We had been talking this week at work about the difficulty of making good movies from videogames. Apropos to that, Time magazine has a feature on the Ten Worst Videogame Movies, which as they observe, "is like shooting fish in a barrel with a plasma canon."
My observation is that there is actually a specific reason videogame movies are hard to do, which has to do with a fundamental limitation of game characters. In linear narrative, any screenwriting book or teacher will tell you to demonstrate the personality of the characters to the audience by the choices they make. A well-written screenplay continually forces the character to make choices, and from those choices we learn more about who they are. At the beginning of the movie, those choices are small: what do they do after work? Does he remember to buy flowers for his girlfriend? In a well-written screenplay, the choices both become harder to make and larger in consequence as the movie goes on. But the point is, the character is defined by the choices they made.
In a videogame, particularly for the main character, the choices that occur during the game are typically made by the player. Thus, nothing about the character can be defined by those choices. Typically in a videogame, the key choices that have made the character who they are, were all made prior to the beginning of the game. For a game to be fun, the choices made during the game need to be up to the player, meaning they can't define the character since every player plays differently; or, there have to be no meaningful character-defining choices made at all, and the player simply focuses on skills. The second one is actually more common, as it's much easier to develop. Either way, the actions taken by the character in the game cannot define who that character is, as far as the overall property is concerned.
Thus, almost all videogame characters fail the "of course he would" test. With a well-drawn movie character, you should know (by the end of the movie) how they would respond to a whole range of moral dilemnas, whether you saw them face that particular situation or not. Would Luke Skywalker lie on his resume to keep his job, at the expense of a co-worker? Of course not. Would Han Solo? If the money was good!
But can you project that on to most videogame characters? Almost all videogame characters are known to us from the following: their boss/organization/syndicate gives them a job to do. It's hard and there are complications. If we play the game long enough, we finish it. We don't get a chance to learn much about their moral dilemnas because either we're busy shooting aliens or because we rather than they make the choices. Would Lara Croft flirt with a friend's boyfriend? Well, how we would know, it doesn't come up much when killing bears with a pair of pistols.
Anyway, none of this proves that it's impossible to make a good movie from a videogame, it's just that even very well-known videogame characters don't give screenwriters much to go on if they want to craft a story. Personally, my guess is that the good videogame-based scripts (surely there will be some someday) will start by taking the world of the videogame and finding a side story in it; the main characters, the Marios, Laras, and Sonics of the world, are of necessity too shallow to work well.
25 April 2009
18 April 2009
...but they do have taste
The Economist's obituary this week was for Helen Levitt, a great photographer in the Henri Cartier-Bresson mold. I was lucky enough to encounter some of her photographs when I was in grad school in Boston, but most people have never heard of her. Featuring her or others worthy but not especially known shows the good side of erudition.
The Economist quote #1
From the April 4th issue's leader on "The Rich Under Attack". This is probably more delicious if you know just how pro-business the Economist usually is.
Yet, even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as this one has to admit that there was something rotten in finance: the basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risktakers are allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it all. Hence the anger.
"Gang", "King".... whichever.
I just finished reading "Gang Leader for a Day," by Sudhir Venkatesh. If you read "Freakonomics" you'll remember the chapter called "Why do Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers?" in which they looked at the economics of the drug trade. Most of the data they analyzed there came from a Indian-American grad student who had spent time in the Chicago housing projects hanging out with a drug gang. Sudhir Venkatesh is that grad student, and this book is his autobiographical account of the five years or so of his life that he spent around the Chicago housing projects, primarily in the company of "J.T." and his branch of the Black Kings drug gang.
This isn't really the kind of book you read to get a grand conclusion, all tied up and made clear; but it's a gripping journal of his life inside a world I really don't know much about. There are a ton of fascinating and harrowing moments along the way (such as when he witnesses, and the Black Kings are on the receiving end of, a drive-by shooting), and there is a sense of closure to the book, since updated housing policies catch up with the Robert Taylor projects by the end of the book (as they have, thankfully, to most high-rise projects in San Francisco).
However, Sudhir spends a lot of the time in the book trying to understand what the tenants think of the gang, and ultimately that provoked an interesting realization for me. J.T. sees the gang as beneficial, keeping order and establishing the boundaries in the projects, since for all practical purposes the police in that era did not come to the projects. At one point he declares, "there is no difference between the gang and this building." Of course, Sudhir wonders, given the gang's predilection for violence and drug abuse, whether the tenants really see it that way.
He attempts to branch out at one point and interview other residents about the economic tricks they use to survive in order to get some of that perspective. The mechanics who fix cars on the street, the woman who runs a candy store out of her apartment: he chronicles many of their adventures in ghetto-scale entrepreneurism. He's surprised by how much both J.T. and the building's tenant association president, Ms. Bailey, are interesting in hearing him retell these fascinating stories.
Of course, that interest is because they (in various combination) extract money from all such activities. Sudhir's information allows them to tighten up quite a few places where they weren't extorting as much money as they could. As one of the mechanics says angrily to Sudhir afterwards, "Man, J.T. is all over these n-----s."
On the one hand, this incident does point out that the combination of the gang and the tenant association are effectively the government of the housing project: they levy 'taxes', the gang is responsible for physical security, and the tenants' association for what passes for social services in that brutal environment. But they have the characteristics of corrupt government as well: the gang members who abuse their women get no punishment because of their position in the gang; the money is skimmed off for the organization.
The realization I had was that this is the form of government not just of brutal Chicago housing projects, but that in practice it was the form of government practiced in much of medieval Europe. As much as afterwards, all kings, dukes, earls, and lords cloaked their actions in the language of divine right, that level of government came from physical domination: the strongest, meanest guys got together, won some battles with other strong, mean guys, and as a result established the local government. If you read about the Welsh Marcher Lords or the events of English interregnums as fictionalized so well in Ken Follet's "The Pillars of the Earth," you can find that that pattern was operating even in relatively civilized England at various points: the people best-organized at wielding the violence and keeping the discipline amongst their thugs take over.
Sadly, seeing those parallel made me wonder whether, at a certain point between subsistence and prosperity, this kind of organization is a spontaneous feature of human societies. Happily, we can rise (and most current societies have risen) above this, but seeing the similarities between 12th century thugs and southside Chicago ones makes both of them seem like slightly more than just anomalies of their respective historical periods.
This isn't really the kind of book you read to get a grand conclusion, all tied up and made clear; but it's a gripping journal of his life inside a world I really don't know much about. There are a ton of fascinating and harrowing moments along the way (such as when he witnesses, and the Black Kings are on the receiving end of, a drive-by shooting), and there is a sense of closure to the book, since updated housing policies catch up with the Robert Taylor projects by the end of the book (as they have, thankfully, to most high-rise projects in San Francisco).
However, Sudhir spends a lot of the time in the book trying to understand what the tenants think of the gang, and ultimately that provoked an interesting realization for me. J.T. sees the gang as beneficial, keeping order and establishing the boundaries in the projects, since for all practical purposes the police in that era did not come to the projects. At one point he declares, "there is no difference between the gang and this building." Of course, Sudhir wonders, given the gang's predilection for violence and drug abuse, whether the tenants really see it that way.
He attempts to branch out at one point and interview other residents about the economic tricks they use to survive in order to get some of that perspective. The mechanics who fix cars on the street, the woman who runs a candy store out of her apartment: he chronicles many of their adventures in ghetto-scale entrepreneurism. He's surprised by how much both J.T. and the building's tenant association president, Ms. Bailey, are interesting in hearing him retell these fascinating stories.
Of course, that interest is because they (in various combination) extract money from all such activities. Sudhir's information allows them to tighten up quite a few places where they weren't extorting as much money as they could. As one of the mechanics says angrily to Sudhir afterwards, "Man, J.T. is all over these n-----s."
On the one hand, this incident does point out that the combination of the gang and the tenant association are effectively the government of the housing project: they levy 'taxes', the gang is responsible for physical security, and the tenants' association for what passes for social services in that brutal environment. But they have the characteristics of corrupt government as well: the gang members who abuse their women get no punishment because of their position in the gang; the money is skimmed off for the organization.
The realization I had was that this is the form of government not just of brutal Chicago housing projects, but that in practice it was the form of government practiced in much of medieval Europe. As much as afterwards, all kings, dukes, earls, and lords cloaked their actions in the language of divine right, that level of government came from physical domination: the strongest, meanest guys got together, won some battles with other strong, mean guys, and as a result established the local government. If you read about the Welsh Marcher Lords or the events of English interregnums as fictionalized so well in Ken Follet's "The Pillars of the Earth," you can find that that pattern was operating even in relatively civilized England at various points: the people best-organized at wielding the violence and keeping the discipline amongst their thugs take over.
Sadly, seeing those parallel made me wonder whether, at a certain point between subsistence and prosperity, this kind of organization is a spontaneous feature of human societies. Happily, we can rise (and most current societies have risen) above this, but seeing the similarities between 12th century thugs and southside Chicago ones makes both of them seem like slightly more than just anomalies of their respective historical periods.
13 April 2009
05 April 2009
03 April 2009
Fun Words You Might Find on a Japanese W-2
It's April, and apart from Cherry Blossoms that means I have to pay my American taxes! In my mood of helping those who live in Japan, here's another vocabulary post, this time "Words you might find on your Japanese pay stub":
勤務状況＝きんむじょうきょう＝work situation
出勤日数＝しゅっきんひすう＝days worked
給与所得＝きゅうよしょとく＝earned income
支給＝しきゅう＝payments
基本給＝きほんきゅう＝base pay
通勤手当＝つうきんてあて＝commuting allowance
通常外支払給＝つうじょうがいしはらいきゅう＝extraordinary payment
支給合計＝しきゅうごうけい＝total payments
控除＝こうじょ＝deductions
健康保険＝けんこうほけん＝health insurance
介護保険＝かいごほけん＝nursing insurance
厚生年金保険＝こうせいねんきんほけん＝welfare annuity insurance
雇用保険＝こようほけん＝unemployment insurance
所得税＝しょとくぜい＝income tax
地方税＝ちほうぜい＝local taxes
家賃＝rent
差引不足税額＝さしひきふそくぜいがく＝deducted amount of insufficient taxes
控除合計＝こうじょごうけい＝total deductions
計算資料＝けいさんしりょう＝calculation data
会社保険料計＝かいしゃほけんりょうけい＝company insurance amount
非課税支給額＝ひかぜいしきゅうがく＝tax-exempt allowance
課税対象額＝かぜいたいしょうがく＝amount subject to taxation
振込支給額＝ふりこみしきゅうがく＝bank transfer amount
現金支給額＝げんきんしきゅうがく＝cash payment amount
差引支給額＝さしひきしきゅうがく＝deducted payment amount
勤務状況＝きんむじょうきょう＝work situation
出勤日数＝しゅっきんひすう＝days worked
給与所得＝きゅうよしょとく＝earned income
支給＝しきゅう＝payments
基本給＝きほんきゅう＝base pay
通勤手当＝つうきんてあて＝commuting allowance
通常外支払給＝つうじょうがいしはらいきゅう＝extraordinary payment
支給合計＝しきゅうごうけい＝total payments
控除＝こうじょ＝deductions
健康保険＝けんこうほけん＝health insurance
介護保険＝かいごほけん＝nursing insurance
厚生年金保険＝こうせいねんきんほけん＝welfare annuity insurance
雇用保険＝こようほけん＝unemployment insurance
所得税＝しょとくぜい＝income tax
地方税＝ちほうぜい＝local taxes
家賃＝rent
差引不足税額＝さしひきふそくぜいがく＝deducted amount of insufficient taxes
控除合計＝こうじょごうけい＝total deductions
計算資料＝けいさんしりょう＝calculation data
会社保険料計＝かいしゃほけんりょうけい＝company insurance amount
非課税支給額＝ひかぜいしきゅうがく＝tax-exempt allowance
課税対象額＝かぜいたいしょうがく＝amount subject to taxation
振込支給額＝ふりこみしきゅうがく＝bank transfer amount
現金支給額＝げんきんしきゅうがく＝cash payment amount
差引支給額＝さしひきしきゅうがく＝deducted payment amount
16 March 2009
Hangin' at the Love Sculpture
There's a reproduction of the famous Philadelphia LOVE sculpture near Shinjuku. It's a popular meeting place, not least because of the unusual circular traffic light fixture in front of the sculpture. This couple ambles past on a chilly night.
 |
| From MyokoSuginohara-Mar2009 |
The Japanese Face of Abandonment
It took me quite a while to tune into it, but there are a lot of abandoned building in Tokyo.
The Japanese abandoned building movement was pioneered by the irregularly-published magazine Land's End, which I was lucky enough to meet the publishers of at Design Festa. But, once I started watching closely, there are abandoned buildings all over Tokyo. There's a huge former corporate reasearch center sitting empty right near Hiro-o station, and closer to home, there's an abandoned junior high school just down the street from my house:
It's very Japanese and all: the place isn't overflowing with garbage or anything. In fact, that's what makes abandoned buildings relatively hard to spot in Tokyo: they look a lot like any other building, except no one goes in or out.
The sign says, basically, "Keep Out."
It's not hard to figure out what's going on with this particular building: the Japanese birthrate is incredibly low (only Italy is lower among developed countries), and so there's just no need for a lot of former schools. And this is in suburban Tokyo, which is doing relatively well in terms of number of children: smaller and more rural areas are really lacking in kids. So, at some point, they just decided to lock the place up and hope more kids show up someday. It'll probably be this way for 20+ years.
The Japanese abandoned building movement was pioneered by the irregularly-published magazine Land's End, which I was lucky enough to meet the publishers of at Design Festa. But, once I started watching closely, there are abandoned buildings all over Tokyo. There's a huge former corporate reasearch center sitting empty right near Hiro-o station, and closer to home, there's an abandoned junior high school just down the street from my house:
It's very Japanese and all: the place isn't overflowing with garbage or anything. In fact, that's what makes abandoned buildings relatively hard to spot in Tokyo: they look a lot like any other building, except no one goes in or out.
The sign says, basically, "Keep Out."
It's not hard to figure out what's going on with this particular building: the Japanese birthrate is incredibly low (only Italy is lower among developed countries), and so there's just no need for a lot of former schools. And this is in suburban Tokyo, which is doing relatively well in terms of number of children: smaller and more rural areas are really lacking in kids. So, at some point, they just decided to lock the place up and hope more kids show up someday. It'll probably be this way for 20+ years.
15 March 2009
You deserve a hot dog today... and it's what's for breakfast!
McDonald's Japan has a new ad campaign here. They really don't impact on my life much (I'm not a big fast food eater), so the last campaign (the introduction of the Quarter Pounder to Japan) didn't really catch my eye. But this one is too good to ignore: they're introduced the McDonald's hot dog:
Better yet, it's (wait for it)... a breakfast food! That's right, the hot dog isn't on the normal menu, it's on the breakfast menu, available only until 10:30am. So the next time you wake up in the morning, run on over to MickeyD's for a hot dog! Who needs cereal anyway.
Better yet, it's (wait for it)... a breakfast food! That's right, the hot dog isn't on the normal menu, it's on the breakfast menu, available only until 10:30am. So the next time you wake up in the morning, run on over to MickeyD's for a hot dog! Who needs cereal anyway.
13 March 2009
Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"
This started as reactions to my Facebook status, but my response got a little long, so I moved it here. In an attempt to, as Dan said, categorize my discontent, here are my ripostes to several sections of the book.
In the initial hockey-player chapter, Gladwell points out a huge statistical anomaly associated with top-end sport figures in many sports and countries: their birthdays are not randomly scattered throughout the year, but rather concentrated in a 3-4 month period. His theory is that when elite teams are first formed (for the sports and countries in question, around the age of 10), the fact that the kids born just after the eligibility cutoff date are older and therefore bigger gives them an advantage. This initial advantage is maintained all the way through the school experience (since it's judged by cutoff date) and is strongly reinforced by the extra training, coaching, and practice received by the athletes chosen for those initial elite teams.
This all seems pretty reasonable, and he argues his case well; as he says, kids born in the second half of the eligibility period have a much lower chance of getting into elite teams in sports and countries where those teams form early, such as Canada's hockey leagues.
But... so? At one point Gladwell states, "If we took coutermeasures such as running hockey leagues twice a year, Canada would have twice as many top-level hockey players." That statement is a stunning example of what he later calls lack of practical intelligence!
No, we wouldn't have twice as many top-level hockey players; the number of such players is by definition constant. It's limited by the number of elite junior hockey teams, the number of elite junior hockey coaches, etc. There are only be one champion, no matter how many compete. So, running a second set of hockey leagues (which would lead to playing hockey all summer, by the way) wouldn't affect Canada's supply of hockey stars at all - it would, logically, raise the level of skill of those stars slightly.
But how much would it even do that? As Gladwell points out, the initial difference among players is very slight; most of the reason hockey stars are better than lower-level players is the additional coaching, support, and practice time. Since those effects wouldn't change, the huge overhead of adding a second season would only address inequity within that small initial difference. In practice, the overhead of running the alternate leagues would probably dilute the effectiveness of coaches and training, and the net result might well be a lowering of the level of play at the end of the program.
Gladwell states that hockey is not a meritocracy because of its prejudice towards people born in the first part of the year. Actually, all meritocracies have rules, and people are advanced on the basis of those rules. For example, the Chinese mandarinate favored those whose minds were well-suited to rote memorization, and systematically discriminated against those who practiced innovative thinking. That may have been bad for the country in the long run, but it was still a widely recognized meritocracy.
Gladwell is correct that the rules for Canadian hockey contains clauses that favor those born in the first few months of the year. That doesn't make it invalid, or not a meritocracy.
Gladwell has a strong aversion to the story of an individual succeeding on their own merits. In the first chapter, Gladwell baldly declares that "In 'Outliers', I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work." Instead, he shows how personal computer entrepreneurs of the late 1970s, American industrialists of the 1830s, his own grandmother, and New York Jewish lawyers of the 1930s were all born at the right time and place to have the best chance of success in their chosen field. He writes, "What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities."
I read through his examples and stories and come away with the utterly opposite conclusion. To me, what distinguishes all of the people he examines, very notably his maternal grandmother, is their individual actions and drive, and the way they took advantage of their opportunities. The individuals he studies were demographically advantaged for various reasons; there were accidents of timing and history that gave them opportunities not available to their peers just a few years in either direction. In fact, virtually every person he studies is quite aware they were lucky for their opportunities and says so.
But does that means what distinguishes them is their luck? I have been around elite schools for a fair portion of my life, I've come to realize that a lot of people have pretty amazing, lucky opportunities. Few of us take advantage of those to achieve stunning levels of success (and many fail to even achieve moderate levels of happiness). While those of us who have worked around Steve Jobs or Bill Joy may have either liked or disliked the experience, few will assert that these are ordinary individuals, even if ranked among those with the opportunity to attend elite schools.
In the end, it probably comes down to the question, "distinguishes them from who?" If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from a peasant tenant farmer in Laxmangarh village in India, you would have say it was that Oppenheimer was born into a middle-class family, and that he was smart. If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from the tens of thousands of other smart, middle- or upper-class men who graduated from college the same year he did, Gladwell's explanation no longer suffices.
An even bigger thing I think Gladwell misses is the question of why we are fascinated by the "Horatio Alger" stories that surround many of these people (or to use his phrasing, why we focus on what these people are like, rather than focusing on the time, socioeconomic class, and place of their birth). The reason that we humans focus on those aspects of the stories is simple: we can't change our birth year, birth country or native culture. We can only change our future behavior.
Knowing that to be a billionaire Silicon Valley success story I need to have been born five years earlier than I was is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Knowing that had I been born in China I would likely have learned to count earlier in my childhood is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Etc., etc. I believe the reason we're more interested in stories about successful people's personal habits, business strategies, and so forth is fundamentally because those elements have potential applicability to our own lives; knowing that their junior high school had access to free timesharing terminals, or that they were born in a certain year, has no applicability to our future choices.
On the other hand, knowing that in his senior year of high school, when Bill Gates got an opportunity to go onsite for three months to write commercial software at Bonneville Power Station, that he grabbed it and managed to talk his high school administration into classifying this as "independent study," is valuable. It provides a lesson in taking advantage of opportunities even if they seem impossible.
One of the sections of the book I liked somewhat better is the section about the 10,000-hour rule: the idea that true mastery of a skill requires 10,000 hours spent honing that skill. I haven't specifically run into this number before, but it certainly resonates with me.
However, this chapter, especially the section about music students at Berlin's Academy of Music, leaves the most important question unanswered. For review, the basic finding was that the teacher's evaluation of the student's talent level correlated nearly perfectly with the total number of hours the students had spent practicing their instrument: students evaluated the highest had spent 10,000 hours; students in the next stratum 8,000 hours; and the lower-ranked students 4,000 hours.
Gladwell then makes the classic statistics mistake of equating correlation with causality: he assumes that the reason the top-ranked students are top-ranked is because of their playing time. In fact, he never asks why those students got the most playing time.
In fact, as anyone who's played an instrument and especially anyone who's been forced to take music lessons they didn't enjoy can attest, a very plausible reason is that when you're good at something, it is usually more intrinsically enjoyable. It was true from the time I began to program that I was better at programming than virtually everyone around me. Thus, my intrinsic rewards for programming were higher than virtually anyone else in my peer group, and thus I spent more time programming.
Music is an incredibly clear example of this: while probably anyone can learn a certain level of achievement in music, unless you intrinsically enjoy it, you will plateau quickly. The realization that actually, the intrinsic quality of the person drives how much time they put into their endeavor seriously undercuts Gladwell's argument that the individual qualities of the person are unimportant.
The parts of Outliers that I liked the best, and the places where I think it's recommendations have the most weight, is when it veers closest to public policy. It's hard to look at the results in part 3 of the "Marita's Bargain" chapter and not conclude that more school is an unequivocally good thing for children from low-income backgrounds. I find it very hard to argue with the cultural background theory described in the "Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes."
Though I don't personally like the fact that the "concerned cultivation" parenting style discussed in part 3 of "The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2" is so much better-suited to our modern world than the older parenting style, this isn't the first book I've read explaining it's advantages.
In the end, I think the biggest reason the book doesn't sit well with me was its avowed ambition to prove that the personal explanations of success don't work. I found that on the contrary it showed just how important personal drive and ambition are in making use of cultural and demographic advantages. I don't have an issue with the idea that personal explanations of success are insufficient, that we also have to look at cultural backgrounds and demographics as well as the individual to achieve a balanced understanding, but Gladwell aims for more than that.
I think nothing expresses the limits of Gladwell's thesis more than the story of his own grandmother and mother. Gladwell describes the various steps by which his maternal family climbed up the social ladder in Jamaica, with his grandmother taking many steps which eventually propelled his mother and aunt to college overseas. In particular, he notes that the establishment of the all-island scholarships which enabled his mother to attend an elite high school came in 1941, and that were she just a few years older the scholarships wouldn't have been available.
And yet, everything about this story suggests that the key actor in it is not the parliament's establishment of the scholarship, but the grandmother's will to give her daughters every possible measure of advantage. His maternal grandmother is described as a force of nature, and while I have no doubt that the all-island scholarships were a boon for his mother, I also am left certain that the grandmother would have found some other way to get her daughters a high school education had the scholarships arrived too late. To me, this seems to fly in the face of his central argument in the book.
The Hockey Example
In the initial hockey-player chapter, Gladwell points out a huge statistical anomaly associated with top-end sport figures in many sports and countries: their birthdays are not randomly scattered throughout the year, but rather concentrated in a 3-4 month period. His theory is that when elite teams are first formed (for the sports and countries in question, around the age of 10), the fact that the kids born just after the eligibility cutoff date are older and therefore bigger gives them an advantage. This initial advantage is maintained all the way through the school experience (since it's judged by cutoff date) and is strongly reinforced by the extra training, coaching, and practice received by the athletes chosen for those initial elite teams.
This all seems pretty reasonable, and he argues his case well; as he says, kids born in the second half of the eligibility period have a much lower chance of getting into elite teams in sports and countries where those teams form early, such as Canada's hockey leagues.
But... so? At one point Gladwell states, "If we took coutermeasures such as running hockey leagues twice a year, Canada would have twice as many top-level hockey players." That statement is a stunning example of what he later calls lack of practical intelligence!
No, we wouldn't have twice as many top-level hockey players; the number of such players is by definition constant. It's limited by the number of elite junior hockey teams, the number of elite junior hockey coaches, etc. There are only be one champion, no matter how many compete. So, running a second set of hockey leagues (which would lead to playing hockey all summer, by the way) wouldn't affect Canada's supply of hockey stars at all - it would, logically, raise the level of skill of those stars slightly.
But how much would it even do that? As Gladwell points out, the initial difference among players is very slight; most of the reason hockey stars are better than lower-level players is the additional coaching, support, and practice time. Since those effects wouldn't change, the huge overhead of adding a second season would only address inequity within that small initial difference. In practice, the overhead of running the alternate leagues would probably dilute the effectiveness of coaches and training, and the net result might well be a lowering of the level of play at the end of the program.
Gladwell states that hockey is not a meritocracy because of its prejudice towards people born in the first part of the year. Actually, all meritocracies have rules, and people are advanced on the basis of those rules. For example, the Chinese mandarinate favored those whose minds were well-suited to rote memorization, and systematically discriminated against those who practiced innovative thinking. That may have been bad for the country in the long run, but it was still a widely recognized meritocracy.
Gladwell is correct that the rules for Canadian hockey contains clauses that favor those born in the first few months of the year. That doesn't make it invalid, or not a meritocracy.
The Self-made Man Story
Gladwell has a strong aversion to the story of an individual succeeding on their own merits. In the first chapter, Gladwell baldly declares that "In 'Outliers', I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work." Instead, he shows how personal computer entrepreneurs of the late 1970s, American industrialists of the 1830s, his own grandmother, and New York Jewish lawyers of the 1930s were all born at the right time and place to have the best chance of success in their chosen field. He writes, "What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities."
I read through his examples and stories and come away with the utterly opposite conclusion. To me, what distinguishes all of the people he examines, very notably his maternal grandmother, is their individual actions and drive, and the way they took advantage of their opportunities. The individuals he studies were demographically advantaged for various reasons; there were accidents of timing and history that gave them opportunities not available to their peers just a few years in either direction. In fact, virtually every person he studies is quite aware they were lucky for their opportunities and says so.
But does that means what distinguishes them is their luck? I have been around elite schools for a fair portion of my life, I've come to realize that a lot of people have pretty amazing, lucky opportunities. Few of us take advantage of those to achieve stunning levels of success (and many fail to even achieve moderate levels of happiness). While those of us who have worked around Steve Jobs or Bill Joy may have either liked or disliked the experience, few will assert that these are ordinary individuals, even if ranked among those with the opportunity to attend elite schools.
In the end, it probably comes down to the question, "distinguishes them from who?" If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from a peasant tenant farmer in Laxmangarh village in India, you would have say it was that Oppenheimer was born into a middle-class family, and that he was smart. If you want to ask what distinguishes Robert Oppenheimer from the tens of thousands of other smart, middle- or upper-class men who graduated from college the same year he did, Gladwell's explanation no longer suffices.
The Practical Intelligence behind the Self-Made Man Story
An even bigger thing I think Gladwell misses is the question of why we are fascinated by the "Horatio Alger" stories that surround many of these people (or to use his phrasing, why we focus on what these people are like, rather than focusing on the time, socioeconomic class, and place of their birth). The reason that we humans focus on those aspects of the stories is simple: we can't change our birth year, birth country or native culture. We can only change our future behavior.
Knowing that to be a billionaire Silicon Valley success story I need to have been born five years earlier than I was is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Knowing that had I been born in China I would likely have learned to count earlier in my childhood is of no use to me in affecting my marginal future success. Etc., etc. I believe the reason we're more interested in stories about successful people's personal habits, business strategies, and so forth is fundamentally because those elements have potential applicability to our own lives; knowing that their junior high school had access to free timesharing terminals, or that they were born in a certain year, has no applicability to our future choices.
On the other hand, knowing that in his senior year of high school, when Bill Gates got an opportunity to go onsite for three months to write commercial software at Bonneville Power Station, that he grabbed it and managed to talk his high school administration into classifying this as "independent study," is valuable. It provides a lesson in taking advantage of opportunities even if they seem impossible.
The Unasked Question about the 10,000-hour Rule
One of the sections of the book I liked somewhat better is the section about the 10,000-hour rule: the idea that true mastery of a skill requires 10,000 hours spent honing that skill. I haven't specifically run into this number before, but it certainly resonates with me.
However, this chapter, especially the section about music students at Berlin's Academy of Music, leaves the most important question unanswered. For review, the basic finding was that the teacher's evaluation of the student's talent level correlated nearly perfectly with the total number of hours the students had spent practicing their instrument: students evaluated the highest had spent 10,000 hours; students in the next stratum 8,000 hours; and the lower-ranked students 4,000 hours.
Gladwell then makes the classic statistics mistake of equating correlation with causality: he assumes that the reason the top-ranked students are top-ranked is because of their playing time. In fact, he never asks why those students got the most playing time.
In fact, as anyone who's played an instrument and especially anyone who's been forced to take music lessons they didn't enjoy can attest, a very plausible reason is that when you're good at something, it is usually more intrinsically enjoyable. It was true from the time I began to program that I was better at programming than virtually everyone around me. Thus, my intrinsic rewards for programming were higher than virtually anyone else in my peer group, and thus I spent more time programming.
Music is an incredibly clear example of this: while probably anyone can learn a certain level of achievement in music, unless you intrinsically enjoy it, you will plateau quickly. The realization that actually, the intrinsic quality of the person drives how much time they put into their endeavor seriously undercuts Gladwell's argument that the individual qualities of the person are unimportant.
The Good Parts of the Book
The parts of Outliers that I liked the best, and the places where I think it's recommendations have the most weight, is when it veers closest to public policy. It's hard to look at the results in part 3 of the "Marita's Bargain" chapter and not conclude that more school is an unequivocally good thing for children from low-income backgrounds. I find it very hard to argue with the cultural background theory described in the "Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes."
Though I don't personally like the fact that the "concerned cultivation" parenting style discussed in part 3 of "The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2" is so much better-suited to our modern world than the older parenting style, this isn't the first book I've read explaining it's advantages.
In Conclusion
In the end, I think the biggest reason the book doesn't sit well with me was its avowed ambition to prove that the personal explanations of success don't work. I found that on the contrary it showed just how important personal drive and ambition are in making use of cultural and demographic advantages. I don't have an issue with the idea that personal explanations of success are insufficient, that we also have to look at cultural backgrounds and demographics as well as the individual to achieve a balanced understanding, but Gladwell aims for more than that.
I think nothing expresses the limits of Gladwell's thesis more than the story of his own grandmother and mother. Gladwell describes the various steps by which his maternal family climbed up the social ladder in Jamaica, with his grandmother taking many steps which eventually propelled his mother and aunt to college overseas. In particular, he notes that the establishment of the all-island scholarships which enabled his mother to attend an elite high school came in 1941, and that were she just a few years older the scholarships wouldn't have been available.
And yet, everything about this story suggests that the key actor in it is not the parliament's establishment of the scholarship, but the grandmother's will to give her daughters every possible measure of advantage. His maternal grandmother is described as a force of nature, and while I have no doubt that the all-island scholarships were a boon for his mother, I also am left certain that the grandmother would have found some other way to get her daughters a high school education had the scholarships arrived too late. To me, this seems to fly in the face of his central argument in the book.
04 March 2009
Convergence is Over
As a Media Lab alum, I have to follow this stuff at least a little bit, so I appreciated Paul Graham's post:
Why TV Lost
Why TV Lost
17 February 2009
Sleeping in Japan
My friend Karen asked this question, and I thought the answer might be interesting to others, so I'm reposting the answer here.
On Feb 17, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Karen wrote:
Leo replied:
Well, here in Tokyo the only people sleeping on sidewalks most of the time are the homeless. That said, yes, seeing people asleep is much more normal here than in the west.
The biggest category is sleeping on the train. To understand that, you have to remember that in Tokyo train commutes that take 1.5 to 2 hours each way are considered quite normal. Given that the Japanese also work reasonably long hours (this sure isn't France), where do they get the time? Answer: they sleep less at home. And, when you're only sleeping 4-5 hours a night at home, it's important to use your train time for extra sleep. Everyone here has had the experience of the person sitting next to you on the train falling asleep on your shoulder (certainly, everyone with broad shoulders has had this experience). So, seeing somebody asleep on the train isn't considered noteworthy.
The next biggest category I've seen is sleeping at the office. Of course, some of this is because of the reason above. However, another reason for sleeping at your desk has to do with the Japanese concept of work: a typical Japanese feels compelled to be at work for about the same amount of time everyone else at work is at work. My friend Beth came up with the perfect phrase for this: in a Japanese company, it's not about how much you get done; it's about how much you are seen to be working.
Because of that, there will be times when a Japanese person feels compelled to stay at work, even though they're so tired they realize they're not going to get anything done. And thus, sleeping at their desk is a rational response. It's very widespread here: the first time I ever visited an Anime studio, I came into a room of about 20 desks, and three people were full hard asleep with their heads plopped down on their drawing table. "Oh wow," I said, "you must have just had a big deadline."
"No," my host replied, "it's actually a pretty light week, why do you ask?"
In terms of the pictures on that blog page above, the traffic monitor asleep on his scooter, or the couple asleep on the bench in the park are just extensions of sleeping at one's desk. Of course, the other big difference in Japan is that there's basically no crime, so you can fall asleep in public without worrying your wallet will be gone when you wake up. The people asleep on benches are probably catching a few lunchtime ZZZs.
Last but not least, and most relevant to the people asleep on the ground, Japan has an incredible tolerance for public drunkenness. The first time I ever visited Japan, I got to my hotel about 11pm and decided to take a walk. Unbeknownst to me, the street I was walking down led towards one of the major train stations where people need to catch the last train of the day (for their two-hour commute home). The street was filled with drunken Japanese businessmen staggering towards the station. There was a group of three where the middle guy was being literally carried by his buddies on either side. I saw several people casually taking a leak at the side of the road, and evidence of numerous people getting sick as well. And it was a weekday night!
If people are in that condition and not in the company of friends, they may well find themselves asleep on a piece of sidewalk somewhere (the guy asleep with his briefcase at the bottom of the stairs is a classic). While that blog would make you think it's extremely common, I find that while it's not unusual to see drunk people asleep on the sidewalk, it's not an every-night kind of thing (unlike sleeping on the train, which is very normal). Perhaps in southern Japan where the climate is milder things are different?
Anyway, yes, in general I see people out in the world asleep here more often than I did in America! Probably a longer answer than Karen wanted...
On Feb 17, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Karen wrote:
Is this true? People sleeping in public like this in Japan? Seems so weird when the idea behind about leaving your shoes at the front door of a house is to keep from tracking in the dirt from the ground outside.
http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1096/Japan+Public+Sleeping.html
Leo replied:
Well, here in Tokyo the only people sleeping on sidewalks most of the time are the homeless. That said, yes, seeing people asleep is much more normal here than in the west.
The biggest category is sleeping on the train. To understand that, you have to remember that in Tokyo train commutes that take 1.5 to 2 hours each way are considered quite normal. Given that the Japanese also work reasonably long hours (this sure isn't France), where do they get the time? Answer: they sleep less at home. And, when you're only sleeping 4-5 hours a night at home, it's important to use your train time for extra sleep. Everyone here has had the experience of the person sitting next to you on the train falling asleep on your shoulder (certainly, everyone with broad shoulders has had this experience). So, seeing somebody asleep on the train isn't considered noteworthy.
The next biggest category I've seen is sleeping at the office. Of course, some of this is because of the reason above. However, another reason for sleeping at your desk has to do with the Japanese concept of work: a typical Japanese feels compelled to be at work for about the same amount of time everyone else at work is at work. My friend Beth came up with the perfect phrase for this: in a Japanese company, it's not about how much you get done; it's about how much you are seen to be working.
Because of that, there will be times when a Japanese person feels compelled to stay at work, even though they're so tired they realize they're not going to get anything done. And thus, sleeping at their desk is a rational response. It's very widespread here: the first time I ever visited an Anime studio, I came into a room of about 20 desks, and three people were full hard asleep with their heads plopped down on their drawing table. "Oh wow," I said, "you must have just had a big deadline."
"No," my host replied, "it's actually a pretty light week, why do you ask?"
In terms of the pictures on that blog page above, the traffic monitor asleep on his scooter, or the couple asleep on the bench in the park are just extensions of sleeping at one's desk. Of course, the other big difference in Japan is that there's basically no crime, so you can fall asleep in public without worrying your wallet will be gone when you wake up. The people asleep on benches are probably catching a few lunchtime ZZZs.
Last but not least, and most relevant to the people asleep on the ground, Japan has an incredible tolerance for public drunkenness. The first time I ever visited Japan, I got to my hotel about 11pm and decided to take a walk. Unbeknownst to me, the street I was walking down led towards one of the major train stations where people need to catch the last train of the day (for their two-hour commute home). The street was filled with drunken Japanese businessmen staggering towards the station. There was a group of three where the middle guy was being literally carried by his buddies on either side. I saw several people casually taking a leak at the side of the road, and evidence of numerous people getting sick as well. And it was a weekday night!
If people are in that condition and not in the company of friends, they may well find themselves asleep on a piece of sidewalk somewhere (the guy asleep with his briefcase at the bottom of the stairs is a classic). While that blog would make you think it's extremely common, I find that while it's not unusual to see drunk people asleep on the sidewalk, it's not an every-night kind of thing (unlike sleeping on the train, which is very normal). Perhaps in southern Japan where the climate is milder things are different?
Anyway, yes, in general I see people out in the world asleep here more often than I did in America! Probably a longer answer than Karen wanted...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)