Notes: What the Dog Saw

New Yorker mag essays by M. Gladwell.

"Blowing Up" -- about Nassim Taleb.

• He never sells options. Only buys them. On both sides. Out-of-the-money options. 
• "We still know nothing."
• second book, The Black Swan. 

"John Rock's Error" - about birth control Pill.

• Dr. Pike: "The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. 
• fault of the haphazard nature of science, which all too often produces progress in advance of understanding. 

"Open Secrets" - Enron.

• differences between puzzle and mysteries. Puzzle need enough info; Mysteries filter through the too much info, open-ended solution. 
• Puzzles are "transmitter dependent" - turn on what we are told. Mysteries are "receiver-dependent" - turn on the skills of the listener. 

"Million-Dollar Murray" - homelessness and power-law distribution solutions.

• Power law - small percentage doing all the damage. 
• Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right bc they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve them; little appeal to the left bc of their emphasis on efficiency over fairness. 

"Art of Failure" - choking vs. panic.

• explicit learning - thinking about it; eventually, implicit learning -  takes place outside of awareness. 
• Under conditions of stress, the explicit learning sometimes takes over. That's what it means to choke. 
• Panic shuts down our thinking; thinking too little; narrow thinking. 
• Under stereotype threat (under pressure), they overthink and don't do well on standardized tests. But on those tests, you need quick processing, intuitions. 

"Blowup" - Challenger explosion.

• Creation of ABS brake systems - people drove more recklessly; they consumed the risk reduction. 

"Late Bloomers"

• Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.
• The Cezannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition. 
• Creativity has two types -- conceptual and experimental. 
• late bloomers -- his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. 

"Most Likely to Succeed" - quarterback problem.

• Teacher effects dwarf school effects. School system has a quarterback problem. How to find a great teacher. How to find a great NFL QB.
• Of all teacher elements -- feedback the most important. Individualized feedback. Also, teacher's withitness. Non-verbal presence.