[10 seconds left in a New York Knicks vs Toronto Rapters game]
Tied at 87
Lin with the ball in his hands
Fans on their feet..
Five
[Lin dribbles the ball, staring down opposing point guard Jose Calderone]
Four
[He throws up a three pointer]
Lin for the win….
GOT IT!
--
The first question on everyone’s mind after the arrival of Jeremy Lin - why didn’t we see this coming?
With the modern obsession with technology, numbers, and rankings, it’s easy to assume we can assign a number to someone and predict their potential. Jeremy's Lin's number? Well he actually didn't even get a number, he was undrafted out of college and expected to go nowhere. The problem with trying to understand people by numbers is that they provide an overly simplistic understanding of human nature.
If you looked out into the 2010 NBA draft class you’d see guys that are 7 ft tall or guys with wingspans longer than my couch - guys that just look like basketball players.
You’d also see guys with impressive resume’s - putting up 20 points per game, receiving Conference Player of the Year awards, or winning NCAA championships. You’d see these guys on paper and they would scream top NBA prospect.
But every year, great players get ignored by NBA teams. Guys that are good at basketball, but lack the impressive resume’s to attract the attention of big time scouts. Fortunately for them, basketball isn’t played on paper. Unfortunately for them, sometimes not having that impressive resume leaves them with no chance to prove they can actually play.
These are the guys who have an innate sense for plays developing in front of their eyes, two seconds before anyone else realizes what’s happening.
The guys that can play at NBA speed.
The guys with the endurance to withhold the day-to-day beating of playing in the NBA.
How could these things that sound so important be so easily ignored? My short answer, we haven’t developed good ways to understand complex intangibles, so we’d just rather pretend they don’t exist. Of course, that’s not to say some people haven’t been trying to understand intangibles.
Let’s look at a different high-money prediction field – my favorite, medical school admissions.
Medical schools are criticized for producing heartless robots that see patients as diseases rather than humans. The rap is that med schools only see the tangibles – class rank, test scores, letters of recommendation from famous names. By doing so, they’re missing out on all the intangibles you’d want to see in a doctor – empathy, presence, social intelligence.
Canada, progressive as always, has known about this problem for a while. They’ve switched to a form of interviewing called “MMI” or multiple mini-interview.
The basic premise is that you talk to ten people for ten minutes each. With each interviewer you discuss a prompt that seeks to grade you on a characteristic like ability to work in teams, empathy, ethical reasoning. The topics range from explaining how to construct a lego car, to discussing the complex intersection of an abusive relationship and doctor-patient confidentiality.
It’s an imperfect system, but at least they’re trying to get at the importance of intangibles in medicine. It’ll hopefully prevent the guys that have padded resumes with no sense of empathy from being physicians, and instead allow the Jeremy Lin’s of the medical world to be picked up by the radar and given a shot at med school.
All this leaves me with some more questions though.
Which intangibles are important in life?
Are intangibles innate, or can they be learned? And can they be taught?
Why is it so hard to gauge someone’s intangibles?
See you on the other side,
from ken
Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
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