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Adam Robinson

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2018-12-11
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2018-12-11
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  1. “Yeah, when a girl runs into a hard problem, she goes, Oh, I thought I was prepared. The boy knows he wasn't. So I goes, maybe the answer is C. The next question.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Most girls in school, most female students are more conscientious than most boys. They do their homework. They're prepared. They feel themselves to be prepared, but most standardized tests are designed to make you fail. The way a high jump contest is designed to make you fail, or a seeing eye chart, right? They keep making it progressively harder until you fail. And the goal is actually to fail at the highest level. That should be your goal. I'm going to fail. I want to fail at the very highest level. After all, you win the Olympic gold medal in high jump, right? by doing that or the pole vault or there are many other contests where the goal is to fail at the highest level. And boys who tend to be unprepared, more unprepared than girls. Better on standardized tests precisely because when they run into difficulty, they expect it to.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So, in fact, what the test measures is your facility with numbers, like do you have a good sense with numbers because life is like that, right? I mean, life when you're a bond trader or whatever else you're doing in business, you want someone with a good intuitive feel for numbers. And the GMAT test is actually pretty good at doing that. It's a clever test. Because if you use your intuition about numbers and you have a good intuition, you'll do well on the test. But if you try to calculate things exactly, you're going to run into trouble. Oh, by the way, this is worth knowing. You know, there's a male-female difference in test taking. Men outscore women, which is to say boys outscore girls, not just on the math part of tests, but on the verbal part. Like people think, oh, well, of course with the math section. Well, yeah, boys are also better on the verbal side of standardized tests. And the reason for that is this, and I'm stereotyping here in a good way.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Right, and law school especially, you wouldn't want someone to do that. By the way, the GMAT for business school actually has its clever test, actually. It's a clever test because the only way to do super well on the math part of it is by estimating and not trying to calculate things exactly. So you estimate an answer is often good enough to know the answer's got to be choice D, right? But if you tried to solve it exactly, you'd run out of time.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Means that the LSAT self selects for people who are really good at selecting an answer but not seeing both sides of a question.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Ah, well see the problem in school is that your goal is ultimately to pass the test, right? And because that's how you're judged. And sometimes what you need to do to pass the test is different from what you would need to do to really learn the material, right? And because often to learn the material, you have to be willing to go through a process of confusion and not really understanding and groping. And yet that would interfere with test performance. So schools encourage a kind of rope learning. Think about the law school admission test, right? The law school admissions test, which future lawyers have to take in the United States, right, to get to law school, the LSAT. Well, the LSAT asks you a question. It gives you five choices. And to do well on that test, you need to be able to pick an answer quickly, answer, not argue for two choices.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Right. And all you need to do is just change what you're doing, not more of it, not more of the same, do something different. And a good first step is in the opposite direction, right? If you don't know how to change what you're doing, start off in the opposite direction. Let's say you're training for a 10K and your times aren't improving and you keep increasing your mileage every week. Well, maybe decrease it now. See what happens with that. Just try different variations. But a step in the opposite direction is usually a good starting point.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Them $500, but it's not like I went back the next day and watched to see whether they had changed their routine. I kind of doubt it.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So that one person who came up with the idea, which was just an experiment, she noticed, wow, people say yes. So imagine an organization that experimented like that, right? And had all of its people experimenting like that till you find something that works. We did that at the Princeton Review. We found something that worked. It once took me two years, two years, mind you, of experimenting every single day, several times with different students to find a way to express a certain concept. And it took me two years of continual experimenting till finally one day I figured out a way. And then once you find that way, then stick with the script. Just don't deviate, right? Find out what works and then stick with that. But until then, you're experimenting. And we can do that as individuals, certainly corporations should be set up to do that. By the way, I don't know whether those three kids, I mean, you know, I get it.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And I said, you guys are saying exactly the same thing to everyone who walks by. Have you noticed that you get the same response from everyone, which is ignoring you? Like maybe a polite, sorry, I don't have the time, or I've already given, right? I said, why aren't you guys trying different lines? Like, why don't you express till you find something that works? And then once you find that, call it the main organization say, hey, we've got a really cool line. It seems to work in New York City. Let's test this in other cities. If you go to a McDonald's, they will ask you pretty much regardless of whatever you buy, would you like some fries with that? That's because I believe it was a 17-year-old girl in Cleveland or in one of the franchises discovered one day that when she asked people”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “For save the children.org, right? They were out there asking, trying to stop people walking by. And so, and I could tell because I watched them for a few seconds. I asked my friend to stop and I wanted to watch this. I said, watch this. They're all going to say the same thing. And sure enough, each one of the teenagers was saying exactly the same thing to everyone who walked by and said. Do you have a few minutes for save the children? And of course, New Yorkers just said no, don't. Goodbye and just kept walking on, right? And yet they kept saying the same thing. So I stopped one of the teens and said, I will give you $500 if the three of you, if I can have your time for two minutes. So they gather around because I was going to give them more money than they got in all that day, right?”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Methodical and scientific about it and detached and ruthless if the audience laughs great if they don't edit the joker cut it. Real simple. And so I think one thing all individuals can do is take a more detached experimental approach to what they're doing. You need a process, right, that you can articulate. Like Chris Rock saying, I changed one line from a joke in a night. Okay, that's pretty specific. He's really scientific about it. And I've heard other comedians, Jay Leno once said the same thing. They're very scientific about it. And so whatever you're doing, and this is true even at a corporate level, try different things. It was so sad. Last summer in New York, I was walking down the street with a friend and I saw three young people, I'm going to say their late teens, early 20s.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Chris Rock, and it's true by the way of all great comedians, they'll tweak one line from one joke and a night, right? They'll just change the name from Tim to Bob, see if that gets more laughs.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Right, because we think that's the answer, right? We think that what we're doing, we're not trying, as I'm using air quotes now, trying hard enough or we'll invest some more money. And that's not changing what you're doing. That's just doing more of the same. And the goal is to be detached and experimental, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, all life is an experiment. Well, if you conduct it like one, and so you see what works. And if something's not working, keep changing till you find something that does. It goes back to the Rudyard Kipling quote, right? I mean, don't negotiate over the price. Just keep trying. Trying until you find something that works. I love that about stand-up comedians, right? Stand-up comedians, they have an idea about what'll work, right? They develop a routine, but then they've got to try it out on an audience, right? They've got to get out in front of people. And if the audience doesn't laugh, okay, got to edit that joke. I read an interview once.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “But either parent can model that. It's not to say that's the father's role. I'm using air quotes now. The mother can also model that. Model persistence and staying with something. And it's okay not to get the answer. Because when you do, there's, it's incredibly rewarding, right? And that's not taught at schools. It's not the model that schools not modeled anywhere. And for adults, if you're having trouble with what you're doing, If you're not getting the results you want, change what you're doing. It's as simple as that.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Modeling exactly models hard work. After all, how did they get there? By working hard, how did they come from wherever they came to the United States? Working hard. It's not easy moving, you know, picking up your family and moving to another country. By the way, it's not to say it's all hard on the father. The mother is also doing really hard work, of course, but it's by and large the father that instills those values and models, especially outside the United States.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “they don't let not almost they don't let them think full stop they just don't let them think and so i think that's a crucial skill for for parents to teach their not teach to model for their children”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Not giving up. Like, you have to model that for kids. You can't expect them to just, as it were, I'm using air quotes now, get that, right? And no one ever teaches them that. It's not so much teaching. It's not like you can learn that in school. You have to model it. And teachers are certainly unwilling to do that because you need to have a teacher in front of a class struggling going, I don't get this and just sticking with it until you get it. And that's not modeled in schools. In fact, students are made to feel bad if they can't get something quickly, right? Teacher asks a question and expects a quick answer. And if you don't give the answer quickly, the teacher moves on. Okay, next and points to someone else.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “So, you need to know it's hard going in, which for sure it's hard. And so the difficulty you have is inherent in the material and not your process, right? I think it's also important for parents to model what it means to struggle for their children, especially today. I'm so worried about the under 25 generation. We spoke about this earlier, right? Their brains have been hijacked by technology. It's really serious. So kids today don't know what it means to actually work at something and to persist. And they don't see it modeled anywhere, right? So for example, something that parents can do that I think would be a great lesson for their young children is to model struggling with something, to model struggle, and to model staying with the struggle.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Right. I think it's important that parents let their children know, just to talk about parents for a sec, that learning is hard. You need to know that learning is hard. It's not easy, right? And the reason you need to know it's hard is that if you think it's easy, as soon as you encounter difficulty, you're going to think the problem is you.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Air quotes now. And the problem with intelligence is or the belief in intelligence is that it works against you. If you're intelligent, you shouldn't have to work too hard. Things should come pretty quickly. And if you are intelligent, what's the point? You're never going to get anywhere. And that's a fairly widely held belief in the United States. The better belief is that your success is determined by how hard you work. And then it's just a matter of choice if you want something, work for it, and you will. if you want it. There's a great Rudyard Kipling quote, if you haven't”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Right, I got feedback and I know I improved. That's the real life lesson. The real life lesson is you can apply yourself, you can work, and you can improve. That's way more important than a test score, right? I mean, the life lesson is I can do better. I often over the years students would say to me, it's been decades since I work with students, but they'd say something like I'm no good at math or I'm no good at learning languages. And I'd say yet because there's always a yet. And it's not that you're no good at math. It's whatever techniques you're using are no good, right? So the ethos that I always inculcated with students, and they knew this from the get-go, was you can improve. And that's really, that's the real takeaway lesson is that if you want something, work at it. In America, we've deified intelligence. I'm using.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Well, you know, you wanted the real takeaway lesson is, the important lesson is not that you went from 29 to 65. The life lesson is this. I worked at something and I changed. I improved. That's the real takeaway.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Right. And so you wanted someone with drive and some belief, but actually a little pessimistic. And that's so parents who want to raise, I'm using air quotes now, the self-esteem of their kids for academic performance. In fact, it's academic performance is inversely related to self-esteem. Inversely.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “After all, that's why you're in the program. Compare two kids playing pickup basketball, and I stop and I ask them, are you going to make the MBA? And one of them says, there's no way. Well, maybe that kid will. The kid who says, yeah, I'm going to make the NBA has no clue about how hard the road is to get there.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Insane. We got two thirds of our students above 65. So into one of the three high schools, which was a huge improvement. So those numbers were startling. The improvements when I said that they improved twice as much as the next group, I'm not talking about 1% versus half a percent. I mean, they were incredible leaps. And it had to do with the father born in another country. And sorry, where the father was born and where the mother was born. Incidentally, and this is important, improvement was inversely related to perceived chances of success, inversely related. So you wanted a kid who said the following, I don't think I'm going to pass the test. That kid improved a lot more than a kid who said, I'm definitely going to pass the test. So you wanted a kid who had the following characteristics. A kid who said, I don't think I'm going to pass the test. My parents don't think I'm going to pass the test.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “and work ethic right and the average student in our course it's 100 questions on the test the starting score of the students in our program were in the 20s like 29 or 30 and to get into Stuyvesant you needed an 85 and then the other two high schools Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech were 75 and 65 but that's still a huge leap from an average of 29”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I worked hard to get here. Education is important. And your mother's the one who gives you your language skills. So you needed a mother fluent in English. Which is why the motherborn in the United States was so important.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “You want her father born in another country, a mother born in the United States. That student improved twice as much as the reverse, motherborn in another country, father born here. And that student improved twice as much as both parents born in another country. And they improved a bit more than both parents born in the United States. Now, this is what was astonishing. If your father was born in another country and your mother was born in the United States, that student improved the same regardless of race. Race dropped out as a factor. It didn't matter whether you were Asian or white or black or Hispanic. It had to do with where your father was born and where your mother was born, and you might ask, why was it so important that the father be born in another country and mother born here? By the way, think Barack Obama. It was important because the father was the one that gave you the immigrant drive, right?”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Also, questions that were psychological like this When in doubt on a question, true or false, you should go with your first hunch. How do you rate your chances to get into Stuyvesant, right, to pass the test, which is the most competitive test in the country, right, for high schools. And so I fed all of these in. And then a year later, I had the results and I was astonished at the following. The number one positive factor for improvement was a father born in another country, motherborn here.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “And I'm always testing and researching. So I created a super long questionnaire, like 150 questions that the following year students were asked to complete. And so the questions were like this, are you male or female? Because sometimes from the names you couldn't quite tell. How old are you? How many brothers and sisters do you have? Where are you in the pecking order? Where was your mother born? Where was your father born? Where were your grandparents born?”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Yeah. And there's a reason for that in a sec. We're going to get to that. I haven't gotten to the punchline. Wait till we get to the punchline. And this may sound boring to everyone, but the punchline is very cool. So, and I'll get to it in about three minutes. And about 5% black and Hispanic. So the board of that announced a program, we're going to prepare inner city kids. It's not fair that wealthier kids get prep courses to get into this school. We'd like to boost our minority enrollment. And knowing that the board of ed knew nothing about doing this, I volunteered pro bono. I said, I'll create a program for you. And at the end of the first year, we had a 300 students and two-thirds of them got into one of the three specialized high schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech. But I was dismayed. And I was dismayed because at comparable starting scores”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Yeah, that's how competitive it was. So the high school was roughly 70% Asian. And by Asian, I include all of Asia, India, you know, not just China. So Asia, about 25% was white. And of the white, most of those were Russian immigrants.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And I should have published these results. I don't know why I didn't. So this is really groundbreaking stuff I'm about to share. So in 1995, New York City announced that it was going to start a program to prepare inner city students for what was known as the Stuverson Test. For those of you outside New York, Stuyvesant is arguably the most competitive high school in the country. You have to take a single test to get in on a Saturday. It's like the SAT. And some 35,000 students take the test for 700 spots. And to put this in perspective, Stuverson's average SAT is higher than Harvard's. That's how competitive it is. This is 25 years ago, Shane. The principle of Stuvison told me that there are prep courses for Stuvisant, this is a high school in New York. There are prep courses in Hong Kong, not Chinatown, New York, I mean Hong Kong. So students were prepping there.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Income, exactly. You knew the race background. You'd have stats on each school, right? The percentage of each race. You had the average age of the plant and equipment, so you know, was it a new school or an old school? You knew the average class size. I fed all these statistics into a computer, into a stat program. And 80% of the variation in fifth grade math and reading scores was attributable to the socioeconomics of the school, not the teachers. 80% of it. So if students are doing well, yeah, 80% of that variation is attributable to their socioeconomic status. And I did some interesting work along those lines about 25 years ago. In fact, this is going to blow your mind when I tell you this.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Right. Now, but let's go back to measuring how good the incoming score and the outgoing score. So you'll get a kick out of this one Saturday. I don't know, this is like 10, 15 years ago. I had a free Saturday, not free, free-ish. I'm using air quotes. And I thought, hmm, let's look at the statistics of New York City schools. And New York City, to its credit, offer statistics on fifth grade math and reading scores and average attendance in a school plus a slew of other statistics for each school in the city. So you would know, for example, the average experience of the teachers at that school. You would know what percentage of the students had free lunches. So give you some indication of the”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “That's a really good question. And it comes back to the core curriculum concept, right? So there's a notion that we should have a core curriculum in the United States, like a core curriculum that we all use. And I think for basic subjects like reading and writing and math, basic subjects, it should be core. And the reason we were able to do what we were able to do and get these dramatic score improvements was we could test everything relentlessly. Because the U.S. education system allows each teacher to kind of do what he or she wants to do, there's no experimenting. There's no improving.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “And not just that. We knew on a class level. So let's say every, not every student, but the students in that class that Shane was in misread that same question. We would know there's something, maybe there's a problem with the teacher. Maybe the teacher isn't teaching students correctly, right? So we had collective feedback on how well each teacher was doing. And then we had it on the site level. So maybe all teachers at that particular site in Los Angeles say were having trouble with that geometry question. Then the problem wasn't the teachers and it wasn't the students. It was the site manager. He wasn't training teachers correctly.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Well, it was a total game, but it was also using big data way back then, you know, right? This is early 80s, right? And so we were using big data because we had to measure everything. So we knew we would know, for example, should we put a cartoon on that page of the manual because we could measure whether the cartoon's presence or not influenced scores.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Right, which techniques aren't you using? We would know why you made the mistake, not just that you made a mistake, we would know why you made the mistake, and we'd know which techniques you weren't using that we taught you last week.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “And so we had statistics like that. And then everything we did, we tested. So for example, let's say, Shane, the question were a geometry question on a test. And it said, what is the area of a circle with radius five? And you wrote down 10 pi. You'd get the question wrong. And you would assume on a superficial level, the student doesn't understand circles. But maybe the student understands circles just fine and he misread the question, because he wrote down the circumference So we had a program, we tagged every question and every choice. So we knew”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Right. You can certainly determine how good a job you did over all the students. In other words, it was difficult in the beginning. Say we had a thousand students, it was difficult to determine whether any given student, how much that student would go up. But we'd know how much the collective would go up. Like we'd kind of like insurance, right? We wouldn't know which person was going to get into a car accident, but we know collectively. 0.03% of them are going to get in accents in any given calendar year, right”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Score leaving. Right, exactly. Score coming in, score, right? And then you can use statistics to figure out what should the expected improvement.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “So, the system I created, yeah. Test prep is it's the hardest, I believe it to be the hardest domain. There's that old funny saying dying is easy, comedy is hard. Well, test prep is a lot harder than comedy. Test prep is a ruthlessly unforgiving domain because you can measure how good a job the tutor has done down to the decimal. You know exactly whether he's done a good job or not. And so”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “But in fact, I proved statistically there are only a few hundred words that could really show up to test you. So I would put that in our manual. It was really only a few hundred words. If you know these, basically you can answer any vocabulary question. So they deleted that section from the test. There was another question type analogy questions like cat is the feline, right? Well, what happens if you don't know what the word feline means? Well, I figured out a way that students could reverse engineer what the answer had to be, even if they didn't know what the words meant. So they deleted that section from the test too. And they changed a lot about the test. They changed the order of the questions now. So it's more randomized.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Sometimes you're stuck on an easy question, right? And if that's the case, you ask yourself, what would Joe Bloggs do? And you do that. He'll always choose something that seems right. And so the algorithm was anything that's obviously right is obviously wrong on a hard question because it's not obvious. That's why the questions are arranged like that. So that was the first insight. And then they used to have a vocabulary section of antonyms where they would ask you like, what's the opposite of? And you would think that there'd be hundreds of thousands of words in the English language that could show up. They could ask you anything.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “So, for example, if the last math question said, Shane drives from Toronto to New York at 60 miles an hour and turns around and returns home at 40 miles an hour and they say, what's his average speed? You know the answer is not going to be 50 because everyone is going to get 50, right? But you know it's got to be around 50. So you already have a really big clue about the answer to the question. And back then, so I created a mythical character Joe Blox. And I said, if you're not sure what to do on a question, you ask yourself, what would Joe Blox do? And if it's a hard question, you do the opposite.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Closing your eyes and guessing You're guessing and batting zero. So, whatever you're doing is moving you away from the answer. So she said, well, I cross off the ones that I know are wrong. And I said, good. Then what do you do? She said, well, then I pick the one that I think is right. So I blurted out. Oh, well, then you should pick the one you think is wrong. And then I realized, oh, yeah, of course. The only reason a hard question is hard is that whatever anyone does, seemingly plausible, leads them away from the answer. And the test was constructed so you have easy questions at the beginning, then the medium ones, and then the ones at the end, you know that whatever anybody does has to be wrong.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “They were back then. They're not so much now anymore because of what I developed. Anyway, so she gets all the easy questions right, and she gets all the medium questions right, but she missed every single hard question. Like she was betting zero. So what was interesting to me was that she would cross off say choices A, B, and C, and she gets it down to DNA, and whichever one she chose, the answer was the other one. So I said, Joanne, this just puzzled me, right? And it's one of my personal algorithms is anomaly detection, right? Like this just like bing, like something's going on here, right? And I just said, I'm puzzled. Could you just, Joanne, you should be getting, you get it down to two choices, two or three choices, and every time you pick one on the hard questions, it's wrong. Could you just step me through your thought process? Because you should be getting a half to a third of these right.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “This mass mailing, I got a single student. I still remember her name, Joanne, from one of the private schools in New York. And I gave her a booklet of sample SATs that had just been published by the Educational Testing Service. And I said, Joanne, you take this book at home and you do a practice test, get your mom or your dad to time you, and then let's meet and go over the test. And I'll tutor you. And I had zero experience, right? I'd never tutored anyone. I had no idea whether I was any good at it or not. I just thought means to an end, right? Like it didn't occur to me that I would be bad at it, but it didn't occur to me that I would be good. It's not like I had any expectations. Really just a means to an end. And then she comes for our second session, the first time I'm going through her test. And I am astonished at what I see because on every section of the test, the questions are arranged in order of difficulty.”

    2018-12-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT