Feeling A Bit Attacked with Maria Konnikova
2023-06-22 00:44:05
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Hey revisionist history listeners, Malcolm, here, before we get started, I wanted to update you on a few things first thing. This August 24th, the Revisionist History season begins in earnest, eight old-school episodes in a row. The little narrative jewel boxes you've come to love.
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Hello, hello everyone, Malcolm Gladwell here, I'm here in the studio with Maria Konnikova, the revisionist history ombudsman who's come by for the second time to do a little bit of correction and instruction and tell me what's gone right and wrong in her own mind with our season so far, Maria welcome.
Thanks so much for having me, Malcolm. It is always a pleasure. Although I have to say that in your last few episodes, I have felt a little bit personally under attack. I mean, we had the Monk Debates, which was an absolutely fascinating episode to me. I'll say a little bit about it in a second, but I don't know if you know that. I used to be a debater and I debated for multiple years at a pretty high level.
In high school, in high school, yes.
Wait, were you successful?
I was successful, but then I stopped debating, so I did not debate in college, and I stopped debating at the point where you would have gone to Nationals. And really had to focus a lot of time on it. Because at first I got into it as a way of clarifying my thinking. And I just thought it was amazing when I watched people do this, like, Wow, they can synthesize so much information, they can argue all these points. And I'm someone who really loves to argue out both sides of something, to figure out what do I think what's important here?
And so I thought debate would help me with that, and it did. But there came a point where it became formulaic, where I figured out how to do it. And then I lost interest in it. Because I realized that it wasn't actually about thinking deeply, it was much more about rhetorical deftness.
Technique?
Technique?
Exactly, it is heavy. That was the great takeaway for me in doing this. Because I debated very casually in high school once or twice, and we did parliamentary debating where heckling was allowed.
That's amazing, that's amazing. We did not have heckling.
We had heckling because you have heckling in parliamentary, in your real parliamentary systems.
Parliament's a shit show.
Oh yeah, so when we did debating, we just were focused on the heckling, that's what, you know.
I mean, of course, that sounds so fun, so I missed. I'd probably still be debating if that's what our debate was, but your debate, the Munk debates, was not about heckling.
No, no, you're not allowed.
It was, yeah, it was a very different format. So for people who didn't listen to the episode or need a little bit of a refresher. You were arguing a resolution, and the resolution was, don't trust mainstream media, and you were against this.
You were on a team with Michelle Goldberg and you were debating against Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray and Douglas Murray. As I found out, and I saw, as did other people who you spoke with after that, he's a debater, and so he, oh, he's, yeah.
Yes, he's a bro, so we're going to spoil it. Spoiler alert How did you do, Malcolm?
I got destroyed, I mean, it was humiliation on the level. My social media to this day is just full of people gloating about how I got my hat handed to me.
You did, you did, but what I actually, I loved that after that happened, you went to learn to figure out what you did wrong. And so I loved the second part of the episode. Where we get to hear professionals talk about what you could have done, what you didn't do, and you went to learn how to debate.
My complete ignorance of this debating technique is what killed me. That, and also the fact that I was excessively self-confident going into the and not self-confident in my abilities to debate. So much as self-confident in the position I was arguing. I just didn't think that there were lots of people out there, particularly in Canada, who would believe that you shouldn't trust the mainstream media. I just couldn't get....
I just thought we're going to win.
I loved the excerpts that you chose for the podcast because you really showed some of the issues which is.
I actually, I don't think this was a bad thing because you felt strongly about your topic, right? You didn't even think that it was possible to argue the other side. Because, I mean, as you just said yourself, you have to be insane to not trust mainstream media to think that the alternative is better. And so you brought a lot of emotion to it, which I think is good from a human point of view, but from a debating point of view is not necessarily ideal. And can cloud your ability to hear the other side's arguments, what they're actually saying, whether they're twisting your words, whether they're twisting the actual premise of the debate.
And that's, I think, where you got got, so to speak.
Yeah, it's funny because I'm not normally, I'm not normally someone who does rise to debate, I'm not normally someone who's terribly emotional. I don't really get angry much, but there was something about that context that just like, I got pissed off about halfway through and I just couldn't keep it in.
And you could tell that you were pissed.
I really think that Douglas Murray is loathsome.
All right, all right. Well, we'll have that on the record.
But that gets to kind of the psychological heart of it, though. Because what we know is as soon as he presses that button, and you actually become enraged, and you become emotional. Your logic goes down a little bit, your ability to process information goes down a little bit, and your ability to listen goes down a little bit. That's why when we're in an argument, we want to be the one who does not get emotional, right? You want to be the one who steps back. You want to be the one who says, Okay, you know, let's take five minutes.
Obviously, when you're on stage in front of an audience with someone you find loathsome, you can't say, okay, let's pause this for five minutes and take a step back. But it actually made me think some of the criticism that you got was not listening well, and it made me think. And this gets to the heart of why I quit debate of something that I learned from con artists. So a few books back, I wrote a book about con artists, and I spent multiple years with con artists. And I learned kind of all of these fascinating histories.
And there's one con artist, totally fascinating character. Victor Lustig. I don't know if you've heard of him. He styled himself as Count Lustig, even though he was not a count. This was early 20th century, so Victor Lustig is most famous for selling the Eiffel Tower not once, but twice, to two different groups of investors.
So he was very good at what he did. And he wrote something called The Ten Commandments of Con Artists. And one of those commandments is something that just came to mind immediately, which is that a con artist isn't a good talker, a con artist is a good listener. And if you think about what that means, right? Listening to the other person is how you get them, and is how you trick them, and is how you take advantage of them.
And so it actually. That's what came to mind when I was listening to this debate, and I thought, Wait, a debate is a con in a lot of ways.
Oh, that's interesting.
It's kind of a way to, you know, if you're the better listener, you're actually going to be the better talker. And you're going to be able to take advantage. Because con artists are great talkers, right? They're silver tongued, but listening is at the heart of it.
But here's the other thing I was thinking about, you know, with respect to debating, the second way, in which debating is kind of a not a trick, but....
Oh, it's a trick.
Well, a version of a trick. And that is that. I realized that my normal way of going about the world is I take in information and don't respond immediately. I tend to turn things over for a long time and decide how I feel a long time later, might be weeks later, might be months later.
I'm someone who kind of I'm a slow processor, and slow processing has been very useful for me. The debate form does not advantage the slow processor. I was in a situation where all of a sudden I had to do in real time, respond to people. I can't do that.
Yeah.
I don't have a kind of.
And Douglas Murray, a great debater. His great advantage is his fluidity, right? It's just like it comes in one ear and boom, he has a response. And I'm still thinking about it. Months later, I'm still thinking about what should I have said, you know, and that?
Yeah, and it's a skill, it is, it's a skill, and that's, you know, at the end of the day, that's what I came away with. That debate teaches you very useful skills of fluency and of conning.
Yeah, I want to make one additional point about this.
Please do.
When I went and hung out with the Brooklyn Debate League, they were my tutors in how to be a Better Debater, the one transcendent value in learning to debate. Remember that the kids that they at the Brooklyn Debate League they're most concerned with. Many of them are from less privileged backgrounds, right? We're talking about kids from poor areas of Brooklyn, you know? What debating allows is for these kids to be heard on subjects where normally no one would ever pay them the slightest attention. So you tell a 15-year-old kid from Bushwick we're going to debate immigration policy.
And not only do they get to talk about immigration policy and people have to listen, but it allows them to almost have another identity.
And these are kids who never have a chance to have another identity. Yeah, right, and that's what is an incredible gift that's being given to them. By allowing them to stand up and inhabit a way of thinking or a set of opinions that would otherwise be denied to them.
No, that's amazing, and I think that that is something that is actually incredibly special about debate. So let's just caveat and put that as an asterisk. That it can give you tremendous skills, it can give you confidence. And especially, you know someone like me, you know, I didn't speak English when I came here as an immigrant. Didn't fit in very well, and that was also a way for me to fit in at first.
Yeah, yeah.
So there was actually one listener email that came in, which actually raises some of the things we've been talking about. So here's what Jonathan writes. So what if we learn to listen to each other? In debates? I've always struggled with the benefits of any debate. Does winning a debate matter anymore to the well-being of society?
As your favorite N.B.A. team, winning a game matters. Does a society full of expert debaters achieve something our current society cannot? And I think this was actually, you know, a really important question and something that we've been touching on. Because while I think that, you know, debate has given me a lot of positives. And, as you say, kind of this group in Brooklyn, it's definitely giving them a lot. Those skills of, you know, fluidity and being silver tongued are not necessarily, I think, beneficial.
Well, the question is, are there sort of spillover effects like listening?
Being someone who learns to pay attention carefully to what people are saying is a really important skill that you can only gain through practice. That's very true, so to the extent that debating is really listening practice, then I think it's really useful. A lot of what's difficult about listening, and why I think we think of it as an imperiled skill, is that listening is about the negation of the self. Right. I is not important.
It's you who are important and there's so much privileging of I these days. I've always wanted to. You know, I have a little alternate fantasy where I teach an English class for a year and I would like in my English class....
Can I take your class?
I don't know if you'd want to, but one of the rules I would have is. We're going to write a series of things over the course of the next year. And my rule is you can never, ever use the word I in anything you write for me, right? No, I's if I see an I referring to yourself in anything you write, you fail, right? And just that I feel like that kind of the discipline of forcing someone to always be talking about the other and to distance themselves from their own perspective would just be incredibly useful.
Yeah.
And the New Yorker would be very happy that they have a whole generation of writers who don't use I.
I tried so hard for so long, when I was a New Yorker writer, not to fall into the I trap. And then, you know, eventually you're like, I give in you, just like....
Speaking to this journalist, I know it's just like, so disingenuous.
I love.
And the English got around this by saying one, yes, one listens to one's perspective on one.
And what does one think about this?
The problem is that you get into the multiple one then, and once you commit to using one. Once you have to keep. And you're like, Oh, please just stop it, it's really annoying.
And it's not just annoying, it makes it difficult to understand because it's actually unclear, yeah.
Yeah.
Let's take a quick break.
The second thing I wanted to talk to you about today is the importance of precise language, even if that language might make you uncomfortable, even if that language might not be nice, so to speak. But the importance of saying precisely what you mean. And I actually started laughing out loud at this listener email that we got. So, I'm taking the liberty of writing as an admirer of Malcolm Gladwell's work, to share my humble opinion on the use of swear words and vulgar language in your content. There is no doubt their use and proliferation has become part of the zeitgeist.
It seems people feel that, even in formal contexts, they lend an air of cool and nonchalance, helping them avoid coming across as stuffy and staid. In a culture where everyone eagerly wants to be hip, what they don't realize is, at the same time, they cheapen the language and give it an air of tawdryness. It's the opposite of classy and also reflects laziness on the part of the writer. I hardly doubt Pushkin would have used such curse words in his writing.
And this is where I just lost my shit. Because this is someone who has never read a word of Pushkin. Pushkin is the most foul-mouthed poet in Russian history, and this is among other foul-mouthed poets. There is profanity in Russian language, and it's not just profanity, it is profane profanity.
And your namesake company, Pushkin, is named for someone who was so enamored with precision in words, with using the right word. And he has an entire poem that laughs at censorship and at people being snooty about language. I'm not going to actually read that poem, but I was going to read a few Pushkin lines, so let me just give this gentleman a taste of what Pushkin's writing is actually like. There's one from a poem which is called The Wagon of Life Телега Жизни.
So I'm actually going to just read this lovely just four lines in Russian, and then we'll do a translation. С утра садимся мы в телегу, мы рады голову сломать и, презирая лени него, кричим «Пошёл, ебёна мать. Russian is such a beautiful, melodic language. Yes, so this is just my rough translation. In the morning, we get into this car, which is, you know, this wagon of life. We are happy to challenge our brains.
Literally, it says, break our heads, but that's not idiomatic and detesting laziness and leisure. We yell, «get moving, fucking mother, but it's not. «fucking mother is the literal translation, but that does not even begin to describe it. So in Russian, the word «тофак and all of its permutations is such an incredibly powerful thing that so. I was talking to my mom in preparation for this episode and asked her, You know, how would she describe it?
She said Well, you could say that saying «fuck in English would be like, you know, a politician just giving a talk in front of an audience. Compared to what something like, «Ебёна мать sounds like in Russian, I mean, people can get killed for saying that to someone else. It's a very yeah.
I mean, you can. There's actually a history of, you know, people bringing fists to faces when you use phrasing like that, because, you know, it's incredibly, incredibly powerful.
Your voice changes when you speak Russian in this really interesting way. I'm falling in love with you speaking Russian.
That's very funny.
Can we do an episode where you're just speaking Russian?
Yeah, absolutely, let's do it, let's do it. It's not just me who thinks that this is so incredibly important. If you look at, you know, Russian history. The use of swearing is an incredibly important part of the language, part of expression, part of kind of communicating clearly.
And, in fact, Dostoevsky wrote back in 1873 about how the single word «хуй, which means prick, dick, but it's once again, it's, you know, both prick and dick and cock, like all of those words, are not quite right, but the male sexual organ. How you could basically describe everything and every single emotion in the Russian language with that one word and its permutations, and how. He thought that it was just awful, that because of censorship, he couldn't actually use it. And so he has just this whole big thing on it. And this is Dostoevsky, yeah.
So if you had named your company Dostoevsky instead of Pushkin, he also would have been on board.
Can I just venture a mild defense of our letter writer?
No, yes, please go ahead.
Which is, I think that what the letter writer is arguing against is sloppiness. That sometimes people use profanity when they can't be bothered to express themselves more articulately, more clearly, more specifically, more.
In other words, it becomes a kind of crutch. But the careful and the choice use of profanity, it can be very powerful and sometimes even beautiful.
Absolutely.
And there are times.
I remember I had this conversation with. It's funny enough. A friend of my brother's is a Mennonite pastor who is writing a book about the use of profanity in the religious context. And he told me this story about a woman whose life had collapsed, a series of incredible, terrible things that happened to her. And she relates this to her friend and her friend, who is someone who would never, in a million years, use a profanity, used a profanity. And it was this incredibly emotionally important moment. Because what the woman who was suffering needed at that moment was someone who understood the magnitude of what had happened to her.
And the only way for a very strict religious person to express that was to swear was to go into forbidden territory, right? Like, that's really beautiful. I don't think our letter writer would disagree with that kind of use of profanity. I don't know.
I don't know our letter writer seemed....
I'm just much more generous towards.
I'm not, I get so, so one of the reasons I get so riled up about this is. The letter writer has a lot in common with Vladimir Putin. Because back in 2014, Putin enacted a ban on using the four base swear words in Russian in any sort of cultural or artistic expression.
So Hui, which we already talked about. Yabat, which was in the Pushkin poem. So that poem would have been censored and would not have been allowed to be published, and Pushkin could have actually been put in jail. Pizda which is kind of your female nether regions.
All of a sudden, Maria, you are resorting to euphemism. It hasn't stopped you in the previous 10 minutes.
And Blyat, which is slut. But normally, you just use it as a daily exclamation in different permutations, so those four words are banned in the Russian language. And this was around the same time that he was enacting all the anti-gay stuff, and it's a way of censoring expression ideas.
It's kind of like taking a hammer to it, right? Because those words, something that my mom also always says is there are really no bad words, it's just bad people. And so by banning these words, he's showing that he's one of the bad people. Because you can hurt someone much more. Just like you said that using swears judiciously can be beautiful and can just be very powerful.
You can hurt someone without swearing, you can really just skewer them and just be absolutely vicious without using a single bad word. Yeah, and it's all in the intention, it's all in the person.
It's all so the moment I see any kind of censorship, it's kind of like you and the monk debates. My emotions start getting riled up and I start wanting to say, no. I'm basically always against anyone who says you should not use any some kind of language.
Yeah.
So, Malcolm, now that we've established the parameters of precise language use, let's take a quick break.
All right, we're back now, Maria. As you know, we gave Columbia University the first ever Pushkin Prize for the way they screwed around with their data. To get a higher place in the U..S. news rankings. We awarded them the George Santos Memorial Pushkin Prize for egregiously deceptive self-promotion. And they were. It was all because a Columbia professor named Michael Thaddeus found them out.
And after he exposed their shenanigans, they fell from number two to number 18.
It was a huge scandal.
Which is quite the fall from Grace.
It is quite the fall from Grace. No one is more obsessed with the U..S news rankings than me. No one was more delighted to see Columbia tumble so far and so fast, but I can see that for a Columbia alum such as yourself, this could be a little bit disconcerting.
You didn't feel like your degree was in some way devalued by learning that the school was 18th as opposed to second.
No, no, because when I applied to Columbia, first of all, it was grad school, so it's a little bit different. But secondly, it was not number two. Because this was pre-manipulation, so I mean, I'm sure there was still manipulation, but this was. I started grad school in Columbia back in 2008..
So this was a while back.
Oh, I think the manipulation may have started by then.
Okay.
It's one thing we don't know, right, you know, Columbia has not come clean about. They've given us no, no knowledge at all about the extent and breadth of this conspiracy. But I think it's reasonable to assume that it may well have started in the 90s.
That's actually probably accurate.
Yeah, and the show we just did about it. I asked Revisionist History's resident data scientist Lauren Lavelle to reconstruct what Columbia did. But I also wanted to know, and this is crucial. Is there a way they could have cheated so they wouldn't have gotten caught? In other words, is there a way they could have climbed into the top 10 without having run any risk of exposure? And so Lauren sat down and went through the data and figured out a strategy to make this happen.
So we're trying to do, like, a more sneaky route of getting them into the top 10.
So in 2023, Duke and Northwestern tied for number 10.
So we're looking to get the same score as a Duke or Northwestern, which is about a 92 out of 100..
Lauren says that for Columbia, just to beat those schools or tie them. They don't need to try goosing. Numbers like their graduation rate or their student faculty ratio, or even how much they spend on instruction. There's all kinds of reasons they can just leave those particular metrics alone.
I want to specifically keep the expenditures per student figure as close to reality as possible, because those are publicly available figures and they're in the consolidated financial statements. And also since their spending is already so high. Like blowing up that number further doesn't actually do much as far as ranking goes, because it's already in the top, like 98 percent of schools, like they're already a top ranking there.
Instead, Lauren says what Columbia could do if they want to cheat without getting caught is just to play with three variables. The percentage of class sizes under 20 students, the percentage of class sizes over 50 students, and the percentage of faculty that are full-time employees. So three like, totally off the radar statistics now. For each of these categories, Columbia gave numbers to U.S news that didn't line up with what Michael Thaddeus found.
The differences were enormous, so, Lauren says. Secondly, Columbia should just pick numbers that are about half as wrong. So somewhere in the middle between what they sent U.s news and the truth. And if all they'd done was those subtle tweaks, they could have cracked the top 10..
And what I arrived at was. The combination of those values gives us a rounded score of 92, which ties Columbia with Duke and Northwestern for 10th place. Which is kind of what we were aiming for.
But, of course, that's not what Columbia wanted. They wanted to rule the rankings and that's why they blew themselves up, because climbing higher in the top 10 is really, really difficult.
So, you know, we have to start making bigger and bigger fabrications in order to keep climbing places. Which lends to that idea of the synergy between the ranking metrics, right? Like, we have to tweak many variables, and in some cases by a lot, to start seeing any appreciable change in score. Like inflating one or two values just doesn't really do much for us.
What Lauren LaBelle is saying is that if Columbia just fiddled with three incredibly obscure metrics and just casually eased their way into the top 10, no one's going after them.
Yeah, that's, that's absolutely true. If they cheated just by a little bit less, like, who knows? And this goes back to when did they start cheating? Right? Because I'm guessing they did not start being so egregious right away, right? They started small and then they started climbing and they got more ambitious and no one, no one caught them.
No one took them by the hand and said, You know, bad boy, you can't do this. And so they kept going and they kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And that, to me, is, you know, the hallmark of the cheaters who get caught.
Columbia only gets caught because this guy. Michael Thaddeus, a math professor, takes an interest and devotes an enormous amount of time to figuring out how much. To the extent to which his institution cheats, right? No one else is checking, so right away, we have a suspicion there may be more cheating going on. Because how many of these obsessive, devoted math professors out there are there? With the motivation to look right? Not like the government's looking, or U.S news is certainly not looking.
Because if u.
S News. The minute that they claim to verify the validity of the data they collect, then they're liable in the case of in the event of a fraud. So they very clearly say, we don't check anything, it's on you. So anyway, the reason I bring this up is I'm walking down the street in Manhattan about two weeks ago, down 22nd Street.
Guy stops me, he goes, Mr. Gladwell. I go, Hi, he goes, Yeah, yeah.
I go, Yeah, yeah. Big fan of revisionist history. I read that thing you wrote about Columbia and I got to thank you because it brought me all kinds of clients.
Uh-oh.
And I was like, Wait, what? I was like, what do you do? He goes, I'm a lawyer, he goes, what clients? he goes. Well, you can imagine when other schools learned about what was happening at Columbia, they realized they had some legal exposure and they called me.
So I got all these clients now. I was like, wait, wait, wait. And then I said, Well, tell me more, and he's like, Oh, I can't.
And then he walked away and I said, Well, I gave him my email. I was like, he didn't email me.
Of course, he didn't, he didn't.
So, but that exchange makes me think, Wait, so what is he saying? is he saying that lots of schools are cheating? They see that Columbia got busted and now they're panicking and they're calling him to figure out whether they have legal exposure. Is that what he's saying?
I think that's what he's saying, because as the moment you started telling the story and it didn't even occur to me until this conversation. But of course, everyone cheats on the U.S. news rankings, and in that case, right? If everyone's cheating by a little bit, then the rankings are actually probably still pretty accurate. Because if every single school is trying to bump themselves up a bit, then it probably kind of all evens out. But they're, I'm guessing, now.
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, I'm totally disagree with you.
Not with Columbia, right? The people who are doing it egregiously, obviously, it doesn't even out.
No, it's not. A better, more plausible explanation is there's a cheating arms race. That somebody fiddles a little, someone else realizes that their peer is fiddling a little, and they fiddle a little bit more. And then what? You went? Columbia is the culmination of a whole series of-.
Got it, so Columbia is a nuclear explosion, got it. But yeah, it made me realize how many people are cheating, how many schools are cheating on the rankings, how many are actually being smarter and just cheating smarter. And not yet as cocky as Columbia became, because that's the other thing, right?
The more you get away with it, the longer you get away with it, the more confident you become that you will keep getting away with it. And that's completely rational.
So as someone who studies this, I'm curious on this question, is it so? The longer you cheat and get away with it, the more confident you become that you won't get caught. But is it also the case that the less aware you are that you're actually cheating?
No, I don't think that's right, you don't think that. No, I think that these people are not pathological.
They are very well aware of what they're doing, but they probably give themselves excuses because they also don't think they're doing anything bad. And people who cheat all the time, who lie all the time, they want to justify that. No, I'm not a bad person and I'm not really doing anything wrong. So Columbia actually probably tells itself, We're not doing anything bad, we're just staying competitive. Because if we're the only truly honest school and everyone else is cheating, then we get screwed and they all benefit. So let's all do it a little bit.
The lance armstrong.
The Lance Armstrong doping argument, for which at various times in my life, I've had a lot of sympathy. So here's what Lance would say, Lance would say. In the era that I was taking EPO and winning the Tour de France every year, not just EPO, lots of things. The only way you could compete at the highest levels of cycling was if you were using performance-enhancing drugs. My problem is that I was better at it than everybody else. And I think that that's actually true, because, you know, you can't just take performance-enhancing drugs and expect to be better overnight.
They're simply a tool that allow you to train in different ways and to exploit your potential more efficiently. And he was the most efficient exploiter of his own potential.
Right, this is true.
He brought a considerable his considerable intelligence, and the manager and his group. Or these guys were like to bear on the question of OK, if we're going to take EPO, how do we maximize its usefulness? So, like, he's sort of right, like, if Lance is a less expert cheater, he doesn't get caught. Most of those guys never got caught.
But it's also because he's so incredibly talented that people are going to scrutinize him more. Yes, and so....
He's like, Columbia in this respect, you know that the reason we care that Columbia is cheating is that it's Columbia. Yeah right, we're not East Tennessee State if they cheat on their U.s.
News We're not getting quite as upset, right? We don't feel like the stakes are as great.
Right, East Tennessee State. No offense, please, but yes, point taken, yeah.
So.
By the way, can I make a personal confession about cheating on the weekend?
Malcolm, What do you cheat on?
I'll tell you what I cheat on. On the weekend, I ran in the Sharon, Connecticut Classic five-mile Road Race, an annual road race. How'd you do? And I came in, I think, 17th.
Nice congratulations.
I'm an old man. That was a good, but I cheated, uh-oh, and I cheated because....
There were maybe other cheaters as well. I was wearing what they call super shoes. Oh, you know about this, I do now.
There's now running shoes you can buy with carbon fiber plates, and there's a particular kind of running shoe made by New Balance, which combines a carbon fiber plate. With what they call a high stack height. An enormous amount of cushion and you kind of bounce down the road. And I heard about, and in certain races, these particular new balances, they're banned from formal competition. I could not wear these if I was running an Olympic marathon.
But I'm like, it's the Sharon classic five-mile, it's like 50 people in the race, it's Sunday morning. I'm an old dude, nobody cares.
But technically, it was cheating.
Well, was it actually banned?
Well, is it formally banned? No, but it's cheating in the sense that it is a violation of the ethic of the sport. And it is an unfair advantage over everyone who was in that race, who was not wearing carbon plate shoes with high stack heights.
Well, if this were actually an important competition, I don't think you would do that.
Are you saying that my race wasn't important to me?
Yes, I am saying that, Malcolm, that is exactly what I'm saying.
I felt mildly guilty. I was at the starting line and I was looking at everyone's shoes to see if anyone else had these shoes. And I feel guilty. It was a conscious decision in the morning because I had lots of legal shoes. And virtually everyone who's serious is wearing some kind of carbon fiber shoe.
But this is the one that combines it with the high stack height. And so I was looking around and I was like, Is anyone else wearing these new bounces? And I felt a little bit exposed, I have to say, but no one noticed. And if you look on the website of the Sharon Classic five-mile race, there's no asterisks next to my performance.
Well, now everyone knows, I mean, I did not know that I was sitting across from a bona fide cheater.
Maybe you can put that story in your.
Maybe now you're going to make my cheating book, it's going to be an entire chapter. Malcolm Gladwell, The Cheater.
No, no, I just want to very briefly go back. We're nearing the end of our time. Yeah, I have one last little bit of business, which is, you know, I've been handing out these prizes, Pushkin prizes.
And we had talked a little bit about the first one, the George Santos Memorial Pushkin Prize for egregiously deceptive self-promotion.
I love that you put memorial in there, that's hilarious.
Well, his career is essentially over, so I feel like....
Yeah, exactly.
But there was another one I did in a.
I read this story by this student at Harvard Harvard, your school that you attended.
I got in Brooks.
See, you put a little barb in there without any swear words, that's right.
Some of my best friends went to Harvard.
And they're perfectly nice people.
They're perfectly nice people. So I found this student named Brooks Anderson, who wrote an article for the Harvard Crimson in which he pointed out just how many administrators there were at Harvard. And so I called him up and I said, Brooks, can you do a little work for me? I want to know which school in America has the highest ratio of administrators to students. You know, the perfect number would be one, right?
And I call that. The ICU staffing ratio An ICU in a hospital is characterized by the fact that there is a one-to-one ratio of staff to patients. Right? That's the baseline.
Theoretically, yes.
Yeah, that's the baseline, often there's more, but that's the baseline. So, I said, to what extent can we figure out if any college is coming close to an ICU ratio? So this is the second Pushkin prize, the ICU Staffing Ratio Award. And I deputized Brooks to go out in the world and to do some research and figure out who is the closest to the magic number of one.
And so I just wanted to run through his findings.
I limited him to the Ivy League plus MIT and Stanford, which seemed reasonable and so he has. At the bottom was Brown 0.14, then Columbia 0.15 Columbia.
There it is, again, Columbia.
Cornell Dartmouth, MIT Harvard. And the highest, at a staggering 0.36 administrative staff to student ratio, is Yale.
The Bulldogs, they take home the prize, which means you walk around the Yale campus. Chances are you're one third as likely to run into an administrator as you are a student. Which is, I'm sorry, completely and utterly. Bananas.
It is bananas. But I will actually push back a tiny bit on this. Because as someone who went to Harvard, we always were a little bit jealous of the fact that Yale students had more support, more resources.
Wait, you were.
I'm serious.
You're serious, I'm actually serious. You went to Harvard and one of your complaints was a lack of resources relative to other schools.
Not relative to other schools, just relative to Yale, that Yale was a much more personalized environment. Where students actually had places to go, people to talk to, where there was a very big support structure. That was actually pretty absent at Harvard, like Harvard's a big school where you sink or swim, and I was fine with that. I actually, I loved it.
Like, I'm independent, I don't need it, I understand, I see your face, I see your face.
But but all of these people?
Sink or swim, there are....
No one's ever sunk in the history of Harvard University.
Oh, some people have sunk.
I mean, like, yeah, in 1936, somebody dropped out.
But all I mean is that administrators do serve a purpose for student support, student resources. I think that's important. And all of these people have jobs, so these are people who are getting paid money and making a living. And they'd be fired. If you had lower ratios, no one's...
And people are going hungry babies, starving babies.
Malcolm's Starving Babies. No one is saying that anyone needs to be fired with the Pushkin Prize. We simply like to shine a spotlight on, shall we say, anomalous behavior by elite institutions in the United States. Come on, I'm trying, I'm trying.
One administrator for every three students it's getting, we're not talking about academic staff.
Okay, so academic staff obviously is more important, but....
And for the parents who pay the tuition, that covers this enormous amount of administrative load.
Fair enough.
Yes, yes, Maria, this has always been enormously fun. I will go home just thinking about your transformation. When you speak Russian, and how anyone with the privilege of hearing you speak Russian gets a different Maria.
I love it and Malcolm, I will go home thinking about your 17th place finish in your race that was life-changing for you, right? it was.
Yes, it was. Yes, it was. Thank you, Maria.
Thank you, Malcolm.
Revisionist History Today was produced by Kiara Powell, with Jacob Smith, Leeming Gistu, Ben Nadaf-hafri and Tali Emlin. Engineering by Flan Williams, Sarah Bruguier and Kay Wang. Our Music by Luis Guerra. Fact-checking by Cashel Williams and Tali Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney.
I'm Malcolm Glaubo.
The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sponsored by Lifelock.
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