways
• We make our own luck
• Be aware of history – it has a long tail that shapes the current environment
• Pay attention to initial conditions – There is an inescapable compounding effect
• Language matters
• Communication matters
• Behaviors and values are crucial

Despite the blurb promising a blueprint for making the most of human potential, there is no such explicit blueprint. The above items, though, do appear to be the effective blueprint and it would seem to be a pretty good one. Not much point in talking about social justice, inherent inequities, and cosmic unfairness. If you want to make the most of your situation and rise to the top in your particular environment, take the dozen observations to heart. And it you want to become spectacularly successful, do all of the above and be in the right place at the right time.

God save us from reading nothing but the best

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts.

Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best. But God deliver us from contenting ourselves with a steady diet of mediocrity, for it is mediocrity, rather than downright trash, that influences the majority of readers.

Zero-sum and Non-zero-sum

From Robert Wright's Nonzero, page 4

On the day James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, Crick, as Watson later recalled it, walked into their regular lunch place and announced that they had "found the secret of life." With all due respect for DNA, I would like to nominate another candidate for the secret of life. Unlike Francis Crick, I can't claim to have discovered the secret I'm touting. It was discovered — or, if you prefer, invented — about half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.

They made a basic distinction between "zero-sum" games and "non-zero-sum" games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant's gain is the other's loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player's gain needn't be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players' interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good.)

Back in the real world, things are usually not so clear-cut. A merchant and a customer, two members of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes — but not always — find their interests overlapping. To the extent that their interests do overlap, their relationship is non-zero-sum; the outcome can be win-win or lose-lose, depending on how they play the game.

Sometimes political scientists or economists break human interaction down into zero-sum and non-zero-sum components. Occasionally, evolutionary biologists do the same in looking at the way various living systems work. My contention is that, if we want to see what drives the direction of both human history and organic evolution, we should apply this perspective more systematically. Interaction among individual genes, or cells, or animals, among interest groups, or nations, or corporations, can be viewed through the lenses of game theory. What follows is a survey of human history, and of organic history, with those lenses in place. My hope is to illuminate a kind of force — the non-zero-sum dynamic — that has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far.

The survey of organic history is brief, and the survey of human history not so brief. Human history, after all, is notoriously messy. But I don't think it's nearly as messy as it's often made out to be. Indeed, even if you start the survey back when the most complex society on earth was a hunter-gatherer village, and follow it up to the present, you can capture history's basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential — that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and depth.

[snip]

You might even say that non-zero-sumness is a nuts-and-bolts, materialist version of Bergson's immaterial é lan vital; it gives a certain momentum to the basic direction of life on this planet. It explains why biological evolution, given enough time, was very likely to create highly intelligent life — life smart enough to generate technology and other forms of culture. It also explains why the ensuing evolution of technology, and of culture more broadly, was very likely to enrich and expand the social structure of that intelligent species, carrying social organization to planetary breadth. Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. All along, the relentless logic of non-zero-sumness has been pointing toward this age in which relations among nations are growing more non-zero-sum year by year.

All of this relates to It is all in how the story is told and The larger a shoal is, the smaller is the proportion of it that needs to know what is actually going on.

But what is it?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, page 85.

A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?

The larger a shoal is, the smaller is the proportion of it that needs to know what is actually going on

From Follow My Leader from The Economist.

HUMAN beings like to think of themselves as the animal kingdom’s smartest alecks. It may come as a surprise to some, therefore, that Iain Couzin of Princeton University believes they have something to learn from lesser creatures that move about in a large crowd. As he told the AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, groups of animals often make what look like wise decisions, even when most of the members of those groups are ignorant of what is going on.

[snip]

He discovered that leadership is extremely efficient. The larger a shoal is, the smaller is the proportion of it that needs to know what is actually going on for it to feed and avoid predation effectively. Indeed, having too many leaders with conflicting opinions results in confusion. At least, that is true in the model. He is now testing it in reality.

Read the whole thing. Speculative still, but interesting.

If accurate, it would seem to emulate the pricing mechanism and Hayek's Problem of Knowledge. Certainly at a macro level, the more trade there is, and the freer that trade is, the more participants none of whom know any material fraction of the whole process but for whom the pricing mechanism allows the collective group to optimize outcomes.

A database somewhere in his lower intestine

Longhorns 17, Badgers 1 by Iowahawk. A solid take down by Iowahawk of shoddy thinking and analysis proffered by Paul Krugman. This is an example of Bruce Thorton's concern about "False Knowledge" - that which we think to be true and never examine the details to verify whether it is in fact true or not. Analyzing one of the erroneous claims made by Krugman, Iowahawk comments:

Mr. Krugman . . . doesn't mention where he gets his dropout statistic from. I suspect a database somewhere in his lower intestine.

Major classes of thinking errors

From Rationality versus Intelligence by Keith E Stanovich

Psychologists have studied the major classes of thinking errors that make people less than rational. They have studied people’s tendencies to show incoherent probability assessments; to be overconfident in knowledge judgments; to ignore the alternative hypothesis; to evaluate evidence with a “my side” bias; to show inconsistent preferences because of framing effects; to over-weigh short-term rewards at the expense of long-term well-being; to allow decisions to be affected by irrelevant context; and many others.

Weather isn't climate in the months which have 'r' in them

From Walter Russell Mead in his essay Mad Meat Making Scientist Proves Climate Doomsayers Wrong.

But record cold temperatures and snowfalls so heavy that I have to dodge falling icicles descending abruptly from the ivy-covered halls of Bard College aren't the cause of my current skepticism about the alarmist predictions on climate change.

We are now in the season when the media tells us over and over again that "weather is not climate" and that the natural variations in the temperature do not, repeat not, affect the credibility of climate change. I actually believe this, although in just a few months the fiddlehead ferns will be poking up through the forest floor and the media will be back to reporting each and every hot spell as conclusive proof that climate change is already here.

My totally unscientific conclusion based on close study of the media: weather isn't climate in the months which have "r" in them. The rest of the year, it is.