July 2, 2020 • 41 mins
In Bolivia, a political activist radically reforms the voting process for... student council elections. Who else does he convince? Revisionist History. And maybe a fancy private school in New Jersey. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. One day, not long ago, I went to visit
the Lawrenceville School just outside Princeton, New Jersey, a very old,
prestigious private school, leafy campus, Gothic, this and that. I
asked one of their deans could I come and meet
(00:37):
with some students? She said yes, Does everyone have a
piece of paper and pen? The dean put together a
group of twenty kids. We met in a conference room
looking out on the campus lawn. On a scale of
one to ten, don't put your name on it. I
would like you to rank your happiness with the Lawrenceville
School's current electoral process. Ten is you think it's perfect.
(01:02):
One is you think it's maybe time to bring in
Adam Adam Adam Cronkwright. He was the reason I was there. Okay,
hi everyone, thanks for coming. My name is Malcolm Babbo,
so you as you know, I am a writer and
I have a podcast called Revisionist History. That's how the
(01:29):
afternoon began. I said, I wanted to run an idea
by them, an idea field tested by this person. I
just met Adam CRONKWRIGHTE about talent and chance and how
we choose others to lead us. And I would encourage
you all to be If you think I'm crazy, you
should say, Malcolm, you're crazy. Maybe this idea could change
(01:52):
a lot about what's wrong with the world right now,
or maybe not. Revisionist history is about the overlooked and misunderstood.
Usually I decide what belongs in either of those categories.
This time, I thought I'd just run Adam's idea by
the students of Lawrenceville and that them decide. All this
(02:14):
had to do with the way they elected their student council.
I thought they should call a constitutional convention and start over.
There is no right answer or wrong answer, but I
want to make a case for something and see how
that possibly relates to the way you guys do things
here at Lawrenceville. They listened to Adam's idea argued about
(02:36):
it for close to two hours. I'll be honest, I
didn't think I'd get anywhere. The whole student council was
there as well, all people who had profited from the
Lawrenceville electoral status quo. And what was wrong with the
status quo in theory, not much. Lawrenceville elected its leaders
through the perfect democratic system, campaign speeches, open elections. Their
(02:58):
constitution might as well have been drawn up by the
founding fathers. For all I know, one of the founding
fathers went to Lawrenceville. But then at the end of
the afternoon, I said, okay, now that I've given you
an alternative, how happy are you with what you have?
Scale of one to ten. One is totally miserable with
(03:20):
the status quo, and ten is delighted. Everything's perfect. I
want to see your number, rip it off and hand
it to me. Don't put you name on them all.
As the students handed in their little slips of paper,
I glanced at a few. I was taken aback. Lawrenceville
(03:42):
had the perfect democratic system, and upon reflection, upon exposure
to a little of Adam Cronkwrighte's subversion, there were a
lot of students in that room who decided they didn't
like it anymore. I told them I'd do an official
tally later after I got home. But there's some happiness
(04:03):
in this room, and if they seem discontented with democracy
in the gilded corridors of the Lawrenceville School, I can
only imagine what it's like elsewhere. I first ran across
Adam Cronkwright online. I was just rummaging around Google one
(04:26):
day and what he was doing struck me is so
interesting that I tracked him down cold called him. Are
you ever in New York City? This was November. He
said yes, he'd be there in February. So he settled
on a date and he came to my apartment. Young guy, beard,
big backpack, hiking boots. So tell me, actually, before we
(04:47):
get into the question, where are you from, I'm from
just outside of Syracuse, New York. Yeah, so central New York.
How did you end up in Bolivia? Coach of Bomba,
to be more precise, a midsize city in the mountains
of central Bolivia. It turned out to be a long
story that starts in Canada, across Lake Ontario from his
(05:08):
home town. I remember where I was when I thought
of the idea, Like, you know, where were you I was.
I was outside Victoria Hall, walking on on Queen's campus
and it was spring. It was two thousand and nine.
Adam was finishing college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
(05:29):
He wanted to be a politician. He had, as he
puts it, a pretty big hero complex and it's kinda
gonna save the world. And coming to terms with this
idea that like, you know, be difficult to get to
the heights of power without tafting to make some serious
compromises externally internally, and you know, so then I was
(05:50):
kind of like, Okay, what am I going to do?
What are we going to do? He began to read history,
political science, turned it over in his mind, looking for
a big idea, and this is gonna, you know, right,
all the wrongs. But I wasn't that involved in anything.
He was more of a dreamer than a doer. Adam graduated.
The world was in a financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street
(06:13):
was one of the protest movements that grew up in response.
There was a tense city of activists in Succotti Park
in Lower Manhattan. Adam decided to go down to New
York and join them. There were working panels and panel discussions,
and one speaker in particular stuck with him, an activist
(06:34):
from Bolivia who talked about an epic struggle there over water.
Adam lived in Succotty Park for five weeks until everyone
was evicted by the NYPD. His experience with Occupy left
him frustrated. He understood what they were fighting for, but
not how. There was no how inoccupy. They didn't have
(06:57):
a plan that seemed like it could actually reform the
systems that had failed during the financial crisis. Adam moved
to Brooklyn, slept on some one's couch, and all the
while kept skyping with his new friend Bolivia, the water
activist Marcella Olivella. I kind of shared with her that
I was feeling a bit burnt out disillusion from what
I was seeing, and she said, well, yeah, I'll come
(07:18):
down to Bolivia and check out social moments there. So
he did Syracuse to Kingston, to Zaccotti Park, to Bolivia.
He made his way to coach A Bomba and there
he met Marcella's brother, Oscar, who runs a foundation. So
I was working with them for a while, and then
Oscar one day he was in the car and he's
asking me, what are you into? You know? So I
(07:40):
started telling him about democratic lotteries and he had never
heard of concept democratic lotteries. That's Adam's idea, replace elections
with lotteries. Adam tells Oscar about it. Oscar says, we
could test it in the schools. They signed up a
(08:09):
rural elementary school and two high schools, a night school,
and a regular high school and Adam sells them on
this new way of picking their student council. Anyone who
wanted to be in the lottery put their name forward,
and then the whole school gathered in the gym to
hear the results. We wanted something that was very visual
(08:32):
that could generate buzz, and so they had some clay
pots and we used fava beans as a crop that
they grow there. They're kind of the biggest beans you
can find, and so we had two colors, screen and purple.
The students would put faba beans in the pot and
they'd cover it with an aguay yuan, a traditional cloth,
(08:52):
so that it's from there, and it was also kind
of visually beautiful. If there were two hundred students running
for eight student council positions, they would put one hundred
and ninety two green fava beans in the pot and
eight purple ones. Then all the candidates would line up.
The kid reaches in under the cloth, Yeah, grabs a bean. Yeah.
(09:15):
Do they hold it up? If it's purple, they hold
it up. If it's purple or green, they hold They're
supposed to hold it up so the school can see.
No campaigning, no speeches, or posters, no glad handing, no ballance,
no recounts. The whole selection was over in twenty minutes.
(09:37):
Those who picked out the purple fava beans were on
student council. Done. Now, I know that sounds like a
crazy idea. You would never go for that, would you?
Or would you? Adam Cronk write learned three important things
(10:07):
from his work on school lot of he's in Bolivia.
I'm going to call them Cronk Rights laws. None of
them I think are obvious beforehand, at least they were
not obvious to him. First, numbers, as in number of candidates,
typically what percentage of the kids want to be part
of the lottery. It varies by the school. Yeah, it
(10:29):
varies by the school. And so at the Night High School,
you know, these kids often work even on Saturdays, like
they got a full schedule. So we would usually get
between twenty and thirty students who are volunteering for like
twelve spots, right, So it wasn't a huge, huge turnout.
And then at the rural K through eight school, it
(10:52):
was literally like every student that could participate participated in
every lottery. And then you know at another school we
worked at later on, it was an urban high school.
But in the morning, you know, there you had at
least half of the school. After the student council members
finished their time in office, Adam always asks a simple question,
(11:16):
would you have run if we had done things the
old way with campaigns and speeches? It's about three quarters
who's saying no right away? Why do they say no? Well,
let's say that nobody would have voted for me. I
was new in the school, didn't have a lot of friends.
You know, I would not want to run a campaign,
(11:37):
you know, and ask people to vote for me. You know.
It's the things that you can kind of guess are impediments.
They liked serving in office. They just didn't want to
run for office. The demands of the campaign were filtering
out all kinds of people who would otherwise have been
very interested in student council politics. Overwhelmingly those who win
(11:59):
the lottery one year in fact run again the next.
So yeah, they tend to line back up. But when
we asked them, you know, it would be normal elections,
would you have done it? The majority saying Now. What's
interesting is the extent to which running for an office
and running an office are two very very different things.
(12:23):
And someone may be both capable and interested in running
an office, but have no interest in running for That's
the first law. In a democracy. Elections are supposed to
encourage participation, but they don't. They discourage it. Lotteries encourage participation, Okay,
(12:48):
cronk rights. Second law. When you choose your student government
by lottery, you see a change in the kinds of
things the government actually does. In my high school, the
student council basically organized dances, not at Adams schools. In
coach of Bamba. At the Night School, for example, the
student government tackled all kinds of issues. Human trafficking is
(13:10):
a big problem there, and so they organized a workshop
on human trafficking that had like theatrical production and breakout
groups and stuff. They've gotten First aid kits for their schools.
The schools don't tend to have them. They've organized educational
field trips. The student council put together soccer tournaments and
(13:31):
poetry competitions. They opened a library. School didn't have one,
and so they solicited book donations from institutions and DVDs
and they were able to get a computer donated from
the Ministry of Education, and they set it up and
they ran it. They also created their own student ID
cards because that school didn't have ID cards and didn't
(13:53):
have uniforms, and since they went to school at seven pm,
the transportation workers didn't believe that there were students since
they charged them double. So that was the first thing
that they worked on. I was like hardy. Number one
for all the students was we want student ID cards,
and so they made their own and distributed those to Addam.
(14:14):
The crucial thing about that long list of accomplishments was
the range of things the students who were interested in.
What do you mean by that? That's a more diverse group.
They come from different social circles versus typically, at least
in Bolivia. You know, it'll be like a group of
friends who runs for election, right, and so they have
(14:34):
similar perspective on the school and what school might need
and or what they're going to offer to win people's votes,
which is typically more of the case. And so a
group that's brought together through a lottery, none of the
students in the student government know each other prior to
that first meeting, and they often have very divergent interests.
You know, you'll have you know, jocks and artists, and
(14:58):
you know, like just kind of the whole gamut. The
whole gamut. Democracies are supposed to be the best system
for ensuring that a whole gamut of interests are represented
in government. Cronk writes second law says that's not true,
not if the government is drawn from the same narrow
band of society a year after year. It's the lottery
that gives you a truly representative sample of leaders. After
(15:21):
the success of a few experiments, Adam helps set up
a nonprofit called Democracy in Practice to work with student
governments in Bolivia. I can't tell you the number of
times that, you know, fresh off of a lottery selection,
we have the first couple orientation meetings and my co founder,
Role and I will come out and we'll be walking together,
(15:44):
and we'll be, you know, saying, oh, you know, so
and so they're going to be a really important part
of this team. You know. They present themselves well, they
speak well, they're confident, and they don't even finish the
term of office. This brings us to Kronk wrights third law.
Maybe the most important of all. Nobody knows anything the
(16:10):
number of times that we've walked out of those meetings
and been worried about a particular student who seemed really unplugged,
you know, just kind of close body language, uncomfortable, didn't
participate much, and and we say, oh, we got our
work cut out with that student. And it you know,
they within a couple of weeks they figure out what's
expected of them, how they can plug in, and by
(16:31):
the end of their term they're even voted by their peers,
is like one of the most important members of the team.
And so that's an experience we've had over and over
again and still kind of get fooled by that. Now,
the charisma that that that certain students will have and
the confidence that they'll have. So the prediction, the mechanism
(16:52):
we're using for predicting who will be a good leader,
it's just flawed. So what you're saying, yeah, yeah, even you,
even you sometimes fall into this trap of of thinking
that because the kid presents herself well and is both
spoken in charismatic, that she's going to be a good leader. Yeah. Yeah,
(17:14):
it's really difficult to counter that bias, right, And obviously
not every student who's confident charismatic, you know, has a
has a big ego and can't work well with others
and doesn't show up. You know, we've had we've had
several students who fit that mold, and we're great teammates.
But generally, it's a lot easier to teach a shire
(17:39):
student or student who's not super popular. It's a lot
easier to teach them to overcome those fears and kind
of add a few more leadership skills to their their
skill set than it is to teach some of the
more confident, charismatic students to kind of set aside their
ego and like be a good member of a team
(18:00):
and not try to steal the line. Light in and
listen to others and not dominate conversations. Democratic elections are
based on the idea that os are good predictors, that
they can look at a slate of candidates and accurately
predict who will be the most effective leader. That's why
we have campaigns and speeches and debates to help us
(18:20):
make that prediction. But in Bolivia, Adam and his team
discovered that people are lousy predictors. The teachers who often
aren't in the meetings are just constantly fooled by, you know,
when they come out and say, oh, you know that
student what a great leader, you know, and they're not
even aware that the rest of the student government's about
to kick them out. You know, they've had enough of
(18:41):
some of their behavior. In its one student who got
picked in the lottery. And during the lottery I had
a teacher turned to me and under his breath say
that students have done You're not going to work out,
you know. I found out afterwards he was the one
student from his class thirty five students who had failed
the previous year, and he was one of the one
(19:03):
of the more kind of outstanding examples that we've had.
He just you really loved to work on meaningful projects
and be a part of a team. Now I know
what you're thinking. It's Bolivia. What works for teenagers in
Coachabamba doesn't necessarily work for the rest of us Apples
(19:24):
and oranges and all that. Except after being schooled by Adam,
I began to see versions of his logic everywhere. Hello,
this is Mike Loward and delighted Dutch you fllent time
to chat with me. I just ran across your papers
on peer of view and citations and found them absolutely
(19:48):
fascinating and they fit very much in a theme I'm
exploring in my podcast this season, so I wanted to chat.
Michael Lower is Deputy Director of Extramural Research at the
National Institutes of Health in beathes To, Maryland. If I
had to make a list of the most important Americans
you've never heard of, Lowers in the top ten. He's
(20:09):
way way up in what you might call, and I
mean this in the nicest possible way, the biomedical deep state.
His office hands out around thirty billion dollars a year
in research grants to scientists across the United States. Basically,
if you walk through any biology or chemistry department, or
any medical school or any medical research institute, Blower's office
(20:32):
is what's paying for it. So every year, his office
gets eighty thousand grant applications from around the country. They
only have money to find about twenty percent of those,
so they hold the equivalent of an election. Each of
those applications gets assigned to a small group of reviewers.
The reviewers vote for the ones they like and throw
(20:53):
out the rest. Then those finalists are turned over to
a second group of voters. The reviewers who are assigned
to grant will give a brief presentation about the grant
itself and what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses.
This is then followed by an open discussion. After the
discussion is complete, there is then a scoring. So first
(21:15):
round is you're throwing out the bottom the bottom half.
That's right, that's right. The second round is you're scoring
the remainder and how what is the score? The scores
on a scale of what to water? How is the
score represented? This is like golf, so a lower score
is better. A score of ten would be perfect. That
(21:35):
means that as far as the reviewers are concerned, they
can't think of anything better. A score of ninety would
represent the absolute worst. Those scores are predictions about how
good a scientists proposal is, in exactly the same way
that the choices voters make are predictions about how good
a leader a candidate will be. Cronchriste's third law says
(21:57):
that voters aren't very good at that prediction. So lower wonders,
what about the nah's grant reviewers? Are we any good
at it? Does the proposal that got a perfect ten
from the voters grant approval time actually end up being
the most influential or innovative research once it's finished Laura
looks around. He can't find any definitive answer to that question.
(22:21):
This period view process that you've just described has been
in place at NIH for how long seventy five years?
Twenty five years. So we have this situation where we
have a process in place for many, many years, seventy
five years, which is from an empirical perspective, unexamined. Well,
that's right, so Lauer says, let's take a look. His
(22:46):
method is simple. The standard way that science measures the
value of a bit of research is how often it's
cited by other scientists in their work. So if I
spend five years working on an experiment and no one
mentions that experiment again, it would be considered a failure.
And if it's mentioned a thousand times, it's considered a
(23:06):
home run. So what is the relation between the score
of your grant application and the number of citations your
work gets once it's finished? I think you know where
this is going. We did not find the strong correlation
between the peer review score and the citation metrics of
(23:29):
the subsequently funded grant. Now it's worth pointing something out.
Laura doesn't go into this thinking that the NAH is
going to be subject to Kronkrit's third law, nobody knows anything.
After all, Laura's not talking about adolescents judging other adolescents.
He's talking about distinguished scientists judging the potential of other
(23:51):
distinguished scientists. We had assumed that we would find a
reasonably strong correlation between the peer review score and the
grant productivity. Really yeah, I had assumed that you went
in skeptical. No. But then again, exactly as I said,
(24:13):
if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call
it research. Kronk writes, third law applies outside of coach
of Bamba. It applies even at the National Institutes of Health,
to the process by which billions of dollars of research
money is distributed. It's not Cronk writes third law. It's
Cronk writes universal third law. When Lawar publishes his research,
(24:42):
lots of other scientists look at his results and say,
if he's right, our electoral system in science is broken.
I mean, why bother voting on grants at all. People
throughout the scientific community start talking like Adam, start saying,
let's just do a lottery. Let the reviewers make the
(25:02):
first cut and get rid of the obvious losers then
put the rest in a hat. My favorite article ran
in the Walls Journal by two microbiologists, Ferrik Fang and
Arturo Costat of All entitled taking the Powerball Approach to
funding medical research Powerball for goodness Sake, with the subtitle
(25:23):
winning a government grant is already a crapshoot, Making it
official by running a lottery would be an improvement. There's
a famous line from Neil's Board, and also attributed to
Yogi Bearra that prediction is very hard, especially about the future.
By its very nature, science is unpredictable. And essentially what
(25:43):
we are asking scientists to do is to make predictions
about something which is itself inherently unpredictable. Well, so is leadership.
Leadership is even more unpredictable than scientific merit, So why
do we insist on making predictions about something which is
inherently unpredictable? Along these lines, I did something fun two
(26:09):
days ago. I went to the Lawrenceville School, I got
fancy boarding school in New Jersey, and I spoke to
a group of kids, seniors and juniors, a random group
of kids, but including the student council and student uncil president.
And I told them about your work, describe it to them,
(26:29):
and I said, you know, at Lawrenceville you have a
very similar situation. This is a preselected group of highly
able people, which you use essentially a peer review process
to decide who was eligible for the student council, right,
they have a vote, And I said, well, given the
fact that doctor Lower's work suggests that we're bad at
(26:51):
making those kinds of predictions at the very top, would
you consider change in a way you elect your student
council and student council president. Laughs. No. On the contrary,
as you'll discover, the students at the Lawrenceville School did
not laugh at this idea at all. Thoughts comments, is
(27:19):
this something you'd ever think of trying here? Do you
think Bolivia is different than New Jersey. The students at
the Lawrenceville School take the argument I brought them very seriously.
They have lots of questions. The democratic process at Lawrenceville
is steeped in tradition. They're a little leery of leaving
the process up to chance, especially for the top student
(27:42):
body president. You don't want to have to go to
the first school meeting and have a president who's a
little bit shaky, because the first time you go to
school meeting, you're expecting the freshmen to be excited about
the school year ahead, and the seniors everyone in between
to be excited about the school year ahead. You don't
want to have to learn with them. The students are
crammed into a small conference room. Some sit at a
(28:04):
long table, others stand along the walls. The headmaster and
one of the school steens stand by the door. A
microphone is passed to whomever wants to speak. This is
a student named Soley. You want to have someone initially
who is a figurehead who can immediately be put into
a stressful situation of talking to the entire school and
(28:25):
basically the entire faculty perform at the high school. One
of the president's most important functions at Lawrenceville is the
school meeting that happens in the auditorium every Thursday morning.
Forty five minutes all the students show up. It's a
central part of the school culture. Hi Am Quinn, I
think that a good public speaker is someone who's willing
(28:46):
to be vulnerable with the audience, which is also why
I think that being a good public speaker and being
a sociable, energetic person is really important in being a
good leader, because when you're vulnerable on stage, like Tay
last year, wrapped on stage, which was awesome and god
us really excited. Tay Lawrenceville's current student body president. He's
(29:10):
standing at the back of the room. Later when we chat,
I learned he's half Nigerian, half Kenyon, grew up in London.
I've noticed if we have not heard from the currents
president student counsel old on thank for the Tay is
the only one in the room wearing a suit, a
(29:30):
little bit of his English formality. Tell me why you
think you were elected? Why do I think? I think
a large part of why I was elected is the
fact that I am someone who has made sure that
I am very president on campus. I speak to as
many people as possible. I think I'm known for generally
being someone who does speak to people and looks to
make change and help people. Did you really rap in
(29:51):
your speech? Yes, so my closing speech. The person I
was running against, he was a phenomenal speaker. He partakes
in theater, so he was, if not as good, he was,
definitely he's actually I would actually say he's a better
public speaker than I was, So I knew that I
had all the great public speakers by the way, I
do that exactly. They that others a better public speak
for him. No, but genuinely, he is someone who who
(30:15):
who speaks on stage of law. He is a theater kid,
so he's great public speaking. So I knew that he
was going to come in essence, all guns blazing and
produce a phenomenal speech. So I knew that there was
some way in which I had to show that I
am a quote unquote fun guy and someone that the
student body could relate to. So I decided to go
out with a wrapping my closing statement. I have to
(30:36):
say I really liked Tay. He's incredibly thoughtful and charismatic.
My first thought after talking to him was would I
have voted for him? I think I would have. But
then I thought, aren't I making the same mistake that
Adam kronk Right warned about. Am I unfairly ruling out
other students who might be just as capable of being
(30:56):
a great student body president. Back when I met with
Adam cronk Right, he talked about this one student at
one of his schools in coach of Bamba. What happened
to him like what happened? I really should have played
this tape for the Lauren Hill students. He just he
started off. He looked bored, he looked uncomfortable, you know,
(31:16):
just like slouched in his chair, didn't know if he
was listening and stuff. The moment that they started to
do some of that work, he just would wake up
and the meetings basically and start bottom lining things. He said, Oh,
I can go, you know, I can go take the
letter down of the Mayor's office. I can go do this,
I can go to that. And he'd do it. He'd
(31:37):
fall through, you know, and that sometimes is in short
supply when you're working with teenagers, you know, and he
really liked to do those types of things, and he'd
fall through. And so then people started to count on him,
and they realized they could count on him, and he
took out a lot of responsibility. Adam Cronquid also told
me about another student named Richard Knew in school, completely introverted,
(32:01):
who then blossomed and turned out to be one of
the most effective student council members. I remember walking with
him after one of the first meetings and I told them,
you know, this is your opportunity everyone else in the
group is looking to you as a leader. And he
stopped dead in his tracks. You know, it looks at me,
all confused, and he says, I'm not a leader. I'm
(32:23):
not always out front and dominando, like dominating the conversation,
you know. And I told them, like, that's not that's
not our conception of leadership. You know. A leader is
someone who develops leadership and other people ran it works
well on the team. And I think this is the key,
the larger lesson behind Cronk writes three laws. It isn't
(32:46):
just that we're bad at making predictions. It's worse than that.
It's that our whole system of prediction is screwed up.
Because we require that our candidates performed for us. We'll
never get the Richards of the world or the student
who everyone thought would be a dud. Neither of them
could win an election, could they. They'd slouch in their
(33:07):
chairs and look bored and uncomfortable. They get blown off
the stage, even though both those kids could end up
being great leaders in their own right. In that room
at Lawrenceville, they were Indian and Korean and Chinese and
African and African American and white American kids. They were
from all over. Some were funny, some were serious, Some
(33:27):
sounded like they were forty five years old, some seem
very young. They were as varied and idiosyncratic as any
group of teenagers anywhere would be. So why when it
came to their leader did they cling to a system
that ensured that only one type the performer could win. Now,
(33:49):
even if you accept those arguments, there's still the problem
that a lottery doesn't feel right. If you win an
NIH grant under the old system, you get to walk
around and say my grant was selected over thousands of others.
It feels earned. If you win an election, you get
to say the people chose me, and the people get
(34:11):
to say I chose her. My name's Frankie. And I
think another aspect of the sort of arbitrarily picked lottery,
like it's effect. I think it's worth thinking about its
effect on like the students themselves and their kind of
response in terms of their lack of control or say
(34:33):
over who is decided to be the leader. But here's
what I think Adam Krunkwright would have said to Frankie.
You can't just pay attention to the legitimacy of the
end result, you have to pay attention to the legitimacy
of the process. Suppose we did this, and you know,
we've chosen a big set of people and then chosen
(34:56):
our president by lottery. What percent of American presidents would
have been female? So wait, you guys twice I've heard
this argument that buy in depends on elections, but when
it comes to presidents, it seems to be the opposite.
(35:16):
Is true that if we had a lottery, a whole
lot of people right now who feel disenfranchised would feel enfranchised.
It was at that point that a sophomore named Summer
suggested a hybrid plan, kind of like the Lawrenceville version
of the idea that has been floated for the NIH.
Have voters make a first cut, then picked the final
(35:36):
winners by lottery who has that potential to learn and
to grow and is open to other viewpoints, whereas someone
who's already stuck in their ways. Summer laid out her idea,
then stopped, looked around the room. Wait, Summer, don't don't
give up. This is I love this, keep going, so
walk me through. I'm going to make you dean of
(35:58):
students for the day. By the way, the fact that
Summer stopped like that while exploring her idea. That's exactly
the point of Adam Kronk Wrighte's lottery work with students
in Bolivia, because the electoral system does not reward the
candidate who, midway through explaining her idea during a debate
pauses to get feedback and take the temperature of the
(36:18):
room and reflect on, waow what she's saying is actually
what she wants to say. No, the system rewards the
candidate who blunders ahead, convinced of their own brilliance. I
want more candidates like Summer keep going, So describe to
me how this works. I like this idea a lot.
So I think the preliminary part, like I said, would
(36:38):
be an anonymous procedure where people could prepare a peace
any piece they wanted, whether it be a project and
essay a video. And then from there I was either
thinking that there could be a lottery system from there,
because at that point you know that people chosen are
ones you're equally interested in representing the community. Right, So Summer,
(37:03):
we're gonna call us the Summer proposal. So what you're
saying is suppose all the students look at these fifty projects,
and then you're saying that they would vote on the
ones they liked the best. Yes, and then from that
pool you would do potentially a lottery. Yes, yes of
this idea. Now that they had thought about their electoral
(37:29):
system and talked about the alternatives, how happy were they
with the status quo? I wanted to vote? Should I
own a show of hands? Scalable one to ten? Ten ment, happy, one, ment, disillusion?
What should it be? Hold on? What should it be?
Because I'm gonna let you know, and I'm gonna hold
you to this. And I got them to agree that
six should be the threshold. Anything less than six, anything
(37:53):
less than that, and they should consider calling their own
constitutional convention and rewriting the rules. Pays your hands up.
I care as the day of folks, all right, I'll
let you know, thank you all for much. I went
home and counted their average happiness score with the electoral
(38:14):
status quo five point three. A tried and tested democratic process,
honed over generations at one of America's most prestigious private schools.
And when you ask the students, even for a moment
to think about how well it works, they say, we're
not so sure. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing,
(38:37):
kind of a big thing. Wait, so do you think
colleges should Where I really wanted to push this discussion
was maybe colleges should choose their students by lottery. I
think there's a lot to be said for that. You
liked that idea, MCA, I think I do. I'm not
prepared to give you a full answer on it. You
(38:59):
guys right now aging They were mostly juniors and seniors
either on the cusp of the endless college application process
or in the middle of it. And selection is the
student body president problem times ten. Right, the student runs
for a highly coveted position, the university makes its prediction.
But if nih reviewers can't predict the best scientists based
(39:21):
on grand proposals, and if voters pass over perfectly good
candidates because they slouch in the corner, how on earth
can universities pick the best students based on college applications.
There are much much bigger fish to fry here. Yeah,
I like it. I like the idea a lot. Another
(39:42):
revolutionary I was suddenly so giddy with excitement that I
didn't catch his name. Lanky kidd, big head of curly hair.
Do you think that The reason you and I think
alike so much is that our hair is similar. I think,
sorry exactly, I called for another vote on support for
college admission lotteries. Right, short hands, Oh most of you. Well,
(40:05):
half the revolutionaries are not at the gates Lawrenceville. They're
inside the gates. Next stop for Adam Cronkwright, New Jersey.
(40:27):
Revigious History is produced by Miya LaBelle and Lee Mingustu,
with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna naim Our. Editor
is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Louis Skara, mastering by
Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Has special thanks
to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carlie Megliori, Maya Kanig,
(40:51):
Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course La Jacob Weisper Oh,
and big thanks to the staff and students of the
Lawrenceville School for a really fun afternoon. I'm Malcolm Goblin.
(41:13):
It would have been so much clever if I had
had them to have a lottery to decide on whether
to have a lottery. That would have been so meta
and great. But I missed that opportunity.
Pushkin. One day, not long ago, I went to visit
the Lawrenceville School just outside Princeton, New Jersey, a very old,
prestigious private school, leafy campus, Gothic, this and that. I
asked one of their deans could I come and meet
(00:37):
with some students? She said yes, Does everyone have a
piece of paper and pen? The dean put together a
group of twenty kids. We met in a conference room
looking out on the campus lawn. On a scale of
one to ten, don't put your name on it. I
would like you to rank your happiness with the Lawrenceville
School's current electoral process. Ten is you think it's perfect.
(01:02):
One is you think it's maybe time to bring in
Adam Adam Adam Cronkwright. He was the reason I was there. Okay,
hi everyone, thanks for coming. My name is Malcolm Babbo,
so you as you know, I am a writer and
I have a podcast called Revisionist History. That's how the
(01:29):
afternoon began. I said, I wanted to run an idea
by them, an idea field tested by this person. I
just met Adam CRONKWRIGHTE about talent and chance and how
we choose others to lead us. And I would encourage
you all to be If you think I'm crazy, you
should say, Malcolm, you're crazy. Maybe this idea could change
(01:52):
a lot about what's wrong with the world right now,
or maybe not. Revisionist history is about the overlooked and misunderstood.
Usually I decide what belongs in either of those categories.
This time, I thought I'd just run Adam's idea by
the students of Lawrenceville and that them decide. All this
(02:14):
had to do with the way they elected their student council.
I thought they should call a constitutional convention and start over.
There is no right answer or wrong answer, but I
want to make a case for something and see how
that possibly relates to the way you guys do things
here at Lawrenceville. They listened to Adam's idea argued about
(02:36):
it for close to two hours. I'll be honest, I
didn't think I'd get anywhere. The whole student council was
there as well, all people who had profited from the
Lawrenceville electoral status quo. And what was wrong with the
status quo in theory, not much. Lawrenceville elected its leaders
through the perfect democratic system, campaign speeches, open elections. Their
(02:58):
constitution might as well have been drawn up by the
founding fathers. For all I know, one of the founding
fathers went to Lawrenceville. But then at the end of
the afternoon, I said, okay, now that I've given you
an alternative, how happy are you with what you have?
Scale of one to ten. One is totally miserable with
(03:20):
the status quo, and ten is delighted. Everything's perfect. I
want to see your number, rip it off and hand
it to me. Don't put you name on them all.
As the students handed in their little slips of paper,
I glanced at a few. I was taken aback. Lawrenceville
(03:42):
had the perfect democratic system, and upon reflection, upon exposure
to a little of Adam Cronkwrighte's subversion, there were a
lot of students in that room who decided they didn't
like it anymore. I told them I'd do an official
tally later after I got home. But there's some happiness
(04:03):
in this room, and if they seem discontented with democracy
in the gilded corridors of the Lawrenceville School, I can
only imagine what it's like elsewhere. I first ran across
Adam Cronkwright online. I was just rummaging around Google one
(04:26):
day and what he was doing struck me is so
interesting that I tracked him down cold called him. Are
you ever in New York City? This was November. He
said yes, he'd be there in February. So he settled
on a date and he came to my apartment. Young guy, beard,
big backpack, hiking boots. So tell me, actually, before we
(04:47):
get into the question, where are you from, I'm from
just outside of Syracuse, New York. Yeah, so central New York.
How did you end up in Bolivia? Coach of Bomba,
to be more precise, a midsize city in the mountains
of central Bolivia. It turned out to be a long
story that starts in Canada, across Lake Ontario from his
(05:08):
home town. I remember where I was when I thought
of the idea, Like, you know, where were you I was.
I was outside Victoria Hall, walking on on Queen's campus
and it was spring. It was two thousand and nine.
Adam was finishing college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
(05:29):
He wanted to be a politician. He had, as he
puts it, a pretty big hero complex and it's kinda
gonna save the world. And coming to terms with this
idea that like, you know, be difficult to get to
the heights of power without tafting to make some serious
compromises externally internally, and you know, so then I was
(05:50):
kind of like, Okay, what am I going to do?
What are we going to do? He began to read history,
political science, turned it over in his mind, looking for
a big idea, and this is gonna, you know, right,
all the wrongs. But I wasn't that involved in anything.
He was more of a dreamer than a doer. Adam graduated.
The world was in a financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street
(06:13):
was one of the protest movements that grew up in response.
There was a tense city of activists in Succotti Park
in Lower Manhattan. Adam decided to go down to New
York and join them. There were working panels and panel discussions,
and one speaker in particular stuck with him, an activist
(06:34):
from Bolivia who talked about an epic struggle there over water.
Adam lived in Succotty Park for five weeks until everyone
was evicted by the NYPD. His experience with Occupy left
him frustrated. He understood what they were fighting for, but
not how. There was no how inoccupy. They didn't have
(06:57):
a plan that seemed like it could actually reform the
systems that had failed during the financial crisis. Adam moved
to Brooklyn, slept on some one's couch, and all the
while kept skyping with his new friend Bolivia, the water
activist Marcella Olivella. I kind of shared with her that
I was feeling a bit burnt out disillusion from what
I was seeing, and she said, well, yeah, I'll come
(07:18):
down to Bolivia and check out social moments there. So
he did Syracuse to Kingston, to Zaccotti Park, to Bolivia.
He made his way to coach A Bomba and there
he met Marcella's brother, Oscar, who runs a foundation. So
I was working with them for a while, and then
Oscar one day he was in the car and he's
asking me, what are you into? You know? So I
(07:40):
started telling him about democratic lotteries and he had never
heard of concept democratic lotteries. That's Adam's idea, replace elections
with lotteries. Adam tells Oscar about it. Oscar says, we
could test it in the schools. They signed up a
(08:09):
rural elementary school and two high schools, a night school,
and a regular high school and Adam sells them on
this new way of picking their student council. Anyone who
wanted to be in the lottery put their name forward,
and then the whole school gathered in the gym to
hear the results. We wanted something that was very visual
(08:32):
that could generate buzz, and so they had some clay
pots and we used fava beans as a crop that
they grow there. They're kind of the biggest beans you
can find, and so we had two colors, screen and purple.
The students would put faba beans in the pot and
they'd cover it with an aguay yuan, a traditional cloth,
(08:52):
so that it's from there, and it was also kind
of visually beautiful. If there were two hundred students running
for eight student council positions, they would put one hundred
and ninety two green fava beans in the pot and
eight purple ones. Then all the candidates would line up.
The kid reaches in under the cloth, Yeah, grabs a bean. Yeah.
(09:15):
Do they hold it up? If it's purple, they hold
it up. If it's purple or green, they hold They're
supposed to hold it up so the school can see.
No campaigning, no speeches, or posters, no glad handing, no ballance,
no recounts. The whole selection was over in twenty minutes.
(09:37):
Those who picked out the purple fava beans were on
student council. Done. Now, I know that sounds like a
crazy idea. You would never go for that, would you?
Or would you? Adam Cronk write learned three important things
(10:07):
from his work on school lot of he's in Bolivia.
I'm going to call them Cronk Rights laws. None of
them I think are obvious beforehand, at least they were
not obvious to him. First, numbers, as in number of candidates,
typically what percentage of the kids want to be part
of the lottery. It varies by the school. Yeah, it
(10:29):
varies by the school. And so at the Night High School,
you know, these kids often work even on Saturdays, like
they got a full schedule. So we would usually get
between twenty and thirty students who are volunteering for like
twelve spots, right, So it wasn't a huge, huge turnout.
And then at the rural K through eight school, it
(10:52):
was literally like every student that could participate participated in
every lottery. And then you know at another school we
worked at later on, it was an urban high school.
But in the morning, you know, there you had at
least half of the school. After the student council members
finished their time in office, Adam always asks a simple question,
(11:16):
would you have run if we had done things the
old way with campaigns and speeches? It's about three quarters
who's saying no right away? Why do they say no? Well,
let's say that nobody would have voted for me. I
was new in the school, didn't have a lot of friends.
You know, I would not want to run a campaign,
(11:37):
you know, and ask people to vote for me. You know.
It's the things that you can kind of guess are impediments.
They liked serving in office. They just didn't want to
run for office. The demands of the campaign were filtering
out all kinds of people who would otherwise have been
very interested in student council politics. Overwhelmingly those who win
(11:59):
the lottery one year in fact run again the next.
So yeah, they tend to line back up. But when
we asked them, you know, it would be normal elections,
would you have done it? The majority saying Now. What's
interesting is the extent to which running for an office
and running an office are two very very different things.
(12:23):
And someone may be both capable and interested in running
an office, but have no interest in running for That's
the first law. In a democracy. Elections are supposed to
encourage participation, but they don't. They discourage it. Lotteries encourage participation, Okay,
(12:48):
cronk rights. Second law. When you choose your student government
by lottery, you see a change in the kinds of
things the government actually does. In my high school, the
student council basically organized dances, not at Adams schools. In
coach of Bamba. At the Night School, for example, the
student government tackled all kinds of issues. Human trafficking is
(13:10):
a big problem there, and so they organized a workshop
on human trafficking that had like theatrical production and breakout
groups and stuff. They've gotten First aid kits for their schools.
The schools don't tend to have them. They've organized educational
field trips. The student council put together soccer tournaments and
(13:31):
poetry competitions. They opened a library. School didn't have one,
and so they solicited book donations from institutions and DVDs
and they were able to get a computer donated from
the Ministry of Education, and they set it up and
they ran it. They also created their own student ID
cards because that school didn't have ID cards and didn't
(13:53):
have uniforms, and since they went to school at seven pm,
the transportation workers didn't believe that there were students since
they charged them double. So that was the first thing
that they worked on. I was like hardy. Number one
for all the students was we want student ID cards,
and so they made their own and distributed those to Addam.
(14:14):
The crucial thing about that long list of accomplishments was
the range of things the students who were interested in.
What do you mean by that? That's a more diverse group.
They come from different social circles versus typically, at least
in Bolivia. You know, it'll be like a group of
friends who runs for election, right, and so they have
(14:34):
similar perspective on the school and what school might need
and or what they're going to offer to win people's votes,
which is typically more of the case. And so a
group that's brought together through a lottery, none of the
students in the student government know each other prior to
that first meeting, and they often have very divergent interests.
You know, you'll have you know, jocks and artists, and
(14:58):
you know, like just kind of the whole gamut. The
whole gamut. Democracies are supposed to be the best system
for ensuring that a whole gamut of interests are represented
in government. Cronk writes second law says that's not true,
not if the government is drawn from the same narrow
band of society a year after year. It's the lottery
that gives you a truly representative sample of leaders. After
(15:21):
the success of a few experiments, Adam helps set up
a nonprofit called Democracy in Practice to work with student
governments in Bolivia. I can't tell you the number of
times that, you know, fresh off of a lottery selection,
we have the first couple orientation meetings and my co founder,
Role and I will come out and we'll be walking together,
(15:44):
and we'll be, you know, saying, oh, you know, so
and so they're going to be a really important part
of this team. You know. They present themselves well, they
speak well, they're confident, and they don't even finish the
term of office. This brings us to Kronk wrights third law.
Maybe the most important of all. Nobody knows anything the
(16:10):
number of times that we've walked out of those meetings
and been worried about a particular student who seemed really unplugged,
you know, just kind of close body language, uncomfortable, didn't
participate much, and and we say, oh, we got our
work cut out with that student. And it you know,
they within a couple of weeks they figure out what's
expected of them, how they can plug in, and by
(16:31):
the end of their term they're even voted by their peers,
is like one of the most important members of the team.
And so that's an experience we've had over and over
again and still kind of get fooled by that. Now,
the charisma that that that certain students will have and
the confidence that they'll have. So the prediction, the mechanism
(16:52):
we're using for predicting who will be a good leader,
it's just flawed. So what you're saying, yeah, yeah, even you,
even you sometimes fall into this trap of of thinking
that because the kid presents herself well and is both
spoken in charismatic, that she's going to be a good leader. Yeah. Yeah,
(17:14):
it's really difficult to counter that bias, right, And obviously
not every student who's confident charismatic, you know, has a
has a big ego and can't work well with others
and doesn't show up. You know, we've had we've had
several students who fit that mold, and we're great teammates.
But generally, it's a lot easier to teach a shire
(17:39):
student or student who's not super popular. It's a lot
easier to teach them to overcome those fears and kind
of add a few more leadership skills to their their
skill set than it is to teach some of the
more confident, charismatic students to kind of set aside their
ego and like be a good member of a team
(18:00):
and not try to steal the line. Light in and
listen to others and not dominate conversations. Democratic elections are
based on the idea that os are good predictors, that
they can look at a slate of candidates and accurately
predict who will be the most effective leader. That's why
we have campaigns and speeches and debates to help us
(18:20):
make that prediction. But in Bolivia, Adam and his team
discovered that people are lousy predictors. The teachers who often
aren't in the meetings are just constantly fooled by, you know,
when they come out and say, oh, you know that
student what a great leader, you know, and they're not
even aware that the rest of the student government's about
to kick them out. You know, they've had enough of
(18:41):
some of their behavior. In its one student who got
picked in the lottery. And during the lottery I had
a teacher turned to me and under his breath say
that students have done You're not going to work out,
you know. I found out afterwards he was the one
student from his class thirty five students who had failed
the previous year, and he was one of the one
(19:03):
of the more kind of outstanding examples that we've had.
He just you really loved to work on meaningful projects
and be a part of a team. Now I know
what you're thinking. It's Bolivia. What works for teenagers in
Coachabamba doesn't necessarily work for the rest of us Apples
(19:24):
and oranges and all that. Except after being schooled by Adam,
I began to see versions of his logic everywhere. Hello,
this is Mike Loward and delighted Dutch you fllent time
to chat with me. I just ran across your papers
on peer of view and citations and found them absolutely
(19:48):
fascinating and they fit very much in a theme I'm
exploring in my podcast this season, so I wanted to chat.
Michael Lower is Deputy Director of Extramural Research at the
National Institutes of Health in beathes To, Maryland. If I
had to make a list of the most important Americans
you've never heard of, Lowers in the top ten. He's
(20:09):
way way up in what you might call, and I
mean this in the nicest possible way, the biomedical deep state.
His office hands out around thirty billion dollars a year
in research grants to scientists across the United States. Basically,
if you walk through any biology or chemistry department, or
any medical school or any medical research institute, Blower's office
(20:32):
is what's paying for it. So every year, his office
gets eighty thousand grant applications from around the country. They
only have money to find about twenty percent of those,
so they hold the equivalent of an election. Each of
those applications gets assigned to a small group of reviewers.
The reviewers vote for the ones they like and throw
(20:53):
out the rest. Then those finalists are turned over to
a second group of voters. The reviewers who are assigned
to grant will give a brief presentation about the grant
itself and what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses.
This is then followed by an open discussion. After the
discussion is complete, there is then a scoring. So first
(21:15):
round is you're throwing out the bottom the bottom half.
That's right, that's right. The second round is you're scoring
the remainder and how what is the score? The scores
on a scale of what to water? How is the
score represented? This is like golf, so a lower score
is better. A score of ten would be perfect. That
(21:35):
means that as far as the reviewers are concerned, they
can't think of anything better. A score of ninety would
represent the absolute worst. Those scores are predictions about how
good a scientists proposal is, in exactly the same way
that the choices voters make are predictions about how good
a leader a candidate will be. Cronchriste's third law says
(21:57):
that voters aren't very good at that prediction. So lower wonders,
what about the nah's grant reviewers? Are we any good
at it? Does the proposal that got a perfect ten
from the voters grant approval time actually end up being
the most influential or innovative research once it's finished Laura
looks around. He can't find any definitive answer to that question.
(22:21):
This period view process that you've just described has been
in place at NIH for how long seventy five years?
Twenty five years. So we have this situation where we
have a process in place for many, many years, seventy
five years, which is from an empirical perspective, unexamined. Well,
that's right, so Lauer says, let's take a look. His
(22:46):
method is simple. The standard way that science measures the
value of a bit of research is how often it's
cited by other scientists in their work. So if I
spend five years working on an experiment and no one
mentions that experiment again, it would be considered a failure.
And if it's mentioned a thousand times, it's considered a
(23:06):
home run. So what is the relation between the score
of your grant application and the number of citations your
work gets once it's finished? I think you know where
this is going. We did not find the strong correlation
between the peer review score and the citation metrics of
(23:29):
the subsequently funded grant. Now it's worth pointing something out.
Laura doesn't go into this thinking that the NAH is
going to be subject to Kronkrit's third law, nobody knows anything.
After all, Laura's not talking about adolescents judging other adolescents.
He's talking about distinguished scientists judging the potential of other
(23:51):
distinguished scientists. We had assumed that we would find a
reasonably strong correlation between the peer review score and the
grant productivity. Really yeah, I had assumed that you went
in skeptical. No. But then again, exactly as I said,
(24:13):
if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call
it research. Kronk writes, third law applies outside of coach
of Bamba. It applies even at the National Institutes of Health,
to the process by which billions of dollars of research
money is distributed. It's not Cronk writes third law. It's
Cronk writes universal third law. When Lawar publishes his research,
(24:42):
lots of other scientists look at his results and say,
if he's right, our electoral system in science is broken.
I mean, why bother voting on grants at all. People
throughout the scientific community start talking like Adam, start saying,
let's just do a lottery. Let the reviewers make the
(25:02):
first cut and get rid of the obvious losers then
put the rest in a hat. My favorite article ran
in the Walls Journal by two microbiologists, Ferrik Fang and
Arturo Costat of All entitled taking the Powerball Approach to
funding medical research Powerball for goodness Sake, with the subtitle
(25:23):
winning a government grant is already a crapshoot, Making it
official by running a lottery would be an improvement. There's
a famous line from Neil's Board, and also attributed to
Yogi Bearra that prediction is very hard, especially about the future.
By its very nature, science is unpredictable. And essentially what
(25:43):
we are asking scientists to do is to make predictions
about something which is itself inherently unpredictable. Well, so is leadership.
Leadership is even more unpredictable than scientific merit, So why
do we insist on making predictions about something which is
inherently unpredictable? Along these lines, I did something fun two
(26:09):
days ago. I went to the Lawrenceville School, I got
fancy boarding school in New Jersey, and I spoke to
a group of kids, seniors and juniors, a random group
of kids, but including the student council and student uncil president.
And I told them about your work, describe it to them,
(26:29):
and I said, you know, at Lawrenceville you have a
very similar situation. This is a preselected group of highly
able people, which you use essentially a peer review process
to decide who was eligible for the student council, right,
they have a vote, And I said, well, given the
fact that doctor Lower's work suggests that we're bad at
(26:51):
making those kinds of predictions at the very top, would
you consider change in a way you elect your student
council and student council president. Laughs. No. On the contrary,
as you'll discover, the students at the Lawrenceville School did
not laugh at this idea at all. Thoughts comments, is
(27:19):
this something you'd ever think of trying here? Do you
think Bolivia is different than New Jersey. The students at
the Lawrenceville School take the argument I brought them very seriously.
They have lots of questions. The democratic process at Lawrenceville
is steeped in tradition. They're a little leery of leaving
the process up to chance, especially for the top student
(27:42):
body president. You don't want to have to go to
the first school meeting and have a president who's a
little bit shaky, because the first time you go to
school meeting, you're expecting the freshmen to be excited about
the school year ahead, and the seniors everyone in between
to be excited about the school year ahead. You don't
want to have to learn with them. The students are
crammed into a small conference room. Some sit at a
(28:04):
long table, others stand along the walls. The headmaster and
one of the school steens stand by the door. A
microphone is passed to whomever wants to speak. This is
a student named Soley. You want to have someone initially
who is a figurehead who can immediately be put into
a stressful situation of talking to the entire school and
(28:25):
basically the entire faculty perform at the high school. One
of the president's most important functions at Lawrenceville is the
school meeting that happens in the auditorium every Thursday morning.
Forty five minutes all the students show up. It's a
central part of the school culture. Hi Am Quinn, I
think that a good public speaker is someone who's willing
(28:46):
to be vulnerable with the audience, which is also why
I think that being a good public speaker and being
a sociable, energetic person is really important in being a
good leader, because when you're vulnerable on stage, like Tay
last year, wrapped on stage, which was awesome and god
us really excited. Tay Lawrenceville's current student body president. He's
(29:10):
standing at the back of the room. Later when we chat,
I learned he's half Nigerian, half Kenyon, grew up in London.
I've noticed if we have not heard from the currents
president student counsel old on thank for the Tay is
the only one in the room wearing a suit, a
(29:30):
little bit of his English formality. Tell me why you
think you were elected? Why do I think? I think
a large part of why I was elected is the
fact that I am someone who has made sure that
I am very president on campus. I speak to as
many people as possible. I think I'm known for generally
being someone who does speak to people and looks to
make change and help people. Did you really rap in
(29:51):
your speech? Yes, so my closing speech. The person I
was running against, he was a phenomenal speaker. He partakes
in theater, so he was, if not as good, he was,
definitely he's actually I would actually say he's a better
public speaker than I was, So I knew that I
had all the great public speakers by the way, I
do that exactly. They that others a better public speak
for him. No, but genuinely, he is someone who who
(30:15):
who speaks on stage of law. He is a theater kid,
so he's great public speaking. So I knew that he
was going to come in essence, all guns blazing and
produce a phenomenal speech. So I knew that there was
some way in which I had to show that I
am a quote unquote fun guy and someone that the
student body could relate to. So I decided to go
out with a wrapping my closing statement. I have to
(30:36):
say I really liked Tay. He's incredibly thoughtful and charismatic.
My first thought after talking to him was would I
have voted for him? I think I would have. But
then I thought, aren't I making the same mistake that
Adam kronk Right warned about. Am I unfairly ruling out
other students who might be just as capable of being
(30:56):
a great student body president. Back when I met with
Adam cronk Right, he talked about this one student at
one of his schools in coach of Bamba. What happened
to him like what happened? I really should have played
this tape for the Lauren Hill students. He just he
started off. He looked bored, he looked uncomfortable, you know,
(31:16):
just like slouched in his chair, didn't know if he
was listening and stuff. The moment that they started to
do some of that work, he just would wake up
and the meetings basically and start bottom lining things. He said, Oh,
I can go, you know, I can go take the
letter down of the Mayor's office. I can go do this,
I can go to that. And he'd do it. He'd
(31:37):
fall through, you know, and that sometimes is in short
supply when you're working with teenagers, you know, and he
really liked to do those types of things, and he'd
fall through. And so then people started to count on him,
and they realized they could count on him, and he
took out a lot of responsibility. Adam Cronquid also told
me about another student named Richard Knew in school, completely introverted,
(32:01):
who then blossomed and turned out to be one of
the most effective student council members. I remember walking with
him after one of the first meetings and I told them,
you know, this is your opportunity everyone else in the
group is looking to you as a leader. And he
stopped dead in his tracks. You know, it looks at me,
all confused, and he says, I'm not a leader. I'm
(32:23):
not always out front and dominando, like dominating the conversation,
you know. And I told them, like, that's not that's
not our conception of leadership. You know. A leader is
someone who develops leadership and other people ran it works
well on the team. And I think this is the key,
the larger lesson behind Cronk writes three laws. It isn't
(32:46):
just that we're bad at making predictions. It's worse than that.
It's that our whole system of prediction is screwed up.
Because we require that our candidates performed for us. We'll
never get the Richards of the world or the student
who everyone thought would be a dud. Neither of them
could win an election, could they. They'd slouch in their
(33:07):
chairs and look bored and uncomfortable. They get blown off
the stage, even though both those kids could end up
being great leaders in their own right. In that room
at Lawrenceville, they were Indian and Korean and Chinese and
African and African American and white American kids. They were
from all over. Some were funny, some were serious, Some
(33:27):
sounded like they were forty five years old, some seem
very young. They were as varied and idiosyncratic as any
group of teenagers anywhere would be. So why when it
came to their leader did they cling to a system
that ensured that only one type the performer could win. Now,
(33:49):
even if you accept those arguments, there's still the problem
that a lottery doesn't feel right. If you win an
NIH grant under the old system, you get to walk
around and say my grant was selected over thousands of others.
It feels earned. If you win an election, you get
to say the people chose me, and the people get
(34:11):
to say I chose her. My name's Frankie. And I
think another aspect of the sort of arbitrarily picked lottery,
like it's effect. I think it's worth thinking about its
effect on like the students themselves and their kind of
response in terms of their lack of control or say
(34:33):
over who is decided to be the leader. But here's
what I think Adam Krunkwright would have said to Frankie.
You can't just pay attention to the legitimacy of the
end result, you have to pay attention to the legitimacy
of the process. Suppose we did this, and you know,
we've chosen a big set of people and then chosen
(34:56):
our president by lottery. What percent of American presidents would
have been female? So wait, you guys twice I've heard
this argument that buy in depends on elections, but when
it comes to presidents, it seems to be the opposite.
(35:16):
Is true that if we had a lottery, a whole
lot of people right now who feel disenfranchised would feel enfranchised.
It was at that point that a sophomore named Summer
suggested a hybrid plan, kind of like the Lawrenceville version
of the idea that has been floated for the NIH.
Have voters make a first cut, then picked the final
(35:36):
winners by lottery who has that potential to learn and
to grow and is open to other viewpoints, whereas someone
who's already stuck in their ways. Summer laid out her idea,
then stopped, looked around the room. Wait, Summer, don't don't
give up. This is I love this, keep going, so
walk me through. I'm going to make you dean of
(35:58):
students for the day. By the way, the fact that
Summer stopped like that while exploring her idea. That's exactly
the point of Adam Kronk Wrighte's lottery work with students
in Bolivia, because the electoral system does not reward the
candidate who, midway through explaining her idea during a debate
pauses to get feedback and take the temperature of the
(36:18):
room and reflect on, waow what she's saying is actually
what she wants to say. No, the system rewards the
candidate who blunders ahead, convinced of their own brilliance. I
want more candidates like Summer keep going, So describe to
me how this works. I like this idea a lot.
So I think the preliminary part, like I said, would
(36:38):
be an anonymous procedure where people could prepare a peace
any piece they wanted, whether it be a project and
essay a video. And then from there I was either
thinking that there could be a lottery system from there,
because at that point you know that people chosen are
ones you're equally interested in representing the community. Right, So Summer,
(37:03):
we're gonna call us the Summer proposal. So what you're
saying is suppose all the students look at these fifty projects,
and then you're saying that they would vote on the
ones they liked the best. Yes, and then from that
pool you would do potentially a lottery. Yes, yes of
this idea. Now that they had thought about their electoral
(37:29):
system and talked about the alternatives, how happy were they
with the status quo? I wanted to vote? Should I
own a show of hands? Scalable one to ten? Ten ment, happy, one, ment, disillusion?
What should it be? Hold on? What should it be?
Because I'm gonna let you know, and I'm gonna hold
you to this. And I got them to agree that
six should be the threshold. Anything less than six, anything
(37:53):
less than that, and they should consider calling their own
constitutional convention and rewriting the rules. Pays your hands up.
I care as the day of folks, all right, I'll
let you know, thank you all for much. I went
home and counted their average happiness score with the electoral
(38:14):
status quo five point three. A tried and tested democratic process,
honed over generations at one of America's most prestigious private schools.
And when you ask the students, even for a moment
to think about how well it works, they say, we're
not so sure. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing,
(38:37):
kind of a big thing. Wait, so do you think
colleges should Where I really wanted to push this discussion
was maybe colleges should choose their students by lottery. I
think there's a lot to be said for that. You
liked that idea, MCA, I think I do. I'm not
prepared to give you a full answer on it. You
(38:59):
guys right now aging They were mostly juniors and seniors
either on the cusp of the endless college application process
or in the middle of it. And selection is the
student body president problem times ten. Right, the student runs
for a highly coveted position, the university makes its prediction.
But if nih reviewers can't predict the best scientists based
(39:21):
on grand proposals, and if voters pass over perfectly good
candidates because they slouch in the corner, how on earth
can universities pick the best students based on college applications.
There are much much bigger fish to fry here. Yeah,
I like it. I like the idea a lot. Another
(39:42):
revolutionary I was suddenly so giddy with excitement that I
didn't catch his name. Lanky kidd, big head of curly hair.
Do you think that The reason you and I think
alike so much is that our hair is similar. I think,
sorry exactly, I called for another vote on support for
college admission lotteries. Right, short hands, Oh most of you. Well,
(40:05):
half the revolutionaries are not at the gates Lawrenceville. They're
inside the gates. Next stop for Adam Cronkwright, New Jersey.
(40:27):
Revigious History is produced by Miya LaBelle and Lee Mingustu,
with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna naim Our. Editor
is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Louis Skara, mastering by
Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Has special thanks
to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carlie Megliori, Maya Kanig,
(40:51):
Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course La Jacob Weisper Oh,
and big thanks to the staff and students of the
Lawrenceville School for a really fun afternoon. I'm Malcolm Goblin.
(41:13):
It would have been so much clever if I had
had them to have a lottery to decide on whether
to have a lottery. That would have been so meta
and great. But I missed that opportunity.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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