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How the Ivy League Broke America
The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock has found that experts are generally terrible at making predictions about future events. In fact, he’s found that the more prominent the expert, the less accurate their predictions. Tetlock says this is because experts’ views are too locked in—they use their knowl... See more
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
Social engineers
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people: What does this person care about, and how driven are they to get good at it? We shouldn’t just be looking for skillful teenage test-takers; we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
One observational study that followed four children between the ages of 14 months and 5 years found that they made an average of 107 inquiries an hour.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
What was that like for the researchers, the parents, the kids. Are the researchers a part of the kids’ childhood memories? in what capacity?
Talent and even effort cannot, as the UCLA Law School professor Joseph Fishkin has observed, “be isolated from circumstances of birth.”
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict. He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning—in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Brasília, or construct a sys... See more
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
“What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
By focusing on only those parts of the forest that seemed instrumental to their uses, the planners failed to see the forest accurately. In trying to standardize and control the growth process, the planners murdered the trees.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
to work in isolation is the death of all of us.
Any body we identify is not a single object but a collective of tiny objects or particles.
If the relationships are not recognised before taking action, you might end up doing more harm than good.
These results suggest that sometimes talent inheres in the team, not the individual. In an effective meritocracy, we’d want to find people who are fantastic team builders, who have excellent communication and bonding skills. Coaches sometimes talk about certain athletes as “glue guys,” players who have that ineffable ability to make a team greater ... See more