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  • One argument that we make is that we could all benefit a little bit from thinking more

  • like children, okay. Now you could say well, we're -- first of all everybody's biased in

  • a lot of ways and we have our set of biases too. It may be that we embrace the idea in

  • this book of thinking like children because we're kind of, you know, childlike. We have

  • kind of obvious observations sometimes. There's observations that strike people as obvious.

  • We ask a lot of questions that are not considered, you know, the kind of questions that people

  • ask in good company or smart company. But one of the most powerful pieces of thinking

  • like a child that we argue is thinking small. So I realize that this runs exactly counter

  • to the philosophy of the arena in which I'm appearing which is thinking big, Big Think,

  • but our argument is this. Big problems are by their nature really hard to solve for a

  • variety of reasons. One is they're large and therefore they include a lot of people and

  • therefore they include a lot of crossed and often mangled and perverse incentives.

  • But also a big problem -- when you think about a big problem like the education reform. You're

  • dealing with an institution or set of institutions that have gotten to where they've gotten to

  • this many, many years of calcification and also accidents of history. What I mean by

  • that is things have gotten the way they've gotten because of a lot of things a few people

  • did many, many years ago and traditions were carried on. And now to suddenly change that

  • would mean changing the entire stream of the way that this institution has functioned for

  • many years. Therefore, attacking any big problem is bound to be really hard and the danger

  • is you spend a lot of resources -- time, money, manpower, optimism which is perhaps one of

  • our most precious resources attacking a problem that you can't make any headway on. So I mean,

  • you know, history is littered with brilliant people who have attacked large problems in

  • the past half century, century among them famine, among them poverty and most recently

  • I think education reform, a healthy diet and so on. So these are all really big problems.

  • So our argument is -- you know what? There's a lot of people out there thinking big. Maybe

  • some of them will be successful. Probably not so many honestly. It's very, very hard.

  • Our argument is -- you know what? Let the people who are gonna try to think big solve

  • big problems -- let them go. There's enough people doing that. Why don't you just try

  • to think small. Why don't you try to find one piece of the problem that you can identify

  • and peel it off and try to solve that problem or answer that question. So there are a lot

  • of reasons why it's better to do that. It's easier to satisfactorily answer a small question

  • or solve a big problem because you can get the data, you can understand the incentives,

  • it's just inherently much less complicated. If you can come up with a solution to a small

  • problem there's a much better chance you'll actually be able to get it done. A lot of

  • people feel like they come up with the answers to big problems but then you need to get all

  • the political and capital will to do it. And that can be much harder than actually solving

  • the problem.

  • So if you can peel off a small piece of a problem and then someone else peels off another

  • small piece and you add them up, you're constantly, you know, working toward a better place. So

  • I'll give you an example. If you think about, let's say, education reform. Even that very

  • phrase is kind of weighted or biased toward the supply side, the schools. It's basically

  • saying that oh, all the kids and the families who are sending their kids to school -- they're

  • all doing exactly the right thing. But education needs to be reformed because plainly the schools

  • and teachers and principals, they're the bad people. So that's kind of an assumption already

  • about where the problem should be solved. So you think, you know, people have been talking

  • about the many, many inputs that go into education -- class size, technology in the classroom,

  • resources spent, curricula -- the way the curricula are taught and so on.

  • So, you know, what if you say instead well, that's all -- those are big parts of the education

  • puzzle and they can all be attacked in some way. What if, however, what if we think about

  • instead of the education side -- what if you think about the student side. What if you

  • think about the kids who are showing up from school and what if you can look at areas in

  • which they're not doing well and maybe try to learn something from that and gather some

  • data and figure it out. So I could offer two examples about this. One is a pilot program

  • that was built here in New York City that was called School of One. And what School

  • of One did was it basically tried an entirely different model for each kid. Let's say in

  • a math class -- each kid would come into math class on a given day and have the option of

  • learning that day's lesson or whatever lesson in a number of different formats. In other

  • words it might be sitting in a room with a teacher and a bunch of other kids and getting

  • group instruction.

  • It might be peer learning with other kids. It might be virtual tutoring. It might be

  • doing a computer game. In other words, you offer all these different options for each

  • kid to try to learn the same material. Then at the end of each day, each kid gets tested

  • on how well they did on that lesson. And then you can learn what each kid -- how each kid

  • best learned. What form of teaching best learned. Then you have a very nice algorithm that overnight

  • computes the score of each kid with each kind of teaching and in the morning each kid now

  • comes in with a sort of playlist to determine what I'm gonna do today in what format of

  • learning and what I'm going to tackle. So that's, to me, a really neat idea in which

  • technology and a smart way of thinking about the demand side of education, the students

  • can change the way you can think about learning generally. Here's an even simpler one that

  • than and an even smaller one that than.

  • It turns out that if you look at the poorest learners in schools, I think pretty much anywhere

  • but in the U.S. and in much poorer countries as well. You can notice that often a bunch

  • of them have something in common which is they have bad eyesight. So as ridiculous as

  • this seems to be talking about in the twenty-first century, you know, who doesn't wear glasses

  • now. I mean an estimated one million people in America wear glasses that have no prescriptions

  • in them just because they want to look like me, okay. So Lebron James, you know, half

  • of the NBA now goes to put on their fake glasses after a game because it's just become a thing,

  • right. So you would think that the stigma of glasses is dead. But it's not and in some

  • places it's really not dead. So some scholars, some researchers went to a relatively poor

  • rural province in China and they wanted to know how big a deal is poor eyesight for education

  • generally. In other words, is poor vision depressing classroom scores.

  • And what they did is they found out that a tiny, a pitifully tiny fraction of the students

  • in this one region who needed glasses were wearing them -- almost none. And there was

  • a stigma and there were beliefs that wearing glasses in childhood would have a bad effect

  • later in life and so on. Some of which may have logic to them, some of which may not.

  • So they did an experiment these economists did. And they said what if we take all these

  • students who need glasses and we'll divide them up and make an experiment. We'll have

  • a control group. The kids -- half the kids keep going like they were before -- they don't

  • get glasses. The other half we give them glasses - $15 glasses I think it was funded by The

  • World Bank. Much cheaper than all new computers and all new curriculums -- a $15 pair of glasses.

  • They gave them to one set of kids. Then after a year they measured their education, their

  • test scores against the kids who hadn't gotten the glasses. And it turns out that having

  • glasses is a really big deal in school. Surprise, surprise, right. A tiny problem, incredibly

  • obvious solution where thinking like a child, you know, sometimes we shy away from obvious

  • ideas because we think, oh, that's not sophisticated enough, not smart enough. Here however was

  • a bunch of low hanging fruit. A bunch of kids who needed glasses. The minute they got them

  • they started doing much, much better in school. And that, to me, is the beauty of thinking

  • small. You find a problem that you can actually figure out instead of pining about it and

  • guessing about it for years and years, come up with a solution that's actually doable,

  • in this case incredibly cheap. And happy ending, it works. Not every solution will be so easy

  • or so cheap or they won't always work but I think you can see why we think at least

  • that thinking small can have a huge benefit.

One argument that we make is that we could all benefit a little bit from thinking more

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