Monthly Archives: May 2009

Elite Are Elite Because They Have Better Genes. But For How Long?

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Lessons in Survivial an article than ran in Newsweek details an experiment run at military training camp that explains scientifically why Special Forces units are able to bounce back faster than ordinary soldiers. The study shows that their bodies are simply genetically better suited for enduring and recovering from high pressure, high stress situations.

Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal.

With so much more NPY in their systems, the Special Forces soldiers were much more clearheaded under interrogation stress and performed better according to the trainers. Special Forces soldiers really are special and different from the rest of the Army. They stay more focused and engaged in a crisis and bounce back faster afterward because their bodies produce massive amounts of natural anti-anxiety chemicals. In the fog of war—and everyday life for that matter—that’s a major advantage.

The results beckon the classic debate of nature vs. nurture. At present nature appears to be winning this battle, by the tide is soon to turn.

This evidence destroys a big part of the mystery of why some people are simply in a different class compared to others in their field. You can explain differences between the elite and ordinary based on this study, very roughly in mechanistic way. For example, African Americans are on average are better athletes than white people. Roughly speaking they naturally produce more fast twitch muscle fiber and other important chemicals essential for athletics.

But if the metric we’re defining success by is talent how much can you chalk up to having genes that produce the optimum amount of chemicals vs. undergoing rigorous training that increases important chemicals in your body?  Does having better genes make you automatically better than most of your peers? At present training, practice and hard work is the determining factor for most people. But that’s because most people have genes that deviate little from the average, which gives only a slight advantage in terms of expressed talent. So nurture matters a lot today. That’s where you get theses like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. But it’s undeniable that the genetic outliers have a distinct advantage. If Lebron James never practiced playing basketball his whole life, he could still probably beat 99% of dedicated amateurs his age. But in most cases nurture still reigns supreme of nature given an average genetic composition. But the balance starts to swing in nurtures favor very soon. Most medical science today is horribly imprecise, with drugs having all sorts of unintended effects, yet macroscopically still being able to produce somewhat of the desired effect. But the biotechnology and nanotechnology on the very near horizon will allow personalized medicine and allow everybody to have the same kind of chemical advantages that the genetic freaks have gotten naturally and luckily.

Soon we will be able to model the chemical composition of these genetic freaks  and transfer that pattern to everybody. Not long after that we will begin trying patterns that no humans currently possess naturally. Admittedly all of this is a gross simplification but these types of technologies and procedures are on the horizon.

These are dangerous waters that certainly need to be tread carefully. And I sure hope open science is in full bloom by then. But don’t I must take a moment to refute the argument about how this experimentation is bad thing because we may end up with perfect humans. First of all perfection won’t be achieved because no matter how good something this there is always room for improvement. We won’t be perfect we will only have a higher baseline standard.  And there’s nothing wrong with striving for “perfection” anyway. I’ve heard many people afraid that biotechnology like this will make everybody the same, a meme propagated by movies like Gattica. But I’m sure this won’t be true. Whenever there’s been an increase in control over our environment diversity as increased not decreased. When the baseline standard of humanity’s capabilities are raised our possible lifestyles, and creative works of art and discovery will increase exponentially. Look at the incredible diversity of applications of computer technology today. All computer programs are just unique patterns of 1′s and 0′s, just going really, really fast.  Think about the difference between the current Mac OS X operating system and the punch card operating systems of the early computing days.

We’ll when this new technology comes around faster than you expect, because “technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view“, humanity will be operating on an incredibly more powerful operating system.

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Gladwell & Simmons’ Debate Sports and Everything Else

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I’ve just been getting around to finishing the Bill Simmons–Malcolm Gladwell article on espn.com and it has to be the most intriguing, insightful and entertaining sports article I’ve read in a long time. Both pull from a wide range of disciplines have great knoweldge of the history of the sport and possess unique views about where the sports should be headed.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

I’ve just been reading several of the books that were written about the fall of Bear Stearns, and those books illustrate another side of this story. Bear Stearns didn’t fail because the employees were incompetent, because they weren’t good at what they do. They failed because they were good at what they do. They were so successful for so long that they grew overconfident and arrogant and complacent. The biggest obstacle to success is success. My biggest worry for LeBron is that he wins the title this season. And if he wins again next year, and the year after that, then what do you have? A guy still in his mid-20s who has already done it all, and has no reason to doubt his own skills and judgments, ever. You’ll bring him in as a free agent when you become GM of the Minnesota Christians and team him up with Larry Bird’s nephew and two 5-foot-9 “character guys” from Holy Cross, and it’ll all be downhill from there. Mark my words.

By contrast, remember what happened to LeBron last summer during the Redeem Team practices? He watched Kobe getting up at 6 a.m. every day to train for three grueling hours, then said to himself, “All right, this guy works harder than me. I need to step it up.” And he did. And that exposure had a profound effect on his career, just like every splendid Michael Lewis story probably keeps you on your toes. If Kobe dropped dead of a cocaine overdose eight years ago, does LeBron have that epiphany? Maybe not. You can become great without the help of someone else, but you can’t stay great without someone pushing you. Golf excepted, of course.

Given that, then, why do so few underdog teams use the press? Pitino’s explanation is that it’s because most coaches simply can’t convince their players to work that hard. What do you think of that argument?

There are two other things here that fascinate me. After my piece ran in The New Yorker, one of the most common responses I got was people saying, well, the reason more people don’t use the press is that it can be beaten with a well-coached team and a good point guard. That is (A) absolutely true and (B) beside the point. The press doesn’t guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog’s best chance of victory. It raises their odds from zero to maybe 50-50. I think, in fact, that you can argue that a pressing team is always going to have real difficulty against a truly elite team. But so what? Everyone, regardless of how they play, is going to have real difficulty against truly elite teams. It’s not a strategy for being the best. It’s a strategy for being better.

I wonder if there isn’t something particularly American in the preference for “best” over “better” strategies. I might be pushing things here. But both the U.S. health-care system and the U.S. educational system are exclusively “best” strategies: They excel at furthering the opportunities of those at the very top end. But they aren’t nearly as interested in moving people from the middle of the pack to somewhere nearer the front.

Or how about eliminating the draft altogether? I’m at least half-serious here. Think about it. Suppose we let every college player apply for and receive job offers in the same way that, oh, every other human being on the planet does. That doesn’t mean that everyone goes to L.A. and New York, because you still have the constraints of the cap. It does mean, though, that both players and teams would have to make an affirmative case for each other’s services. So you trade for Steve Nash or Jason Kidd, because they make you instantly attractive to every mobile big man coming out of college. Instead of asking the boring question — which team is going to be lucky enough to draft Derrick Rose? — we ask the far more interesting question: Which team, out of every team in the league, should Derrick Rose play for?

The bigger point here is that what consistently drives me crazy about big-time sports is the assumption that sports occupy their own special universe, in which the normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply. That’s how you get the idea of a reverse-order draft, which violates every known rule of human behavior.

We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.

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Asking The Right Questions

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Good writing and good conversation seem to have many parallels. In order to continue to write you’re basically having a conversation with yourself and you need to intuitively, or perhaps, sliently whisper the right questions to yourself to prompt an interesting recall or synthesis of information. Asking myself better questions is definitely something I want to improve on. I think this ability, whether conscious or not, underlies the development of long trains of thought. Personally, I don’t feel like I know what the best questions to focus on are. In conversations I can feel there’s a next level that I don’t know how to reach; a way to draw more interesting comments out of someone, if only I knew what to ask. I have the same experience with writing. I will generate a ideas but not be able to take it as far as I want to. I can feel there is a next level to go to, if only someone asked me the right question. Or better yet, if I knew how to ask myself the right question, a flurry of insights would ensue.

But is focusing on asking the right questions the right model? Perhaps this idea is breaking down train of thought too finely to render focusing on the right question paralyzing rather than catalyzing. Yesterday on Twitter I asked “When is the advice not to take it one step at a time? Or are those words of wisdom universally applicable?” I think the answer is that, yes focusing on the next step is always the right thing to do, but the size of the step varies. The extremities run from focusing on only the desired end outcome, while ignoring the process, to focusing on an infinitum of smaller and smaller minutiae like in Zeno’s Paradoxes. In this case, I’m trying to discover what the right level of conscious focus is, to extend the complexity and length of trains of thought.

In reading, for example, first we focus on reading individual letters. Then we graduate to reading individual words. Then a few people move on to reading sentences. And even a smaller select few claim to be able to read paragraphs the same way most people read words. This is essence of what most speed reading programs teach. Those levels are the “what” of faster reading but what’s more interesting is the “how”, because that allows us to know not just what’s possible but achieve it ourselves. I’ve been experimenting with some of these techniques and have been able to get up to the level of reading sentences and thus paragraphs in a few eye movements in situations with few distractions (though those are hard to come by lately). Reading with a purpose is one such technique, but more on specific reading techniques another time.

In writing there is a similar process. We start out with very simple ideas and then string them together to form longer, complex thoughts. What is the technique, the “how” that unlocks the potential to begin connecting multiples of complex thoughts together. I think focusing on the right questions might be one successful approach.

Ultimately, what I’m talking about here is consciously understanding and modeling what many elite figures do intuitively and unconsciously, so if you asked them there’s a good chance they couldn’t articulate how they do what they do. What I hope to talk more about is the tremendous power and flexibility in understanding consciously many of the processes that skilled naturals understand only intuitively.

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Capturing Creativity

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Captures ideas when you have them. If you don’t, these creative insights will try to flee and bringing them back is a sweat inducing struggle. Creativity is often romanticized but really it’s just making connections between disparate ideas. And it’s actually far easier to be creative when you say to yourself ‘What are some connections here?” than when you say to yourself “be creative” — In fact most times we can’t be funny, happy or productive by saying to ourselves, “C’mon Max, be happy” or “be productive” yet I know many people who do that. This approach doesn’t work because we are focusing on the wrong things. Those words, (there’s a name for these but I don’t remember) sit on top of a compelx pyramid where the leverage points seem frequently to be found somewhere in the middle. On the pyramid of funny, humor is not found at top of the pyramid: just telling yourself to be funny; or at the bottom fo they pyramid: analyzing the details of situations with mathematical precision. But is instead found at the inbetween point focusing on irony, surprise and a good story arc.

Do you agree with this pyramidal model? What are other phenomena that exhibit leverage points falling in the middle?

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Striking the Balance Between Productivity and Over-Optimization

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This post is a result of some ideas that were being tossed around amongst friends over dinner and then later over e-mail. I wanted to extend the conversation to a wider audience. The post has been lightly edited.

Max: If your goal is to optimize productivity, does taking a few hours out on a Saturday night advance that goal? I tend to think yes, if you use the paradigm of energy management rather than time management. I’ve heard there are scientific articles support this and discuss the social lives of the some of the world’s most productive people. Regardless of what the evidence supports, over-optimization has to be considered as well.

Tyler: I tend to think that optimizing all of your time is destined to lead to burnout and to injure your ability to lead a full life — but I tend to agree that a social life provides a good chance to recharge and recenter, especially when you use that time to discuss the things you’re thinking about. Getting the informed opinions of a peer group can help you challenge assumptions and learn through serendipity.

Max:  I agree optimizing can have insidious effects on enjoyment of life if it leads to over optimization. But I think enjoying life can increase your productivity.  I strive to enjoy as much of what I’m doing on a day to day basis as possible. I understand life is a process and I’m happy as long as I’m moving in the right direction even though there is always room for improvement. This positive outlook helps productivity because an upbeat person gets more done than a depressed person. By focusing on optimization while being able to recognize what too much looks like I think you can increase your further your goals and increase your happiness.

The way I look at optimizing is that’s important to put forth effort to increase productivity yet have tempered expectations. Optimization becomes over optimization when you can’t focus on the present moment and when you become disappointed with yourself for not accomplishing more.

Striking the balance between optimization and over optimization seems to be an important topic for up and coming ambitious generation. I invite you to share your thoughts on how to increase productivity in a sane, healthy way? I’d like to dig deeper into this topic.

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