BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Videos from each extreme.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Videos from each extreme.
I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's two best sellers, Blink and The Tipping Point, and found them fairly underwhelming. Both were interesting and entertaining and informative, but they didn't have any real stickiness in my mind, or coherence in themselves. They were just a bunch of interesting anecdotes and statistics, but they didn't coalesce into a unified, persuasive whole.
And sure, that's a pretty high standard for any book to meet, which is probably why I didn't think they were that great; my expectations going in were rather high, after hearing great things about them for so long.
That said, I will highly recommend this video. It's a speech he gave in 2005 in which he talks about the usefulness (or not) of elite university educations. He argues that they're not very useful at all, and makes a pretty compelling case. His main point is that elite colleges, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, aren't anything special at turning students into successful adults. The reason most people who come out of those colleges succeed is that those colleges only admit people who are very likely to succeed no matter where they go to college. Gladwell's comparison, which took a while to make sense, is to modeling agencies. They don't make people beautiful or turn them into models; they simply select people who are already beautiful to join their crew of models.
So it's not that Yale does something to students during their 4 or 5 years that makes them achievers, it's that Yale gets to select the cream of the crop of 18 year olds, and since they only pick the best ones, of course the majority of the ones they pick will be successful. It's a selection bias.
Gladwell has a lot of data points to argue his conclusion. Among the most interesting was when they did matched pair studies on students who were accepted to elite universities, but didn't go there. They couldn't afford it or wanted to stay closer to home or whatever. Their salaries, 10 and 20 years after college, were essentially identical to the those of students who were just like them at 18, but who did go to the elite schools.
That surprised me.
The selection bias part was obvious, once Gladwell pointed it out, but I believed the whole, "The connections you make in the school will propel you to success." logic you so often hear espoused as dogma. As he argued, active, motivated, likely-to-be-successful people make contacts wherever they are, and you can meet plenty of people who will further your career at any college with reasonable academic requirements.
Anyway, check out the video. It's about half an hour and the sound quality is pretty good. This is the sort of thing I listen to while cooking or doing housework, and it's informative and far more entertaining than say, watching Mtv. (More on that below.)
For a change of pace and value, here's the Mtv VMAs in 2 minutes, by Best Week Ever. I recommend you not click it, if you're like me and haven't watched Mtv since about the time Beavis and Butthead were still on. It will bore you, but will also provide a useful reminder of why you no longer watch Mtv.
I made it through 45 seconds, my twitching mouse finger finally descending on the stop button when the Pussycat Dolls won something other than best transvestite novelty act. At least I'd heard of them, though. Some accountant-looking guy named Chris Brown won best male video, which they showed immediately after Britney Spears won best female video, and my surprise at that, "who the hell is he?" moment was all that kept me going after Britney's silver astronaut pity fuck.
