Word: ve
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your last book, Outliers, you talked about how success comes not just through genetics or hard work but through context - the situations we stumble into fortuitously. Can you talk a little bit about your own lucky breaks? I've had millions. I was in one of the last generations to sign on with newspapers when newspapers were still hiring lots of young people. To go to the New Yorker and get the editor I got were lucky breaks. I'm also lucky to be an outsider in America. A lot of what Americans take for granted I think...
...ve talked before about the deficiencies of the U.S. public-education system. If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan - who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools - what would you do? There's precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I'd think of myself as a venture capitalist, fund as many wacky and inventive ideas as I could, and closely monitor them...
...ve always been fascinated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. They do really, really well in sports. It's not correct to say these schools are dysfunctional; they're highly functional in certain areas. So I've always wondered about using the principles of sports in the classroom. Go same sex; do everything in teams; have teams compete with each other. I'd like to try that. I don't know whether it will work, but it's certainly worth a shot, and we could learn something really useful...
...curious about your take on the statistics revolution in baseball and, increasingly, basketball. You've cautioned against assessing players through measurements like height or arm strength. Some of the ideas in Blink would also seem to support old scouting models, in which you just take the guy who looks like he plays the best. My take on it is that what you're looking for is a balance between these two things. I remember once having a conversation with a top executive with the Toronto Raptors. I asked her about the stats revolution in basketball and she just kind...
...society, as you've pointed out, we're not very good at making these predictions. We use measurements like IQ or the SAT or the Wonderlic test, and we're unable to determine if a budding lawyer or a budding quarterback is going to be any good. How can we get better at making predictions? Certain kinds of predictions are impossible. If you want to find out if someone can do the job, you have to let them do the job. We should be experimenting with people too. I feel very strongly about the notion that if you want...