It would be interesting to see the breakdown of athletes at Harvard, including wealth, race, academic ranking, and athletic ranking. Two points: in my experience, many top athletes at top academic schools are not white and there is often an assumption that they were admitted with lesser grades/scores. Also, in many of the ivy league schools, the obscure sports are funded by very wealthy alumni, so filling those spots is a way to bring money into the school. In the end, I suspect that Harvard would be thrilled to fill their brochures with photos of a wildly diverse squash team if players from the various racial groups could be recruited.
I'd be interested in that as well, Dewey. In my n=1 of being an Ivy League athlete, the sports that Gladwell was talking about were mostly white, although they were also basically entirely filled with kids from private schools (because only those schools have most of the sports in question), so not sure how to disentangle those. As far as the obscure sports being funded by wealthy alumni, I wonder to what extent that's the case in terms of overall expenditures. And if the money is earmarked for the sport, then does it matter for the university overall? In any case, it does seem to me that a lot of the less competitive sports provide a lever by which an institution can calibrate various proportions, whether that's to get fewer or more minorities, or men, or fewer or more wealthy students, or whatever it is they feel like they should titrate. I can see arguments for and against that, but the explanations in the lawsuits don't seem very forthcoming.
Ex Harvard Rower. The Ivy League is now the training ground for international rowing. Last Olympics 30 or more Ivy grads across all teams. It’s like French swimming. Yale had one American born rower on their top 2 men’s 8’s last year. It’s brutally tough.
Second. Harvard has data on alumni giving. The dirty secret is the athletes give substatially more than non athletes. In fact STEM grads in general give less. Padding athletics is about developing future revenue streams.
Indeed, the Ivy League is the development pipeline for a number of sports. Even if athletes do give substantially more than non-athletes, I'm not sure that bears on Gladwell's point. If part of the idea is giving preference to athletes in sports that mostly higher SES people participate in, I would expect them to give more than other students just based on SES, and would assume that is part of the admissions strategy. (I know some DIII schools actually use the opportunity to play football to get students who will pay full tuition.) In any case, I appreciate the comment, and I'd be curious to know how the overall amount of athlete giving to non-athletics parts of the university compares to other students. Any idea?
According to the Atlantic piece below, it's about 20%. For the Ivies in generaly, I think they range from about 10-20%. Cornell and Penn are larger schools, so the percentage is lower. And if I had to guess the colleges that, overall, have the largest proportion of athletes, I'm assuming it would be some of the small liberal arts colleges that have a lot of sports. Some of those colleges only have like 1,500 students, but maybe 500 athletes. I know Gladwell argues that some of those colleges are using sports to keep the number of men up, so presumably the admissions boost in those cases (if that's true) is different for male and female athletes.
Fascinating- I played a sport at a D3 liberal arts school, which had an athletics rate of about 40% of the student body. But my (naive) impression of the much larger ivy league schools was that the number would be much lower than 20%. Some interesting insight, especially as I imagine how and where my kids will get into college. Thanks!
Back in my day (the 80s, LOL) as an Ivy League (track) athlete, it seemed to me that Harvard was the only school that had a significant number of international athletes. These were not "dumb jocks" whom Harvard had admitted to bolster their national squash rankings, but high achievers who had come to Harvard for the academics because of course that's where they were going to go. I'm remembering Gus Udo, a Nigerian triple jumper of quality (and presumably a scholar of quality as well), and at Brown I had a Swedish teammate who was one of the best-coached (technique) track athletes I have ever met (he studied engineering, which was the most rigorous path at Brown at that time). Now, of course, international students represent a significant revenue stream for nearly every academic institution, but back then, they were rarer, and I suspect, more heavily concentrated at the more elite institutions.
My son is now navigating the university admissions process, and he is extremely skeptical of my confident declarations to him that his "minority" status (Japanese, in an era in which decreasing numbers of Japanese are daring to leave their country to get an education); but diversity is good (though to my surprise you didn't really address this in your conversation with MG), and I think universities are correct to pursue it.
A further thought for your wide-ranging mind, David: Are we in an era in which there has been a splintering of "minority" identification? In which there are thousands more categories of self-identification than there used to be? It seems to me this is obviously the case. And if we agree that it is, how does this affect the pursuit of diversity, and our understanding of what comprises a diverse student body (or faculty) or workplace? I wrote about this a few weeks ago, not in depth, but because an encounter prompted me to think about the assumptions we make about people (from Boston! from Toronto!): https://thejadedcynic.substack.com/p/making-assumptions
I also recall Havard having a conspicuous set of world class track and field athletes when we competed against them. I remember they had a sprinter who was already on the British Olympic team, and a Hungarian high jumper who won a national title or two. I remember everything from that of course international athletes would use their skill to go to Harvard, to the idea that Harvard had some sort of special financial aid for foreign students that allowed them to get around the Ivy League scholarship rules. I actually have no idea what the reality is. ...In any case, I agree with you that there is obviously some increasing granularity when it comes to minority identities. I seem to recall reading some study of census data that found a pretty substantial reshuffling of self-reported identity. That's a great question about what it means for colleges. I remember hearing an argument at an academic conference once that involved a math professor arguing that his department was very diverse even though all the professors were white or Asian, because every professor was from a different country. In any case, really interesting question you raise, and I'm definitely going to read your piece!
I completely agree with that professor. Having lived for 35 years in Asia, I often hear people talking about “Asia”, as if that’s a commonality. It’s not. There is no “Asia”, except geographically. Japanese and Bangladeshis and Kazakhs have little in common. Mongolians and Malaysians. Indonesians and Iraqis. And guess what? I’ve spent 35 years living as a minority (white, male!) in societies in which membership is largely defined by race. I have walked in a lot of people’s shoes who in America, would find it impossible to imagine that they have shared any experiences with me (and would reflexively dismiss my own experiences of racism and xenophobia). Oh, yes, it’s an interesting old world!
Is the "overstory" idea, and cultural norms, just a different way of looking at, and phrasing, B F Skinner's idea of "environment determines behaviour", perhaps?
Could be...I was thinking of it more as aligned with the work of Douglass North and others on social norms, but just because I'm more deeply familiar with that work. I don't think Gladwell was inventing anything new there, but rather giving some recent examples and framing that speaks to a wide audience. As Herbert Simon once observed, people only take up an idea when it has a catchy label. He wrote that's why he switched from "bounded rationality" to "satisficing."
Dmitry, not that I know of, but clearly relevant! And reminds me a bit of some philosophy I was reading recently on "narrative values." Thanks for alerting me to this.
What a fantastic conversation! As I read through it, I couldn’t help but make mental notes on each insight, eagerly anticipating the next story or revelation. I was especially fascinated by the term 'overstory' and Malcolm’s brilliant explanation of how a small number of individuals are responsible for a large portion of transmission, and why focusing on them is more effective than broad strategies, was both practical and eye-opening. The entire dialogue between David and Malcolm felt so organic, flowing like a compelling story packed with thought-provoking ideas! I only wish the conversation had continued even longer.
Rajesh, so glad you enjoyed! I was pretty self-conscious about the length as it was, both because it's a very long post, and I kept getting a Substack warning that I was coming up on the word limit where some email providers would truncate the email. In any case, I thought Malcolm's chapter on the "superspreader" doctors in the opioid epidemic was particularly eye-opening. I never would have guessed that just 350 doctors were writing 10% of the prescriptions.
First off, I got SO excited at the shoutout (if I'm not too arrogant in thinking it was for me) and have already had multiple friends text me about it.
Reading/listening to you and Gladwell is always such a treat. You cover so much ground. Coupling/displaced phenomena had also stuck with me from that book, and I chuckled at the 10,000 hours reference.
My question: even as a former Ivy League athlete, I find all of this to be very compelling (to be upfront about my bias: I walked on and wasn't recruited). I can't really come up with a good reason to disagree with really any of it, especially because he's so much more well researched than I am. But, as you referenced, your relationship with Gladwell was born out of disagreement! What do you disagree with either in his new book or in this Q&A or both?
Haha...that was definitely you. You're a celeb around here! Regarding disagreements, I'm still mulling some of it over, but my intuition is that some of the sports stuff may not be just about group proportions, but about recruiting in sports that have such high SES participants that they're likely to pay full tuition, or to be donors later. But even beyond that, I think colleges sports have some sort of difficult-to-define, self-perpetuating momentum. There's like some nuclear proliferation of getting good at sports, and I'm not sure anyone has defined the strategy of why, and it just takes on a life of its own. A really telling thing to me in some of testimony in court cases was that, as Gladwell pointed out, the officials charged with explaining admissions preference were not able to offer a convincing and coherent explanation. I think that could be because they don't want to say the quiet part out loud, but I also think it might be because they actually have never articulated it coherently to themselves...or a combination of the two. I see the same thing with pro sports stadium subsidies. Harry Truman famously said he wanted a one-armed economist because they always say "on the one hand...but on the other hand." And yet one issue where economists appear to be one-armed is that public subsidies for stadiums is a terrible deal for a city. The economic impact of a pro franchise is typically on the order of a single medium sized grocery story, and the opportunity cost is enormous. (I saw some economists poll where opportunity cost was rated as the top idea that would improve peoples' lives if they understood it...or something like that. Ok, found the paper, it's below..) And yet, every mayor loves a sports franchise and nobody wants to be the one who lets one leave town. I LOVE the Olympics, but it's amazing to me that cities still bid. (Though fewer and fewer are.) I think sports just has some special allure that I find hard to define. I'd love to see a serious survey of college presidents that asked them to explain the specific level of investment and admissions preference they make in sports. Maybe if it were anonymous they could speak freely? I guess I just think this could be complicated. But I don't really think that takes away from Gladwell's argument. I understand him as making the strong version of an argument that is essentially ignored, and I think that's valuable. In terms of the overstory aspect of the book, of course I wonder to what degree the place drives the people versus the self-sorting of people to the place. Probably both!
I have listened to almost the whole book. The idea of group size is very important. For instance, when we have workshops or courses, we almost always have fewer women. It's important to make the group size smaller and have enough women in each group. It creates a feeling of safety. We did this by changing the testimonials itself. Hence, if there are more testimonials that have a mix of men and women, the sign ups are also relatively balanced. But also countries matter. If the testimonial has a lot of people from one country vs. another, then you tend to attract clients from the country that's getting the most prominence. In effect, you can create a group balance, simply by advertising or promoting the balance in the first instance.
Thanks for reading and for the kind words, Katherine! Regarding changing perspectives, I've found that if you write about enough science, you're definitely going to be wrong about some things, maybe just because work that seems solid is eventually overturned. So, to me, the only honest approach is to expect that I'll change perspective on something, I'm just not sure what it is yet in the moment I'm writing.
I noticed as a college student that again and again people (professors, graduates) or things (books) came from Harvard were weak, dull, poorly written. But Harvard was supposed to be a sign of quality!
And yes, particularly Harvard.
Now I feel like you’ve provided part of the answer.
I was thinking about that, but I didn't take good quality audio. On my list of things to look into next year (this year I'm laser-focused on finishing a book) is providing an audio version of some of the Q&As I do here. If it's any consolation, there are now a lot of programs that can read it to you, including one that is built in to the Substack app. That's not going to give you the enjoyment of listening to a natural conversation, but it will provide the ability to listen while doing something else, if that's part of the appeal. In any case, definitely something I'm thinking about.
Hey George, great to see you here! The new book, very broadly speaking, is about how constraints can be useful instead of only stifling. And I'm turning in a manuscript at the end of the year.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of athletes at Harvard, including wealth, race, academic ranking, and athletic ranking. Two points: in my experience, many top athletes at top academic schools are not white and there is often an assumption that they were admitted with lesser grades/scores. Also, in many of the ivy league schools, the obscure sports are funded by very wealthy alumni, so filling those spots is a way to bring money into the school. In the end, I suspect that Harvard would be thrilled to fill their brochures with photos of a wildly diverse squash team if players from the various racial groups could be recruited.
I'd be interested in that as well, Dewey. In my n=1 of being an Ivy League athlete, the sports that Gladwell was talking about were mostly white, although they were also basically entirely filled with kids from private schools (because only those schools have most of the sports in question), so not sure how to disentangle those. As far as the obscure sports being funded by wealthy alumni, I wonder to what extent that's the case in terms of overall expenditures. And if the money is earmarked for the sport, then does it matter for the university overall? In any case, it does seem to me that a lot of the less competitive sports provide a lever by which an institution can calibrate various proportions, whether that's to get fewer or more minorities, or men, or fewer or more wealthy students, or whatever it is they feel like they should titrate. I can see arguments for and against that, but the explanations in the lawsuits don't seem very forthcoming.
Ex Harvard Rower. The Ivy League is now the training ground for international rowing. Last Olympics 30 or more Ivy grads across all teams. It’s like French swimming. Yale had one American born rower on their top 2 men’s 8’s last year. It’s brutally tough.
Second. Harvard has data on alumni giving. The dirty secret is the athletes give substatially more than non athletes. In fact STEM grads in general give less. Padding athletics is about developing future revenue streams.
Indeed, the Ivy League is the development pipeline for a number of sports. Even if athletes do give substantially more than non-athletes, I'm not sure that bears on Gladwell's point. If part of the idea is giving preference to athletes in sports that mostly higher SES people participate in, I would expect them to give more than other students just based on SES, and would assume that is part of the admissions strategy. (I know some DIII schools actually use the opportunity to play football to get students who will pay full tuition.) In any case, I appreciate the comment, and I'd be curious to know how the overall amount of athlete giving to non-athletics parts of the university compares to other students. Any idea?
I agree with all that you've shared. Any idea of the percentage of student athletes in a class at Harvard and similar schools?
According to the Atlantic piece below, it's about 20%. For the Ivies in generaly, I think they range from about 10-20%. Cornell and Penn are larger schools, so the percentage is lower. And if I had to guess the colleges that, overall, have the largest proportion of athletes, I'm assuming it would be some of the small liberal arts colleges that have a lot of sports. Some of those colleges only have like 1,500 students, but maybe 500 athletes. I know Gladwell argues that some of those colleges are using sports to keep the number of men up, so presumably the admissions boost in those cases (if that's true) is different for male and female athletes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/harvard-university-and-scandal-sports-recruitment/599248/
Fascinating- I played a sport at a D3 liberal arts school, which had an athletics rate of about 40% of the student body. But my (naive) impression of the much larger ivy league schools was that the number would be much lower than 20%. Some interesting insight, especially as I imagine how and where my kids will get into college. Thanks!
Back in my day (the 80s, LOL) as an Ivy League (track) athlete, it seemed to me that Harvard was the only school that had a significant number of international athletes. These were not "dumb jocks" whom Harvard had admitted to bolster their national squash rankings, but high achievers who had come to Harvard for the academics because of course that's where they were going to go. I'm remembering Gus Udo, a Nigerian triple jumper of quality (and presumably a scholar of quality as well), and at Brown I had a Swedish teammate who was one of the best-coached (technique) track athletes I have ever met (he studied engineering, which was the most rigorous path at Brown at that time). Now, of course, international students represent a significant revenue stream for nearly every academic institution, but back then, they were rarer, and I suspect, more heavily concentrated at the more elite institutions.
My son is now navigating the university admissions process, and he is extremely skeptical of my confident declarations to him that his "minority" status (Japanese, in an era in which decreasing numbers of Japanese are daring to leave their country to get an education); but diversity is good (though to my surprise you didn't really address this in your conversation with MG), and I think universities are correct to pursue it.
A further thought for your wide-ranging mind, David: Are we in an era in which there has been a splintering of "minority" identification? In which there are thousands more categories of self-identification than there used to be? It seems to me this is obviously the case. And if we agree that it is, how does this affect the pursuit of diversity, and our understanding of what comprises a diverse student body (or faculty) or workplace? I wrote about this a few weeks ago, not in depth, but because an encounter prompted me to think about the assumptions we make about people (from Boston! from Toronto!): https://thejadedcynic.substack.com/p/making-assumptions
I also recall Havard having a conspicuous set of world class track and field athletes when we competed against them. I remember they had a sprinter who was already on the British Olympic team, and a Hungarian high jumper who won a national title or two. I remember everything from that of course international athletes would use their skill to go to Harvard, to the idea that Harvard had some sort of special financial aid for foreign students that allowed them to get around the Ivy League scholarship rules. I actually have no idea what the reality is. ...In any case, I agree with you that there is obviously some increasing granularity when it comes to minority identities. I seem to recall reading some study of census data that found a pretty substantial reshuffling of self-reported identity. That's a great question about what it means for colleges. I remember hearing an argument at an academic conference once that involved a math professor arguing that his department was very diverse even though all the professors were white or Asian, because every professor was from a different country. In any case, really interesting question you raise, and I'm definitely going to read your piece!
I completely agree with that professor. Having lived for 35 years in Asia, I often hear people talking about “Asia”, as if that’s a commonality. It’s not. There is no “Asia”, except geographically. Japanese and Bangladeshis and Kazakhs have little in common. Mongolians and Malaysians. Indonesians and Iraqis. And guess what? I’ve spent 35 years living as a minority (white, male!) in societies in which membership is largely defined by race. I have walked in a lot of people’s shoes who in America, would find it impossible to imagine that they have shared any experiences with me (and would reflexively dismiss my own experiences of racism and xenophobia). Oh, yes, it’s an interesting old world!
Finally, a conversation between my two favorite authors🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Appreciate it Jacob! And hope Malcolm and I can come close to expectations;)
Is the "overstory" idea, and cultural norms, just a different way of looking at, and phrasing, B F Skinner's idea of "environment determines behaviour", perhaps?
Could be...I was thinking of it more as aligned with the work of Douglass North and others on social norms, but just because I'm more deeply familiar with that work. I don't think Gladwell was inventing anything new there, but rather giving some recent examples and framing that speaks to a wide audience. As Herbert Simon once observed, people only take up an idea when it has a catchy label. He wrote that's why he switched from "bounded rationality" to "satisficing."
Really interesting, thanks!
Was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity ever mentioned in Malcolms work ? Seems to me a fitting model for the claims you discussed
Dmitry, not that I know of, but clearly relevant! And reminds me a bit of some philosophy I was reading recently on "narrative values." Thanks for alerting me to this.
Check out Dan McAdams work, he created a really nice model for it
What a fantastic conversation! As I read through it, I couldn’t help but make mental notes on each insight, eagerly anticipating the next story or revelation. I was especially fascinated by the term 'overstory' and Malcolm’s brilliant explanation of how a small number of individuals are responsible for a large portion of transmission, and why focusing on them is more effective than broad strategies, was both practical and eye-opening. The entire dialogue between David and Malcolm felt so organic, flowing like a compelling story packed with thought-provoking ideas! I only wish the conversation had continued even longer.
Rajesh, so glad you enjoyed! I was pretty self-conscious about the length as it was, both because it's a very long post, and I kept getting a Substack warning that I was coming up on the word limit where some email providers would truncate the email. In any case, I thought Malcolm's chapter on the "superspreader" doctors in the opioid epidemic was particularly eye-opening. I never would have guessed that just 350 doctors were writing 10% of the prescriptions.
First off, I got SO excited at the shoutout (if I'm not too arrogant in thinking it was for me) and have already had multiple friends text me about it.
Reading/listening to you and Gladwell is always such a treat. You cover so much ground. Coupling/displaced phenomena had also stuck with me from that book, and I chuckled at the 10,000 hours reference.
My question: even as a former Ivy League athlete, I find all of this to be very compelling (to be upfront about my bias: I walked on and wasn't recruited). I can't really come up with a good reason to disagree with really any of it, especially because he's so much more well researched than I am. But, as you referenced, your relationship with Gladwell was born out of disagreement! What do you disagree with either in his new book or in this Q&A or both?
Haha...that was definitely you. You're a celeb around here! Regarding disagreements, I'm still mulling some of it over, but my intuition is that some of the sports stuff may not be just about group proportions, but about recruiting in sports that have such high SES participants that they're likely to pay full tuition, or to be donors later. But even beyond that, I think colleges sports have some sort of difficult-to-define, self-perpetuating momentum. There's like some nuclear proliferation of getting good at sports, and I'm not sure anyone has defined the strategy of why, and it just takes on a life of its own. A really telling thing to me in some of testimony in court cases was that, as Gladwell pointed out, the officials charged with explaining admissions preference were not able to offer a convincing and coherent explanation. I think that could be because they don't want to say the quiet part out loud, but I also think it might be because they actually have never articulated it coherently to themselves...or a combination of the two. I see the same thing with pro sports stadium subsidies. Harry Truman famously said he wanted a one-armed economist because they always say "on the one hand...but on the other hand." And yet one issue where economists appear to be one-armed is that public subsidies for stadiums is a terrible deal for a city. The economic impact of a pro franchise is typically on the order of a single medium sized grocery story, and the opportunity cost is enormous. (I saw some economists poll where opportunity cost was rated as the top idea that would improve peoples' lives if they understood it...or something like that. Ok, found the paper, it's below..) And yet, every mayor loves a sports franchise and nobody wants to be the one who lets one leave town. I LOVE the Olympics, but it's amazing to me that cities still bid. (Though fewer and fewer are.) I think sports just has some special allure that I find hard to define. I'd love to see a serious survey of college presidents that asked them to explain the specific level of investment and admissions preference they make in sports. Maybe if it were anonymous they could speak freely? I guess I just think this could be complicated. But I don't really think that takes away from Gladwell's argument. I understand him as making the strong version of an argument that is essentially ignored, and I think that's valuable. In terms of the overstory aspect of the book, of course I wonder to what degree the place drives the people versus the self-sorting of people to the place. Probably both!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2020.1716319
I have listened to almost the whole book. The idea of group size is very important. For instance, when we have workshops or courses, we almost always have fewer women. It's important to make the group size smaller and have enough women in each group. It creates a feeling of safety. We did this by changing the testimonials itself. Hence, if there are more testimonials that have a mix of men and women, the sign ups are also relatively balanced. But also countries matter. If the testimonial has a lot of people from one country vs. another, then you tend to attract clients from the country that's getting the most prominence. In effect, you can create a group balance, simply by advertising or promoting the balance in the first instance.
Great discussion with one of my favorite authors! Thank you for your willingness to change your perspectives over time based on
new evidence, nuance, inquiry, discussion and lived experience.
Thanks for reading and for the kind words, Katherine! Regarding changing perspectives, I've found that if you write about enough science, you're definitely going to be wrong about some things, maybe just because work that seems solid is eventually overturned. So, to me, the only honest approach is to expect that I'll change perspective on something, I'm just not sure what it is yet in the moment I'm writing.
I noticed as a college student that again and again people (professors, graduates) or things (books) came from Harvard were weak, dull, poorly written. But Harvard was supposed to be a sign of quality!
And yes, particularly Harvard.
Now I feel like you’ve provided part of the answer.
Well, Emily, you clearly weren't attuned to the Harvard squash team if all you saw was low quality;)
True! 😂
*that came
Can you put the entire conversation out as a Podcast? I'd love to listen to you two chat.
I was thinking about that, but I didn't take good quality audio. On my list of things to look into next year (this year I'm laser-focused on finishing a book) is providing an audio version of some of the Q&As I do here. If it's any consolation, there are now a lot of programs that can read it to you, including one that is built in to the Substack app. That's not going to give you the enjoyment of listening to a natural conversation, but it will provide the ability to listen while doing something else, if that's part of the appeal. In any case, definitely something I'm thinking about.
Good audio can be relatively simple and have a look at Riverside.
https://riverside.fm
P.S. Yes, the reading back facility is good, but it's important to hear the actual voices where possible.
What is your upcoming book David? Great conversation with MG.
Hey George, great to see you here! The new book, very broadly speaking, is about how constraints can be useful instead of only stifling. And I'm turning in a manuscript at the end of the year.
Does this post capture the entire discussion? I assumed that this was an excerpt and the podcast would have the entire discussion.
There was indeed some more, some of it just friendly banter, which I think could work as audio, but not as written Q&A.