He starts talking about education at the 8:06 mark.

A few good points:

• If everyone in the USA had teachers in the top 25% of the teaching distribution, we could catch up to Asia in terms of student performance in about two years. In four years we could blow the world away (Note diminishing returns and other factors here are important, probably understated by Gates).
• Teachers are paid based on how long they've been teaching, and whether or not they have a masters' degree in education. These two factors are nearly irrelevant to teacher performance. As a result, we're not retaining our best teachers.
• Most states have rules limiting the amount of times the principal is allowed to visit a classroom. In one state the principal can make one visit per year and must inform the teacher ahead of time. Other states have laws that you are not allowed to use data on teacher performance in making tenure decisions.
• We have more data on teacher performance than ever before, and we also have cheaper access than ever before - it's easier for the best teachers to be available because of cheap video technology.

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• "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question." - John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

• Crazy statue in Magnitogorsk.

• Evidence that our perceptions of people are almost entirely subconscious and don't rely at all on what the person actually says. This article was printed and placed on the dorm room wall, below the David Foster Wallace speech and right next to the Bash Brothers poster. Hat tip to Overcoming Bias. My immediate reaction was one expressed by a commenter:

• "To what extent could the causation be going in the other direction? Perhaps the researchers have merely identified markers that are statistically likely to accompany competence. The competence would lead to success. For instance, good instructors will tend to utilize every channel of communication, including non-lingual ones, even if those channels don't contribute the main impact of their lecture. Hence instructors using non-lingual channels would tend to be rated higher. The same reverse causation could easily be seen with good salesmen (they want to eek out every possible advantage, hence use every mode of communication even though the non-lingual ones may be substantially less helpful)."

• Really, Kellogg? This segment was great, and unexpectedly bold from SNL. "If you want someone to stop smoking weed, don't give them three months off."

• Finally, Gretchen Rubin with indispensable advice, in a sidenote! This deserves its own post. It works best when confronted with a personal appeal.

(As a sidenote, I use this trick frequently: If I’m not sure about my reaction to some event, I imagine someone describing the situation to me as if it happened to a stranger. That often clarifies my view. Along the same lines, I remember reading somewhere that writer Anne Lamott thinks about herself in the third person, to take better care of herself: “I’m sorry, Anne Lamott can’t accept that invitation to speak; she’s finishing a book so needs to keep her schedule clear.”)

• My two favorite songs recently:

Shadow Journal, by Max Richter. Tilda Swinton is the narrator Guru Josh, Infinity 2008 (video slightly NSFW, song slightly ridiculous)

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Yo-Yo Tricks Flip Throw Ins Clean & Jerk

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Sorry for the downtime - I finally bought web hosting, which means I don't have the cheap godaddy bar at the top of the page anymore. It took me a while to figure out how to move and configure the blog. So welcome to the new improved website, now ad-free!

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Or, maxims that young people take for granted: 1) 99.9% of questions have already been answered - the trick is in finding the solution. 2) There is a quicker, better way to do everything you currently do on a computer. 3) As storage and replication costs approach zero every resource should be available for free somewhere. As usual the trick is to find out where or from whom.

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If we divide the workforce into two broad categories, those who get out of bed in the morning because they love what they do, and those who are more attracted by the paycheck, I would place academics firmly in the first camp. Yet when asked to teach a class in the field of their expertise, some fail to get students excited about the subject matter. This is curious because obviously the professor likes the material well enough to dedicate his professional career to its study and advancement. So it should be pretty easy to excite students and get them curious about history or economics or whatever. A few possibilities, off the top of my head: 1) The professor hasn't given much thought to what's interesting about the field. If art history is all that you know, you may lose sight of the bigger picture. In a sense this implies that undergraduates are better rounded than their professors. 2) The professor doesn't think it's his job to make the subject matter interesting. Unfortunate but respectable. When the students are engaged in the material grades, satisfaction, enthusiasm and participation are higher. Ultimately if students are going to excel they need a better motivator than paper deadlines and exams. 3) The course they teach is a survey course, rehashing the basics of the field, not the cutting edge of research. As a general rule classes don't incorporate new material. Addendum: Your time is precious; you should consider at least once a week why you choose to spend time learning what you're learning.

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Stop hating on business jets.

Stop hating on Michael Phelps.

Arnold Kling on the stimulus package.

MIT computer robot competition; essentially, programming dumb robots to beat other robots on a "field." I'm entered into the competititon

Cash4gold TV ad, my favorite from yesterday. Unfortunately, the site is a complete scam.

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Many speakers, especially novice speakers, are better off the cuff than speaking with prepared remarks. Everyone sounds like a human when they speak off the cuff, but it takes practice to sound like a human when giving prepared remarks. I suffered through a 20-minute long speech by a CEO-finance type, full of platitudes like "we invest for the long term" and "a good leader makes smart decisions." Then the session was opened up for questioning and he became much more interesting, fielding questions about hiring, his company's position in Yahoo, his current investment strategy, etc. I'm not sure if he noticed the difference.

This is troublesome because if a speaker has an open format, he can choose to give a speech any way he wants. The question-and-answer format is a subset of the open talk. But when you give people an open format they will choose to deliver a boring speech.

I note that TV profiles usually have the guest responding to questions but with the questions edited out. The other solution may be tojust pick arbitrary, specific parts of your story or your company and talk about those. As usual, getting more specific leads to better results.

So the next time you have to present something, just talk! It's scary at first, there will be a lot of ums, and you might forget to mention some stuff, but it's okay because you actually sound and look like a human being. And don't forget to end your remarks before you actually think you should.

Addendum: No one I know plans out conversations, but they can go on for hours, just thinking of things to say as they pop into your head.

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Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. He has a knack for finding great stories about people or firms that back up his points. But I object to his style of argument - in short, tell a story, tell another story, tell another story, make some point about some unique thing that all three stories have in common.

I took three things away from the book:

1) Most successful people are lucky (Bill Gates had early frequent access to a computer, hockey players with January birthdays are older, outshine their later month peers).

2) The longer and harder you work at something, the better you become at it.

3) If you are willing to work longer and harder than others, you'll have more success than they will. Everyone has to work; there are no examples of genius musicians that succeed with a fraction of the practice of others.

Maybe these points are groundbreaking to a mass audience but they were not new to me. Gladwell also includes a chapter on airplane crashes and respect for authority that's unrelated to the rest of the book, and would make a great expository essay in the New Yorker but is out of place here.

The stories are good and it's a quick read, but don't expect groundbreaking material here.

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As a society, we tend to use an argument's simplicity as a heuristic for its strength. When faced with two arguments, the simpler argument has a decided advantage. As a result we're constantly pushed to make arguments shorter and more memorable. TV heads try to deliver 5 or 10-second sound bites to sell a policy position. Movie advertisers won't sell a movie they can't make a convincing case for in a 30 second commercial. Politicians use frames as one-word arguments: pro-choice vs. pro-life; protectionism vs. food security; the "death tax."

When humans lived in tribes I can imagine that this heuristic served us well. Economies and societies were simpler. There was no government, and not a whole lot of complex interaction between sectors of an economy. Simple arguments were best for the tribe.

In today's world simple arguments can wreak devastating damage. Better phrased, arguments cannot be ruled out because they are complex.Price controls are a great example of a simple, deadly argument. The argument is that when prices for basic goods are too high the government should set a lower price so that people can afford the good. Conversely, if prices are too low have a price floor so that producers don't lose money. It sounds dangerous to let prices float around unsupported, and let industries shrink and expand at the market's will. But the free market has been shown time after time to be the best system for economic growth that we know. The arguments for price controls, supports, "gas tax holidays," central planning and such are economic losers, but they remain popular because the rebuttals to each argument are more complicated.

There are two possibilities; either free marketeers will continue to fail because the arguments for free trade, against price restrictions, windfall taxes, and "gas tax holidays" are more complex than the arguments against them. Or, our society will move away from using an argument's simplicity as a heuristic for its strength, at least where the economy is concerned. I'm not hopeful.

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