Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's eight o'clock in the morning on a Saturday,
Speaker 1: a little chilly deep in downtown Manhattan. Streets are empty.
Speaker 1: I'm standing on a sidewalk with my assistant, Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: First of all, Camille, UM, I need to know did
Speaker 1: you did you sleep well last? Then? I did sleep well? Yes,
Speaker 1: I did not, really, I could almost no sleep. And
Speaker 1: I had a nightmare about the l said that I
Speaker 1: laughed before himself. I had an exam nightmare from high school,
Speaker 1: essentially a high school, and you laughed before it was over.
Speaker 1: I had a nightmare about the el sad that I
Speaker 1: walked out before the test was over. Oh but my
Speaker 1: nightmare was just beginning. This is Malcolm Gladwell. I'm back
Speaker 1: with season four of Revisionist History, my podcast about things
Speaker 1: overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about what happened when
Speaker 1: Camille and I took the law school admissions test. We
Speaker 1: had three number two pencils each, a small pack of Kleenex,
Speaker 1: a package of trail Mix, all in clear plastic bags.
Speaker 1: We lined up outside Pace University with hundreds of other
Speaker 1: nervous people clutching clear plastic bags. Everyone wanted someday to
Speaker 1: become lawyers, except us. We were there in the name
Speaker 1: of science. We had to go. Yeah, it's all been
Speaker 1: very Uh it's traumatic and stressful, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: get one last thing. I would like to get your
Speaker 1: handicap on your chances of beating Just tell me what
Speaker 1: you think your chances of beating me here, Um, my
Speaker 1: chances as as your mom point out, was quite confident
Speaker 1: you would win. My mom is confident me no matter what,
Speaker 1: which is very nice, but you know, maybe unrealistic. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know fifty fifty Camille, I really,
Speaker 1: I told you I am twenty four. Okay, I can't
Speaker 1: even I won't even tell you how old I am.
Speaker 1: But it's it is a It is a large multiple
Speaker 1: of your age, I know. But I don't think it
Speaker 1: has I don't think it has to do with age.
Speaker 1: I think it has to do with reading ability. And
Speaker 1: you read NonStop twenty four hours a day. I've been
Speaker 1: an intellectual. I've been in cognitive decline for years. It's
Speaker 1: all going to be exposed. All right, we're off. I
Speaker 1: got the idea of taking the l SAT from a
Speaker 1: man named William Henderson. I read a paper that he
Speaker 1: wrote It was on my favorite website SSRN, which is
Speaker 1: where academics from around the world posts their papers and
Speaker 1: they get ranked. If you're a regular listener to this podcast,
Speaker 1: you'll know how genius I think SSRN is. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: paper was called the l s at Law School Exams
Speaker 1: and Meritocracy, The Surprising and under theorized role of test
Speaker 1: taking speed. Anything with the words surprising and under theorized
Speaker 1: in the title, of course, is going to be catnet
Speaker 1: for me. So I read it, then I read it again.
Speaker 1: Then I had to meet him. So just a little
Speaker 1: bit of background here. I didn't go to law school
Speaker 1: to US thirty five, and so I had had a
Speaker 1: whole career before then. Why did What were you doing
Speaker 1: before you became a lawyer? I was a firefighter paramedic.
Speaker 1: I was a union rep for a suburban Cleveland fire department.
Speaker 1: I did that for nine years. Is a kid, people,
Speaker 1: And remember I'm kidding, as I went to law school
Speaker 1: because of those Mastard management attorneys. Henderson goes to law school.
Speaker 1: After that, he gets a clerkship with a judge and
Speaker 1: one day he's in the shower and a thought occurs
Speaker 1: to him, what was the aha in a shower. The
Speaker 1: specific aha was what was my God? The two most
Speaker 1: time pressure things I've ever done in my life is
Speaker 1: taking the LSAT in these damn law school exams. He
Speaker 1: had been a firefighter paramedic, he had raced to the
Speaker 1: streets of Cleveland to save people on the brink of death.
Speaker 1: And then most time pressure he'd ever felt was taking
Speaker 1: the l set together into law school and then taking
Speaker 1: the exams once he got there. I can remember taking
Speaker 1: Cass Sunstein's Elements exam my first year of law school
Speaker 1: is a two hour exam. Cass sun used to teach
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, which is where Henderson went
Speaker 1: to law school. He's a genius. He asked the kind
Speaker 1: of questions that you can spend months years thinking about.
Speaker 1: But his exam two hours. That's all you got. The
Speaker 1: proctor said time, and everybody dropped their pencils and there
Speaker 1: is a huge ug. You know, everybody was like groaning
Speaker 1: that they didn't get more time to keep on working
Speaker 1: on Cash Sunstein's element exam. Just like you know, ninety
Speaker 1: people who all drop their pencil and they're all, you know,
Speaker 1: exclaiming the desire for more time. That was a memorable experience. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm sure this is obvious to you, particularly if you're
Speaker 1: an American. You've been tested a thousand times in your life,
Speaker 1: SAT ACT, GRE, on and on, and every one of
Speaker 1: those standardized tests doesn't just test whether you can answer
Speaker 1: the question correctly. They test how quickly you can answer
Speaker 1: the question correctly. But I'm a Canadian. I've never taken
Speaker 1: a standardized test in my life, and as an outsider,
Speaker 1: I have to say the whole system seems really weird.
Speaker 1: Why is quicker better? V L set is Exhibit A.
Speaker 1: It's the single most important thing that determines where you
Speaker 1: go to law school. Nothing else comes close. And what
Speaker 1: is it? It's around one hundred and twenty five questions,
Speaker 1: divided among five sections analytical reasoning, reading, comprehension, two sections
Speaker 1: on dissecting an argument, and one experimental section. Everything's multiple choice.
Speaker 1: You mark your answers with a pencil by filling in
Speaker 1: little bubbles on an answer sheet like an IBM punchcard.
Speaker 1: A perfect score is one eighty, and if you're a
Speaker 1: super go getter, you cannot score below one seventy five
Speaker 1: because then you can't get into Harvard. And if you
Speaker 1: can't get into Harvard. You're never going to get an
Speaker 1: offer from a big law firm or get a Supreme
Speaker 1: Court clerkship. Your life is over everything. The country club,
Speaker 1: the BMW, the multiple cases of two thousand, Chateau Lafitte, rothschild,
Speaker 1: it hinges on those five sections, and how long do
Speaker 1: you get to spend on each of those five sections?
Speaker 1: Thirty five minutes, not forty, not fifty, not fifty five.
Speaker 1: And if you finish up one section early, you don't
Speaker 1: get to add that time to the next section. When
Speaker 1: we decide who is smart enough to be a lawyer,
Speaker 1: we use a stopwatch. So that was William Henderson's question.
Speaker 1: What does putting that thirty five minute time limit on
Speaker 1: a cognitive test like the els AT do? So I
Speaker 1: said to Camille, let's find out, and because we're both
Speaker 1: super competitive, the whole thing got very involved. The first
Speaker 1: thing I would like to do is to understand on
Speaker 1: a very very granular level, what time pressure means for
Speaker 1: the way people take the test, the strategies they use,
Speaker 1: the kinds of mistakes they may specific Everyone told me
Speaker 1: that there was no way I could do well on
Speaker 1: the l set without getting some coaching. So I went
Speaker 1: to one of the top new educational technology startups in America,
Speaker 1: a company in New York called Noodle, started by John Katzman,
Speaker 1: who before this was one of the founders of the
Speaker 1: famous Princeton Review test prep company. I sat down with
Speaker 1: Katsman and two of his top people in a big
Speaker 1: bluff building on Union Square in Manhattan, Catsman Fritz Stewart
Speaker 1: and Dan Edmonds. No, but I am very, very anxious
Speaker 1: not to lose to Camille. So I thought, was she
Speaker 1: born in the US or in the U. Oh, she's
Speaker 1: went to a fancy school like this serious, seriously intelligent woman.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying US, UK were US. Okay, you have
Speaker 1: a problem. Oh great, I'm too old and I'm from
Speaker 1: the wrong country. It was not an encouraging start. I've
Speaker 1: done things under time pressure before. Of course, I've written
Speaker 1: newspaper stories on deadline. I wrote exams in college. In
Speaker 1: those cases, though, the task required me to be me,
Speaker 1: only with a sense of urgency. But the first thing
Speaker 1: the Noodle guys told me was the l SAT didn't
Speaker 1: require me to be me. It required me to be
Speaker 1: someone else. A lot of it is about helping people
Speaker 1: understand they don't get to do this at a comfortable speed.
Speaker 1: That's Dan Edmonds right. In order to finish these sections,
Speaker 1: you have to do it at a speed that's a
Speaker 1: little uncomfortable, which means you have to hone your instincts
Speaker 1: by the test rules, not by your rules. What does
Speaker 1: it mean to read it at an uncomfortable speed? For me?
Speaker 1: It means that if there's something like in a reading
Speaker 1: comprehension passage, if I hit a paragraph that I don't
Speaker 1: fully understand, I don't get to go back and reread it.
Speaker 1: I just kind of have to accept the parts that
Speaker 1: I understand and move on. The noodle guys approached the
Speaker 1: l set like pathologists approach a cadaver. For me, I'm like,
Speaker 1: all right, I didn't get that, but if a question
Speaker 1: asks about it, I will go back. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: bother me as long as I understand the topic, sentence
Speaker 1: of the paragraph, and the overall thrust of the author's argument.
Speaker 1: If I miss a few details here and there, or
Speaker 1: even a chunk of the argument, I'm all right, fine,
Speaker 1: who cares, I'll go. I'll go dig it out exactly
Speaker 1: what I need to. Wait, it's okay to miss a
Speaker 1: chunk of the argument, So I don't even aim for
Speaker 1: a level of what we would normally call comprehension, and
Speaker 1: my first read I am out to process the information,
Speaker 1: not understand it. I don't get any points for understanding it.
Speaker 1: I get points for bubbling in the right question. I
Speaker 1: imagine that when you read, there are lots of moments
Speaker 1: where you sort of oh, that's an interesting point, and
Speaker 1: you sort of pause and you think, and you let
Speaker 1: your mind meander a little bit. There's no meander time.
Speaker 1: On the off side, there's no digression time. Meander and
Speaker 1: digression are my whole m. That's what I do for
Speaker 1: a living. What do you think this podcast comes from?
Speaker 1: So then John Katzman gave me a sample question. What
Speaker 1: I would have you do is read this, and then
Speaker 1: for each of these questions, tell me the two stupidest answers,
Speaker 1: two stupidest okay, the two answers choices that you know
Speaker 1: are wrong. WHOA, this is what? That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: You can't read this on a podcast. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I can't the passage with six hundred words it seemed longer.
Speaker 1: I've just been told that I don't need to understand it.
Speaker 1: I don't need to comprehend it. It's okay if I
Speaker 1: miss chunks of it. In other words, I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: read it without reading it. And as I sit there
Speaker 1: puzzling about this, the three of them debate right in
Speaker 1: front of me. How long is reading without reading should take?
Speaker 1: John said a minute, Fritz said three tops, Dan said
Speaker 1: it depends on the person who's reading. The only thing
Speaker 1: they all agreed on was that I had to hurry fly,
Speaker 1: get the bones of the argument, and now feel free
Speaker 1: to spend the time on the question itself. And again,
Speaker 1: all you're trying to do is tell me the two
Speaker 1: worst answers. Two worst answers. When do you tell me?
Speaker 1: I'm on your shop? Just so? He is on page
Speaker 1: one forty two? Right, go okay? I read it out
Speaker 1: loud because I thought maybe that would help researcher. People
Speaker 1: who participate in opinion surveys often give answers they believe
Speaker 1: the opinion surveyor wants to hear, and for this reason
Speaker 1: that some opinion surveys do not reflect the actual views
Speaker 1: of those being surveyed. However, in well constructed surveys, the
Speaker 1: questions are worded so as to provide respondence with no
Speaker 1: indication of which answers the surveyor might expect after the passage,
Speaker 1: there were multiple sets of questions to test my understanding
Speaker 1: of what I had just not read. They were pages
Speaker 1: of them. So if a survey is well constructed, survey
Speaker 1: respondence desire to meet surveyor's expectations has no effect on
Speaker 1: the survey's results. The reasoning in the researchers argument is
Speaker 1: questionable in that the argument overlooks the possibility that they
Speaker 1: say A and B are just just a cross map
Speaker 1: and move on from actions. Okay, those are the worst.
Speaker 1: Not they're wrong, They're the worst answers. The clock is ticking.
Speaker 1: This is such a brutal passage, shining cruel. Jesus bananas.
Speaker 1: What am I aunt? Time wise? This is what they
Speaker 1: meant when they talked about uncomfortable reading. I was being
Speaker 1: forced into a kind of altered, frenzied state. The word
Speaker 1: they used was breathless. You should be a little breathless,
Speaker 1: they said. I was breathless. I kept asking how much
Speaker 1: time has passed? They tell me my heart would accelerate.
Speaker 1: I started to panic. Okay, okay, I have no idea
Speaker 1: what I did great timing on that seven minute's twenty.
Speaker 1: So this section is how long a few minutes? Thirty
Speaker 1: five minutes, thirty five, thirty five minutes. And we just
Speaker 1: did one, two, three, four, five, six seven questions you
Speaker 1: would have had, say, ten minutes. Yeah, but I haven't
Speaker 1: picked any right answers yet. Well, you've done whole the
Speaker 1: Harper and that was four and a half seven twenty.
Speaker 1: So you're tight. Oh man, you're not toast. Oh I'm toast.
Speaker 1: We did another question. I was convinced the answer was B.
Speaker 1: It was C. I could feel Harvard slipping away. Great,
Speaker 1: thank you. What will you guys think my aunts are
Speaker 1: of the eating commute? If you want the honest answer,
Speaker 1: I think you're in real trouble about you. She's got
Speaker 1: On the day of the l set, I sat in
Speaker 1: a little class room in one of those fixed half
Speaker 1: desks that I last had in grade school. We got
Speaker 1: our test packets. I raced through reading comprehension with time
Speaker 1: to spare sections two and three. I was right up
Speaker 1: against the deadline. Then came analytical reasoning logic games, and
Speaker 1: I looked at the questions and what I had to
Speaker 1: figure out and realized that there was just no way
Speaker 1: I was going to finish in thirty five minutes. I
Speaker 1: needed to slow down, and I wasn't allowed to slow down.
Speaker 1: I glanced behind me and there was Camille with like
Speaker 1: a death stare in her eyes, ruthlessly dispatching question after question.
Speaker 1: Then I looked around some more and saw all these
Speaker 1: kids half my age beavering away, full of purpose, because
Speaker 1: all you Americans, apparently except as Gospel, this idea that
Speaker 1: the smart person is not the person who gets the
Speaker 1: right answer. The smart person is the person who gets
Speaker 1: the right answer the quickest. Mercifully, it ended at one thirty.
Speaker 1: Camille and I stumbled outside into the sunshine, clutching our
Speaker 1: plastic baggies. Our producer Jacob Smith was waiting. We had
Speaker 1: we had no ideas. Some people wanted to be lawyers.
Speaker 1: First of all, that was a shock. Um. Camille cheated
Speaker 1: because she she packed my We had to have these
Speaker 1: plastic bags. She packed my plastic back for me. But
Speaker 1: she gave herself like apples on like really really nutritious snacks,
Speaker 1: and I gots, which is the same thing. So you
Speaker 1: had fresh fruit and Malcolm, Malcolm had trail mix from Stevs.
Speaker 1: But but but who sharpened all your pencils, Malcolm and
Speaker 1: packed you a little tissues in case your nose runs. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: after both taking it, who like, what's your honest? Depending
Speaker 1: on who do you think did better? Oh? I think
Speaker 1: it Camille did. I was I did so poorly. I
Speaker 1: was fine, and I got really cocky and then I
Speaker 1: hit the logic games and basically I think I got
Speaker 1: zero right. I had no idea what to do. I
Speaker 1: sat there and I was like in a state of
Speaker 1: complete panic. I have I was untested until this moment,
Speaker 1: and now I have been tested. America has taken its
Speaker 1: measure of me, and I'm it's pretty it's pretty humbling experience.
Speaker 1: Why do Americans do this to themselves? Do they play
Speaker 1: scrabble with a stopwatch? In literature class? Do they get
Speaker 1: extra points for reading Tolstoy's War and Peace Overnight? Is
Speaker 1: there an oscar that goes out every year to the
Speaker 1: movie that got shot the quickest? I really don't get it. Okay,
Speaker 1: time to meander and digress. I became a Grandmaster of fifteen,
Speaker 1: So I think I became an im right after I
Speaker 1: turned thirteen, and I was a grandmaster of fifteen. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was very, very good at the time. That's Hikaru
Speaker 1: Nakamura grew up in Westchester County, outside New York City.
Speaker 1: He's in his early thirties, although he looks about half
Speaker 1: that age. He's one of the best chess players in
Speaker 1: the world. How much chess were you playing as a kid?
Speaker 1: Pretty much all the time, so I was playing at
Speaker 1: the marshal at least I would say two or three
Speaker 1: days every single week, and then I would also be
Speaker 1: playing blitz on the internet chess club. I would say
Speaker 1: at least five to six hours every single day. Years ago,
Speaker 1: I met Magnus Carlson, who is the greatest chess player
Speaker 1: in the world, and I asked him how much he
Speaker 1: used a chessboard versus how much he just worked through
Speaker 1: chess positions in his mind, and he said, oh, I
Speaker 1: practiced mostly in my mind. In fact, I'm working on
Speaker 1: an opening right now. Hikaru Nakamura is a little like that.
Speaker 1: He's incredibly gracious and humble, but even when he's giving
Speaker 1: you what seems like his full attention, you get the
Speaker 1: feeling that there's a whole separate part of his brain
Speaker 1: breaking down. A be Fisher match from the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: The first thing I did after my disaster with the
Speaker 1: l set was call up Hikaru, but I didn't want
Speaker 1: to talk to him about chess. I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to him about time. So my first question about this
Speaker 1: would be what would happen within reason if there was
Speaker 1: no clock? How does the way that you approach a
Speaker 1: game of chess change if I remove the time constraint entirely?
Speaker 1: All right, So if you remove time entirely from the
Speaker 1: game of chess, every game of chess would be drawn
Speaker 1: because without without time, if you have an anilest amount
Speaker 1: of time to think about any given move. If I
Speaker 1: could think for thirty minutes on every single move, I
Speaker 1: do not think I would ever lose a game of
Speaker 1: Chuss to a human. To a computer, I would still lose,
Speaker 1: but to human even Magnus. Yeah, if I had an
Speaker 1: half hour forever move, I don't think I would ever
Speaker 1: lose to Magnus. This is why chess games have a
Speaker 1: time limit. Otherwise it's not a game. Tournaments would go
Speaker 1: on for months and everyone would end up tied for first.
Speaker 1: It would be like Little League. Everyone would get a
Speaker 1: participation trophy. So there's classical chess which is the kind
Speaker 1: played to the World Championships. Classical allots ninety minutes for
Speaker 1: the first forty moves, then thirty minutes for the rest
Speaker 1: of the game. Winning at classical chess involves calculation, working
Speaker 1: through many possible scenarios before deciding on a move. Then
Speaker 1: there's blitz chess. That's what Hikari was playing for five
Speaker 1: or six hours a day growing up. In Blitz, each
Speaker 1: player gets five minutes for the whole game. When you
Speaker 1: play blitz chats, it very much becomes about finding moves
Speaker 1: that look good, that are not blunders, that you can
Speaker 1: play almost instantly, where you use a couple of seconds
Speaker 1: in classical, how many moves would you go deep It
Speaker 1: normally would be about five to six moves and about
Speaker 1: three or four branches. It's a fantastically complex mental exercise, Yes,
Speaker 1: very much. I mean it's probably at least I would say,
Speaker 1: close to one hundred different different permutations of moves or
Speaker 1: a sequence. Is that you're looking at for every single move? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: In blitz we've truncated that process. Everything about Blitz and
Speaker 1: classical is the same same pieces, same board, same players,
Speaker 1: same choreographed openings, but the time limits are different, and
Speaker 1: what happens when you tinker with the time limit you
Speaker 1: get a completely different set of results. A classical chess
Speaker 1: Magnus Carlson is number one, he's also number one at
Speaker 1: blitz because he's a genius. Hikaru right now is eleventh
Speaker 1: in the classical rankings. But it blitz he's number two
Speaker 1: in the world. Why because he's really really good at
Speaker 1: the rapid pattern recognition that's necessary for blitz, and he's
Speaker 1: not quite as good at the complex calculation that's necessary
Speaker 1: for classical. Now, who's an example a good example of
Speaker 1: the opposite. Fabiana Fabiana Karwana is Actually he's probably the
Speaker 1: best example. I can't even think of anyone who is
Speaker 1: that much better at classical chest than they are at
Speaker 1: blitz and wrap. Why do you think he's not good
Speaker 1: at blitz and wrap? It um? I think? I think
Speaker 1: with Fabiano's it's the other way. He's very very good
Speaker 1: at calculations, so when he gets positions, he's very good
Speaker 1: at calculating and understanding what the possibilities are with more time,
Speaker 1: Whereas when he doesn't have time to calculate the long
Speaker 1: sequences all the way through, his intuition has to take over,
Speaker 1: and his intuition and natural feel are not as good
Speaker 1: as as everyone else. Fabiano is a tortoise, slow and steady.
Speaker 1: Hikaru is a hair ears back speedy. You construct your
Speaker 1: chest that favors the tortoise, or you construct your chest
Speaker 1: so that it favors hairs. I think you can see
Speaker 1: where I'm going with this. If we had a blitz
Speaker 1: tournament for the World Championship, you know, in two months,
Speaker 1: where would you put your odds of winning? I would
Speaker 1: put my odds of winning probably around twenty percent. I
Speaker 1: would say I put Magnus at about sixty percent. I
Speaker 1: put myself at twenty percent, So pretty good odds. Yes,
Speaker 1: so your your world changes if, just arbitrarily, we decided
Speaker 1: that the standard for international tournament chess ought to be blitz. Yes,
Speaker 1: it would change. Yeah, you would make a lot more
Speaker 1: money probably. Yes. Wait, there's a third variation, bullet chess.
Speaker 1: In bullet you get one minute for the whole game,
Speaker 1: and Hikaru is the king of bullet. Are you better
Speaker 1: than Magnus at bullet at bullet? Yes, a bullet yes,
Speaker 1: why now, so what's why wouldn't Magnus if he's if
Speaker 1: he's so serenely superior at all other kinds of chess.
Speaker 1: Why can't he beat you a bullet? In terms of
Speaker 1: the calculation what he does is like the sort Well
Speaker 1: it's not an algorithm, but sort of the way that
Speaker 1: he find tunes or the way he thinks about I
Speaker 1: think it takes a little bit more time to come
Speaker 1: to the conclusions. What strikes me is that the chess
Speaker 1: hierarchy formal chess hierarchy is an arbitrary function of the
Speaker 1: amount of time we have decided to spend on a
Speaker 1: chess match. Right, Yes, Like I said, I think you
Speaker 1: can see where I'm going with this. Hikaru is a hair,
Speaker 1: not a tortoise. And what is the l SAT. It
Speaker 1: is a test that rewards hairs over tortoises, which means
Speaker 1: that if the l SAT ran the chess world, they
Speaker 1: would consider Hikaru the greatest chess player in the world.
Speaker 1: They would crown him champion over Magnus el sat logic
Speaker 1: is that the best player is the one who solves
Speaker 1: the hardest chess puzzles quickest, and that's Hikaru. But that's insane.
Speaker 1: Not even Hikaru thinks he's better a chess than Magnus.
Speaker 1: What Hikaru would say is that he's a different kind
Speaker 1: of chess player than Magnus. And I haven't even mentioned
Speaker 1: puzzle Rush. It's an online game where you get a
Speaker 1: seri of endgame chess positions and you have to get
Speaker 1: to checkmate as often as possible in five minutes. Puzzle
Speaker 1: Rush is insanely popular. Do you play a lot of
Speaker 1: puzzle Rush? I have the highest score edits Yes, I do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what's your score? My highest score is fifty five,
Speaker 1: and what's the second highest? I think there are two
Speaker 1: people with fifty four, and then their couple with fifty three,
Speaker 1: and it falls off from there. Yeah. Yeah. We have
Speaker 1: most of the top players in the world played puzzle Rush.
Speaker 1: Most of them have. Yes, as Magnus played not officially,
Speaker 1: not officially, I think you might be playing and hiding it.
Speaker 1: He probably has. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you get any
Speaker 1: award for being the number one on puzzle Rush? No?
Speaker 1: They don't like crown u King of puzzle Rush. There's
Speaker 1: a three hour video of a cargo crushing puzzle Rush
Speaker 1: on YouTube. It is one hundred and thirty thousand views.
Speaker 1: This actually might be the most hotly contested form of
Speaker 1: chess you've ever played. You've never played something where millions
Speaker 1: of people are in the same tournament. Yeah that's yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. You're right, you're right. You could make an
Speaker 1: argument this is your greatest accomplishment. I guess, but I
Speaker 1: one't think of it that way. But yes, you're right, right, Yes.
Speaker 1: The only reason we don't consider that your greatest accomplishment
Speaker 1: is we've arbitrully decided only to honor chess played under
Speaker 1: these archaic rules in a tournament atmosphere. That also, rush
Speaker 1: is a I mean, if we decided to say that's
Speaker 1: what chess, yes, right, yeah, if yes, that's that's true. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It has many advantages. Chiefly is it allows the entire
Speaker 1: world to compete on an equal right. Right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you went against the entire world and you won. I
Speaker 1: don't know, yeah, yeah, I've never thought about that, but yes,
Speaker 1: that that is true. Yeah, but if one thing comes
Speaker 1: out of this, it is I hope you you give
Speaker 1: yourself a pat in the back. The order in which
Speaker 1: people finish in any cognitive task is an arbitrary function
Speaker 1: of how much time is given to complete that task.
Speaker 1: You can make it fast, or you can make it slow.
Speaker 1: The chess world has chosen to reward the tortoise. The
Speaker 1: L set has chosen to reward the hair. They've decided
Speaker 1: to play puzzle rush and reward the h Carus of
Speaker 1: the world, and not have us play classical and reward Fabiano.
Speaker 1: What does a legal world have against Fabiano? As I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, there's going to be a second part to
Speaker 1: this examination of the L set. Of course, there is
Speaker 1: why would I rush? In the next episode, I'm going
Speaker 1: to visit with the folks who administer the L set,
Speaker 1: the Law School Admissions Council of Newtown, Pennsylvania. But that
Speaker 1: can wait. Let's go back to William Henderson, who started
Speaker 1: me wondering about time and tests. The great justification for
Speaker 1: the L set is your score is supposed to be
Speaker 1: a useful indication of how well you will do in
Speaker 1: your first year of law school. It's a predictor. But
Speaker 1: Henderson's great question was what if the EL set only
Speaker 1: predicts law school grades because law schools make the same
Speaker 1: mistake that the L set does. In most law schools,
Speaker 1: grades are based in large part on how well students
Speaker 1: do on exams where they are deliberately not given enough time.
Speaker 1: You take cass Sunstein's Elements exam where you engage with
Speaker 1: the ideas of a legal genius and you have two hours.
Speaker 1: That's it. Henderson wondered if a law school doesn't rely
Speaker 1: so heavily on its students doing things quickly, if the
Speaker 1: school relies instead on take home exams and essays, what
Speaker 1: happens to the usefulness of the L set as a predictor.
Speaker 1: And he found that its usefulness declines. I'm quoting the
Speaker 1: data show that the L set was a relatively robust
Speaker 1: predictor of in class exams and a relatively weak predictor
Speaker 1: of takecome exams and papers. In other words, once you
Speaker 1: stop racing against the clock, then the people who do
Speaker 1: well on the L set no longer are the best
Speaker 1: at law school, which is exactly what every chess player
Speaker 1: in the world would have told you would happen. So
Speaker 1: what did William Henderson do when he became a law
Speaker 1: professor at Indiana University. He changed the way he evaluated
Speaker 1: his students. He started placing more emphasis on takecome exams,
Speaker 1: And when he gives an examined class, he makes it
Speaker 1: four hours, not two. That's completely open book, and I
Speaker 1: give out one of the questions in advance. I say,
Speaker 1: here's three questions. I'm going to test you on one,
Speaker 1: so you've seen one of the questions already. And then
Speaker 1: four hours. There's plenty of time to do the issue spotter,
Speaker 1: and I give a word limit. And I did that
Speaker 1: as a direct result of that LSAT study that I did,
Speaker 1: because I was cutely aware that you change the ordinal
Speaker 1: ranking when you pick a testament. And I say, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody will need all four hours, but
Speaker 1: if you if you want to take four hours, you're
Speaker 1: free to take four hours. Not long after he started
Speaker 1: grading that way, a student came to see him. This
Speaker 1: kid got an A on the exam, and so he
Speaker 1: comes in. He wants to talk about exams. I said,
Speaker 1: I've been here for three years. I've never done this
Speaker 1: well out of the exam before, and I want to
Speaker 1: know why I did this well. And I pulled out
Speaker 1: as an exam and it was an eight hour take
Speaker 1: home and I go, look at your first paragraph. You
Speaker 1: hit every single issue here in the first paragraph. It's
Speaker 1: just a well organized pearl. And the light bulb went
Speaker 1: on for him. It's just like if I had had
Speaker 1: more time all my exams would have been disorganized. You
Speaker 1: have a student who the system declared was of average ability.
Speaker 1: The student believed it, why wouldn't he. But then someone
Speaker 1: came along, someone by the way, with the great benefit
Speaker 1: of being a firefighter from the suburbs of Cleveland, who
Speaker 1: had the freedom to think a little differently, and he said, wait,
Speaker 1: maybe you aren't of average ability. Maybe you only think
Speaker 1: your average because we have chosen an arbitrary system to
Speaker 1: evaluate your ability that makes you look average. You are
Speaker 1: Fabiano and we had been making you play puzzle Rush.
Speaker 1: Oh I know what you're thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: who won between you and Camille who got the higher
Speaker 1: score in the el sat? No stop racing ahead, you
Speaker 1: are engaged in uncomfortable listening. You'll have to wait until
Speaker 1: the next episode. What I want you to think about
Speaker 1: is that student of William Henderson's and his miraculous revelation
Speaker 1: that he really was a good student. After all, there
Speaker 1: are a ton of tortoises like him out there, not
Speaker 1: just taking the el SAT and sitting in law school classrooms,
Speaker 1: but competing for places at any number of schools and
Speaker 1: professions that have decided to tell their applicants whether they
Speaker 1: are or are not any good. And what I don't
Speaker 1: understand is how the hair has got to set the rules.
Speaker 1: I thought the whole point of the story of the
Speaker 1: tortoise and the hair was that the tortoise one. Clearly
Speaker 1: the kind of person who was most disadvantaged by this
Speaker 1: system is the tortoise. I realized, after my experience with
Speaker 1: the noodle guys and my time with Hikaru, that I'm
Speaker 1: on the side of the tortoise. I feel for the tortoise.
Speaker 1: I might be a tortoise. I come from tortoises, and
Speaker 1: we've all met tortoises in our lives. Who will not
Speaker 1: My mother is a little bit of a tortoise. She
Speaker 1: will not be rushed under any circumstances. She will not
Speaker 1: She does not make mistakes. She goes over things five
Speaker 1: times to make sure that they're perfect. She is ideal
Speaker 1: for a certain kind of work. She'd have a problem
Speaker 1: with the il set. She would say, why are you
Speaker 1: rushing me? And she would you know, and she wouldn't finish,
Speaker 1: and she wouldn't never guess. She can't guess. She's incapable
Speaker 1: of guessing. So my mom could never The profession is
Speaker 1: putting up a barrier to my you put a stop
Speaker 1: watch on thinking whatever, you rigged the system. So Camille
Speaker 1: wins fine, but when you go after the Gladwells, then
Speaker 1: it's personal. Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobell and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Speaker 1: Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carl Migliore,
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Iceberg. Revisionist
Speaker 1: History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladow.
Speaker 1: But Camille, Camille is like a smarty pants. She's going
Speaker 1: to do don't you think she's gonna do amazingly? Well? Yes, yes, Well,
Speaker 1: Camille has a natural um. She naturally prepares and is
Speaker 1: naturally persistent and determined. So I think those things will
Speaker 1: really help her a lot. Should I should I be worried?
Speaker 1: I think you should be worried. I think you should
Speaker 1: be worried. Yep