Just saw Moneyball, the movie, last night.
A wonderful adaptation of a wonderful book.
The movie is astonishing on several levels. One of the most amazing things about it is how scrupulously it avoids the gooey sentimental scenes which would have inevitably been there if Steven Spielberg had anything to do with it. The closest it comes is where Billy Bean asks his daughter to sing him a song in a guitar store and there is some subtle background applause, but even this is handled with a light touch.
A really remarkable film, but this post is not about how good this very good movie is...it's about the underlying theme: How difficult it is to identify talent and how poorly our institutions do it.
Most of us have had the experience of being selected against in both inconsequential and in important ways: We have been not selected for the basketball team or for the prestigious college.
And we smarted, because we thought we knew better. We thought more of ourselves than those who judged us did.
And we may have been correct.
Those who have benefited from the system, whatever system it is, tend to be its most ardent supporters because they have benefited.
So those who have the sort of intelligence which allows them to score high on the SAT know for sure these tests select only the most worthy and also select against the unworthy.
On the other hand, when we were in high school, we thought we could recognize the really bright kids and we knew the SAT missed some really bright people. Those who scored high sometimes surprised us, but it was unusual to say, "That guy is an idiot: How did he do so well?"
But we all knew the screening instruments and processes missed some of the best people.
The girl I took to the senior prom I knew was one of the brightest people at my high school--and we had some really bright people. But she did not do particularly well on the SAT and did not get into the top tier colleges. She went to Carnegie Tech, where she spent a year and transferred to Barnard and then worked her way into Columbia Law School.
Her early defeats, the way she was dismissed by the adult judges of her talents, lit a fire within her which burned bright and hot and drove her and she went to the West Coast, where she became a lawyer for movie companies whose names you would know and she kept moving up and up until she became a partner in one of the worlds richest financial institutions. She is now richer than probably the entire senior class of our high school. When she comes to town, she typically asks out a dozen of her best friends from high school--kids whose SAT scores catapulted them right to Harvard/Yale/Princeton right out of high school, and she takes everyone out to a great restaurant and the bill never arrives.
She told me a story about a classmate of ours who showed up at her office in San Francisco and got past the usual sentries and insisted she come down to the street, where he had his Corvette. He had become a successful liability lawyer and now owned a Vette and a vineyard and he was trying to show her what a success he had become.
Now this particular guy was reasonably bright, but a bad boy and outcast in high school--he dropped out briefly, came back but had not done well enough to go to college (a rarity at that high school) went into the Navy--submarines--and gradually worked his way back, through college, then law school at American University, an un selective college in Washington, DC. But he had earned lot of money and he wanted to show this woman he had arrived, had finally made it, had proven he was smarter and more talented than anyone in high school would have thought. He was saying, I'm now a winner. I belong in the same class as all you guys who thought I was a loser.
Of course, he picked exactly the wrong lady to try to impress.
I'm sure she was polite and never let on how pathetic she thought this display was.
But these are familiar stories--the rise from the bottom to a better more exalted place. (Increasingly rare in this country.)
What is so unusual about the Billy Bean story is it is the story of someone who was selected as having a world of talent, a bright future and he failed miserably.
This is not unusual in baseball, because as the scouts say, there is magic in the world of baseball. There are legions of bright looking prospects who do not succeed in baseball. Billy Bean was merely one of the brightest, a boy who was strong in every department, who, if not a can't miss talent, was at least most likely to succeed.
And he could not hit big league pitching.
Most people to whom this happens, slink off into the shadows and do nothing with that failure. No fires burn bright and hot within. They are simply defeated and wind up selling sports equipment at Dicks.
But Billy Bean was that rare bird who asked "Why?" How could the scouts who showed up at his home offering singing bonuses and persuading his parents to allow him to skip Stanford, how could they have been so wrong? Is it possible, he asked himself, these scouts were clueless? Did they simply not know what they were doing? Did their little tests of potential really mean nothing?
At the group try out, Billy Bean had run faster, hit the ball farther, harder, jumped higher than anyone, but the guys he beat ultimately went on to stellar, some hall of fame careers.
And Bean asked the next question: If these scouts were so bad at predicting success, is it possible they were equally bad at predicting failure?
Likely, scouts are correct some of the time. But we rarely have a controlled experiment. How many times does a team of rejects get assembled to challenge those who were chosen?
Because of the asymmetry in baseball, because there are rich teams who can buy the best prospects and poor teams, who have to settle for the rejected, we have something of a control group.
It was the control group Billy Bean managed to assemble. And with the help of a variety of new metrics, he was able to do it with more than random prospects.
In the 1960's, the only test of intellectual brilliance was the SAT. Now, there is one alternative test, the ACT, and some students who do poorly on the SAT do well on the ACT.
I know at least one student who was told he would not be recruited at Harvard, after his SAT score proved inadequate. He took his ACT and did well and his letter of acceptance, early decision was hand delivered by the coach who had previously told him he was simply not smart enough to survive at Harvard.
I wonder, if we had not just two tests of intellect, if we had a battery of tests, what the chosen people at Harvard would look like?
Clearly, the current system has worked for Harvard, as evidenced by the fact Harvard selected both Bill Gates and the guy who did Face Book. True, they both realized Harvard was not fertile enough soil to nourish their genius, and left, but somehow Harvard figured out they were gifted in the first place.
MIT is filled with smart people who do succeed.
So systems of choosing the talented work for some percentage--but what of those selected against? Is there a rich lode of talent out there being wasted?
And if there is, how much justice is there in the American Pie, which is eaten up by those in the top 1% while the other 99% languishes?
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