CHAPTER 6
Four Points and the Wrongness of Always Being Right
WHAT IF YOU got lost driving? What trait would cause you the most trouble? It’s not forgetfulness or exhaustion, it’s confidence.
The confident lost person simply knows he will figure this whole thing out. He doesn’t look for the source of the mistake, or pull over to get his bearings, or even think about asking for help. The confident lost person doesn’t double back, he doubles down.
The confident lost person forges ahead and doesn’t look back, because there’s no time to waste. The sooner he executes his plan, the sooner he’ll get there. He doesn’t wonder why the landmark that’s supposed to be on the left is on the right, or how he could be crossing the same bridge a second time. It’s the confident lost person who keeps going the farthest down the wrong path.
We celebrate confidence as the natural by-product of our ability and success. We treasure confidence as the resource that helps us do everything better. But we unleash confidence merely by doing something, anything, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong. When confidence gets in the way of asking questions, then it no longer propels us forward, it chains us down.
* * *
DIANE RAVITCH IS an education policy expert who describes the modern American education reform movement and its test-first approach to schools as “like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’” What makes Ravitch’s take on all this particularly interesting is that she used to be on that train, shouting, “Go faster.”
As the Number 2 person in the United States Department of Education in the early 1990s, Ravitch helped lead a revolution. After many years as a researcher who studied and observed education policies, she was suddenly in a position to make policy. And she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity shuffling around nickels and dimes. She wanted to advance an entirely new mind-set about how we think about schools, how we evaluate and reward them, how we challenge the top and elevate the bottom. In short, she wanted to figure out how to make schools do everything better. Even after leaving government, she stayed on the task to help see her reforms come to life. Ravitch was among the dominant voices at two leading education think tanks and helped run an organization that reviewed all the tests that were created out of the reforms she helped propagate.
Ravitch saw her work in clear terms. The problem was a substandard education system that wasn’t getting any better. The fix could be explained in one word: standards.
“Standards,” she said, “are always a good thing. If we raised standards everywhere, then everyone would benefit. And when we do that, we dramatically reorient the bottom. For those at the bottom, more of the same would never be acceptable again.”
There was a great hue and cry against the ideas Ravitch and her team were advancing. Experts and educators accused her of being narrow-minded, missing the breadth of what schools do and valuing only the smallest slice of a real education. Critics said she and her allies believed standards had an almost magical quality. If all you needed were high standards, they said, then every organization everywhere would get better just by raising its standards. That’s nonsense, they asserted.
Ravitch had an answer for those critics. Stop hiding behind your words. Stop cowering behind your desks.
“Frankly, I thought they were afraid of tests,” Ravitch said. Whether it was teachers, administrators, or policymakers, Ravitch thought “they were afraid that we would now hold what they were doing up to the light, and they would be exposed as failing our children.”
Did she have doubts about her position? None. The correctness of her position was obvious. Everyone she knew told her she was right. “You’re surrounded by people with the same ideas,” Ravitch said. “You develop over the years a whole set of relationships with people who agree with you and congratulate you for what you’re doing. There’s not a lot of second-guessing going on in that circle.”
Total confidence in her position was energizing. She went to work each day pressing ahead at full speed. She knew she was right. At least, she knew it until the day she didn’t.
As Ravitch took a close look at the effects of the reforms she had fought for, she began to experience doubts. She imagined a new era of education built on incentives to teach more and teach better. What she saw was a new educational imperative based on one thing: teaching the test.
“We’ve created a system where Mrs. Smith is going to teach nothing but what’s tested,” Ravitch said.
The outcome is bitterly ironic to Ravitch. “In an effort to show how vitally important the classroom teacher is to learning, we undercut that teacher’s ability to really teach,” Ravitch said.
In fact, she thinks her movement traded away the most valuable classroom instruction in favor of a fundamentally useless skill. “We have reshaped the education system to an approach of ‘right answers, right answers, right answers.’ But life’s not like that,” she said. “We’re putting a tremendous amount of value on being able to pick the right one out of four little bubbles. But this turns out not to be a very valuable skill. You can’t take this skill out into the workplace and get paid for it.”
It was a terribly painful process of conversion, but Ravitch saw no way around it. She had helped create a movement she now thinks is faddish, unsupported by evidence, and bad for our kids. The policy was fatally flawed and she had to start leading the fight against her own ideas.
Ravitch spent a good deal of time thinking about how she could have worked so hard pursuing the wrong policy. She realized that the researcher’s skepticism that she normally applied was missing from her days as a policymaker.
“I was excited, caught up in the fervor of it,” she said. “I always look for the hidden problems, the unstated assumptions, the unintended consequences in any idea. I reject nineteen out of twenty ideas that come across my desk as being half-baked. But I believed so strongly in myself and the people I was working with, I believed so strongly in the core idea, that I forgot to question it with the same skeptical eye.”
Ravitch is on the outside now. She doesn’t have the power to undo what she’s done, only to question it. But she does stand together with a new set of allies—the very same people who were once her fiercest critics. “They have been wonderful to me, even those whose motives I once questioned,” Ravitch said. “And the fact is, if I had been more open to considering their criticisms in the first place, I would have done a better job for our kids.”
* * *
IN 1953, THE AVERAGE head coach of a major conference men’s basketball team was paid about as much as one of those high school teachers Diane Ravitch worries about. Today, almost every head coach of a big conference team makes more than a million dollars per season, with several making large multiples of that.
That average coach in 1953 shouldered almost all of the tasks necessary to run a team. Unlike his modern-day successors, he didn’t have four full-time assistant coaches, and a strength coach, and a nutritionist, and an academic coordinator.
Not surprisingly, coaches back then didn’t typically see themselves as hyperspecialized master technicians of the game, and the media offered little to feed and sustain outsized egos. Instead of the multibillion-dollar television contract in place now to broadcast every second of the NCAA Tournament, coaches in 1953 were competing to get to a championship game that wasn’t even on national television.
An interesting thing has happened as college coaches have risen in stature over the last sixty years—teams have gotten worse at the most fundamental task of basketball! When the final buzzer sounded in a 2012 game between Georgetown and Tennessee, neither team had made it to 40 points. In a Mid-American Conference game in 2013, one team went into halftime having scored a total of four points. The bottom line: In 2013, men’s college basketball teams scored fewer points per game than they did in 1953, or in any season in between.
How can that be? If you pay coaches more, if you put their work in the spotlight on television constantly, if you name the arenas and the courts after them, surely they will get better at their jobs?
Actually, what they will mainly see is how great and important they are. And great and important people must insert themselves in what’s happening—all the time. In business schools they call it the romance of leadership. We see leaders as active. We see leaders as engaged. As leaders, the more active we are the more credit we can take. Diane Ravitch was a leader, so certain of herself that she believed her insistence on testing would be a panacea for our schools. College basketball coaches are leaders, so good at their jobs they must fix their teams all game long.
All this has pretty clear effects in college basketball today. Wally Szczerbiak, basketball analyst and a star of the 1999 NCAA Tournament, looks at college basketball today and sees “coaches smothering the game.”
Instead of preparing their team and then watching them execute, coaches today actively insert themselves in the game as it happens. “They coach every single dribble,” lamented Szczerbiak.
What happens next is entirely predictable. When you are being coached during a live game, you naturally do things more slowly. Listening, interpreting, and reacting take time and demand effort. It is harder to do what you’re being told than to do what you’ve been taught. “There is no doubt about it,” admits Brad Brownell, the head coach at Clemson University, “as coaches we slow them down.”
Worse than that, while you are listening and interpreting, you are hampering your natural abilities, your honed instincts, and even your capacity to execute the lessons the coach spent several months of practice teaching. And then there is the hesitancy that comes with knowing every mistake is going to attract the coach’s immediate wrath.
While overcoaching takes place throughout the game, it is particularly intense at the end of close games. “All those timeouts at the end of the game, all that talking instead of playing, that’s fine for strategizing but it’s terrible for doing,” Szczerbiak said. “If you want me to shoot a basketball through a hoop, the last thing I want is for you to stop and sit me down for a few minutes and tell me to think about it. Basketball is a game of rhythm and feel. You don’t get any rhythm sitting on your butt.”
Teams scored more points—were better at playing basketball—with lower-stature coaches. American education, Diane Ravitch believes, would be better today if she hadn’t believed so fervently in herself. Supreme confidence is a tremendously powerful tool, but it’s a tool that can attack the first available problem so relentlessly that no one has the perspective to consider if he or she is making the problem worse.
If Szczerbiak could call a timeout and gather all of today’s coaches in a huddle, he would have a simple message. “In the history of the game, coaches have scored exactly zero points,” he would tell them. “Remember that the next time you spend forty minutes exerting yourself on the sidelines trying to win the game. You want your team to score? Try sitting yourself down next time and letting the players play.”
* * *
THERE’S ALWAYS MORE information at your fingertips than you can possibly use. Do you want the quick-and-dirty count of starts and wins? Or do you like to look at the where, the when, the how fast, and against whom? Maybe just take the experts’ view—what do they forecast? Or you could just straight play the odds.
There’s a lot of ways to approach betting on a horse. But the basic transaction is the same. You make your pick. You step to the window and place your bet. And then you watch. In the span of a two-minute race, horses will grab positions on the inside and the outside, leads will be taken and surrendered, and your heart will thump as you await the outcome. Did your horse win or lose? Did you win or lose?
You’re sitting in the grandstand, studying the horses in the sixth race. Now you’ve figured it out. You know which horse you want to bet on. On your way to the window you step over piles of discarded betting slips scattered over the floor. If you ever forgot that most bets are losers, you could just take a quick glance at the floor or listen to that little paper-crinkling sound that accompanies each step you take.
Just before you make it to the window, a fellow politely inquires if he could ask you just one quick question. You say fine. There’s still plenty of time to place your bet before post time.
He says, “Would you look at this card and tell me the chance you think the horse you are going to bet on has of winning the race?”
The card has a number scale on it. It says one means you think your horse has a “slight” chance of winning. Seven means you think your horse has an “excellent” chance. The guy mentions not to worry about the odds or anything else, just say what you think your horse’s chances are to win.
It turns out there is a second guy working the other end of the line, talking to people just after they place their bets. He asks the exact same question to a different group of bettors.
And what do you know, the people who get asked the question after they bet are 38 percent more confident of winning than the people asked before they bet.1
Their horses didn’t get any faster. The odds didn’t change. Nothing changed except one group was about to implement their decision and the other group had already implemented their decision.
The fancy term for this is post-decisional dissonance reduction. In simple terms, we generally have a lot of conflicting information available to us when we make a decision—any decision. We know there are reasons—some good reasons—why we should have done something differently. We tolerate all that conflict before we do something. But after we do it, we start tossing away the conflict. We start downgrading information that conflicts with what we did. We start elevating the importance of things that support our decision.
Betting on a horse race—like any decision—carries with it no end of data suggesting we should have done something else. There are reasons to support betting on other horses, or not betting at all. Before we bet, we acknowledge that conflict. After we bet, we cast conflict aside. I did the right thing. I’m confident I did.
This new confidence arrives so fast—in mere seconds—that we don’t even have to think. We don’t deliberate and rationally decide the only information that matters is supportive information. No, we give in to our instinct. Now that it’s done, I’m sure I did the right thing. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it.
One of the people interviewed before betting happened to bump into the other researcher talking to people who had already bet. He went up to him and said, “Are you working with that fellow there? Well, I just told him that my horse had a fair chance of winning. Will you have him change that to a good chance? No, by God, make that an excellent chance.”
And that is post-decisional dissonance reduction. A minute had gone by. Nothing about the horse, the field, the track, the conditions had changed at all. But the gambler had changed in that minute. He went from someone about to act to someone who had acted. And now it was time to circle the wagons and support his action.
Because that’s what we do. We increase the attractiveness of what we’ve done and decrease the attractiveness of what we haven’t done.
Unfortunately, our newfound confidence doesn’t make us right. In fact, it makes it harder for us to succeed because we will have more trouble learning from our mistakes than we would if we realistically valued information before and after we acted.
It’s that same ability to generate arbitrary confidence merely from doing that feeds college basketball coaches in their unshakable belief that interrupting the game to insert their wisdom is profitable even when scoring drops and drops. It’s the same arbitrary confidence that let Diane Ravitch never question her education schemes while she was imposing them on classrooms across the nation. It’s the same arbitrary confidence that fueled John Lennon’s teachers as they wrote him off and the smoke jumpers as they went their own way. For bettors, for coaches, for Diane Ravitch, or for anyone, unquestioned confidence comes from doing something, no matter whether it was the right thing to do. In other words, when we’re wrong, we’re going to very happily keep being wrong.
* * *
THE PATIENTS INCLUDED the young and the old. There were men and women. Some were sick, others were injured.
But there were three things they all had in common. First, none had a condition that was even remotely life-threatening. Second, all suffered an inexplicable fatal or near-fatal episode while in the hospital. And third, all had come into contact with Dr. Michael Swango.
Today, Swango is serving consecutive life sentences after confessing to murdering several patients. The story of the serial-killing physician who poisoned patients in hospitals in the United States and abroad is chilling and inexplicable. But the pain he inflicted is all the more haunting because his superiors in his very first job could have stopped him—but their confidence in their profession got in the way.
After completing medical school, Swango was accepted into the residency program in surgery at Ohio State University. Inexplicably, Swango was chosen over scores of more qualified applicants. It took Swango an extra year to finish medical school because of concerns about his marginal performance, yet Ohio State accepted him over doctors who graduated on time, and with better grades from better schools.
In any case, from the outset Dr. Swango failed to live up to Ohio State’s expectations. He was difficult to work with, sloppy, ill-prepared, and frequently cut corners on some of the pedestrian tasks required of a first-year resident, such as taking a patient’s medical history. Midway through his first year, Ohio State’s residency committee decided Dr. Swango would not be allowed to complete the multiyear program and that he would be dismissed at the end of the term.
Soon after Dr. Swango learned that he would be pushed out, there was a dramatic increase in the death rate in the hospital wing where he worked. An athletic nineteen-year-old woman inexplicably went into cardiac arrest and died. After several other deaths, there was a particularly eventful night when two sixty-year-old women suddenly suffered respiratory failure. Doctors descended on the patients, desperately trying to save their lives, and without the slightest idea what had caused their conditions. One of the women died; the other clung to life by the barest of margins.
Hospitals experience patient deaths regularly, of course. There is nothing remarkable or noteworthy about that. But the death rate jumped at Ohio State, and what would normally be a remarkably rare incidence of stable and strong patients inexplicably crashing turned commonplace. It would have been difficult to connect any of this to Dr. Michael Swango but for one small detail: There were witnesses.
The patient who survived the inexplicable respiratory arrest later told the doctors and nurses that just before the episode, a doctor matching Swango’s description had come into her room with a syringe and injected it into her intravenous line.
There was a second witness. The patient in the next bed saw the exact same thing.
There was a third witness. A student nurse had entered the room and saw Dr. Swango, whom she identified by name, with the syringe.
Among the numerous alarming aspects of the witness reports is the fact that Dr. Swango had no medical reason to be in that hospital room, had no medical reason to ever be injecting something in the patient’s IV tube, and would ultimately give conflicting answers regarding what he had been doing there, at one point claiming both that he was there to help a patient find her slippers and that he was never in the room.
Meanwhile, another nurse saw Dr. Swango leaving the bathroom of an unoccupied patient room. Thinking that a very odd sight—since doctors did not use patient bathrooms—she ducked her head into the bathroom. She found a syringe. Worried that the strange behavior indicated that Dr. Swango had done something wrong, she carefully wrapped the syringe and took it with her as evidence.
What did the doctors who ran the hospital do with this devastating and deadly turn of events? They closed ranks.
Though Dr. Swango’s abilities were marginal and his work subpar, the hospital’s leadership found it simply absurd to think that a physician, even one they were dismissing, was harming anyone. Quality, of course, is not related to confidence. It didn’t take an extraordinary horse to inspire bettors’ confidence, and it didn’t even take an ordinary doctor to inspire the confidence of Ohio State’s medical team.
Faced with inexplicable deaths, three witnesses, and a syringe, the doctors in charge decided that there was no reason to call the police. Instead, they launched their own, doctor-led investigation.
In short order they dismissed each witness’s account. The patient who had nearly died could hardly be thought reliable given the trauma she had been through. Her roommate was labeled delusional. Surely the student nurse—for whom there was no convenient medical theory with which to dismiss her—must have been credible. Instead, the student nurse’s testimony was considered simply mistaken. She was confused, that was all.
Was there poison in the syringe? Did it have Dr. Swango’s fingerprints on it? Did it contain a substance ultimately found in the patient’s bloodstream? Assuming it did not, the doctor-investigators never asked for it. They never had it tested. It sat packed safely away in the head nurse’s desk for months, while she unsuccessfully sought someone, anyone in charge to examine it. Eventually she gave up hope that any doctor cared to find out the truth, and she threw it out.
The tragic consequences of the Keystone Cop-less investigation are abundantly clear. Dr. Swango simply walked away from Ohio State at the end of the term, only to find new positions first as a paramedic in Illinois, and then as a doctor in New York, South Dakota, and eventually overseas.
It would be sixteen years between the poisonings at Ohio State and Dr. Swango’s murder convictions. In between, everywhere he went experienced inexplicable patient deaths.
It is, in short, a case of fatal overconfidence. The doctors at Ohio State believed so strongly in their profession, in themselves, and in the inherent superiority of their work and the people who performed it that they could not even fathom the threat Dr. Swango posed. They believed so much in themselves that the words of a student nurse, or even the head nurse, were just noise to them.
Rather than becoming increasingly concerned about a series of questionable actions and events, they gained confidence with each decision they made. They dismissed witnesses because they believed themselves to be right, dismissed evidence because they were right, dismissed the data that showed an extraordinary death rate because they were right. These doctors could not have done worse by their patients, by their hospital, and by their profession. And they couldn’t have done any of it without extraordinary confidence that they knew what to do about the Dr. Swango problem.
* * *
WHEN TWO FILMMAKERS asked Kaleil Tuzman if they could make a documentary about the online business he was starting, he jumped at the opportunity.
The idea was entrancing to him. Not only would he wind up rich and successful when his company made it, but the whole thing would be captured on video. People would see what he had done. They would see the creativity, the drive. They would see the Kaleil charm. They would see the totality of his success. And it would never—never—be forgotten, because the film would live on forever.
Things didn’t exactly work out that way.
Tuzman had been inspired by a long-forgotten parking ticket he found in the back of his closet. When he went online to find out if he needed to pay a late fee on top of the ticket fine, he couldn’t get any information about it, much less actually pay the ticket. Kicking the idea around with a longtime buddy, they set out to create a company that would make it easier to connect local governments and people. Tuzman would run the financial side of the business and his longtime friend Tom Herman would run the technology side.
The company they started—ultimately named govWorks—was built around the image of the long lines people dread dealing with in dingy government offices. What if, they asked, we took an experience that the user hates and is expensive for the government to staff and replaced it with a transaction that was fast, painless, and cheap? What if, instead of waiting on line to pay a parking ticket, you could just click a button? What if, instead of waiting on line to file a building permit, you could just click a button?
The concept was very easy to explain. And it just made sense.
And Tuzman was nothing if not single-minded in pursuit of its success. He sold the promise of a company that could potentially extract a profit from $600 billion worth of government user transactions. It was a figure he touted day and night, in every meeting he had with potential investors. And the pitch worked. Tuzman secured more than $20 million in venture capital and $30 million in loans—more than enough to build a staff of hundreds who worked into the wee hours of the morning each day trying to build the product that would define the company and redefine government accessibility.
What Tuzman lacked was a sense of his own limits. Walking into one meeting with a major investment firm, he delivered a finely honed pitch about his company’s business plan. Glaringly, though, what he lacked was even a basic understanding of what to do when the pitch proved successful. What portion of his company was he willing to cede in exchange for the biggest investment to date in govWorks? He didn’t know. He was paralyzed by the investment firm’s response—an offer that would immediately expire if he didn’t accept the terms in full—because it hadn’t occurred to him that there were two parts to such a meeting, his pitch and their response. And he wasn’t ready for it.
Walking into another meeting with his cofounder by his side, Tuzman was stunned when Herman suggested a new feature for their website that they hadn’t previously discussed. As Tuzman swatted away Herman’s idea, it was clear that they had lost these investors. No one was going to put money in a company when the two principals couldn’t agree on what the company did.
The gap in vision between Tuzman and Herman widened until ultimately Tuzman decided there was no longer room for both of them in the company. He fired his friend of more than a decade in a letter. Then he had security escort Herman from the building.
That he—like Diane Ravitch, and today’s college basketball coaches, and the doctors at Ohio State, and all the horse bettors—displayed confidence unrelated to the quality of what he was doing was never more clear than when the company had to deliver an actual product. Despite attracting tens of millions of dollars in investments, and even securing the holy grail of parking ticket contracts—New York City—govWorks floundered on one simple measure. The software didn’t work. Tuzman had spent all his time selling himself and his ability to create a visionary company. What he had not spent his time on was seeing to it that the company could actually do anything.
For Tuzman, there is no permanent record of his great success. When the credits rolled, all the money was gone, the company was sold for scrap and the stars of the documentary were Tuzman’s ego and failure.
Nevertheless, the film makes clear that even those who lost money on Tuzman recognized that he could benefit from the experience. “I made a mistake with you,” one investor told him. “I usually don’t invest in people who haven’t failed before.”
Tuzman appreciates why many very successful investors respect failure. “It teaches you a lesson every single day,” he said. “Personal invincibility is a great weapon until the day it fails, and then you learn it can make you spend an awful lot of energy on the wrong things.”
THE TAKEAWAY
We believe in believing in ourselves. Nobody wants to cower timidly when something needs to be done. We step forward, confidently.
But just as trying harder and rounding up reinforcements can be both attractive and ineffective responses to a problem, so, too, is confidence a tool we are apt to pick up and misuse.
The problem with deploying confidence against a problem is that our confidence doesn’t always come from our abilities and can distract us from potential solutions. Diane Ravitch’s confidence helped her change education in America, and now she wishes it hadn’t. College basketball coaches step confidently into the arena each night, yet that confidence helps many of them make an unproductive nuisance of themselves to their teams. Kaleil Tuzman’s confidence helped him launch a company and the grandest of dreams—but got in the way of his noticing that the company’s only product didn’t work. “First, do no harm” is a fundamental principle taught to medical students. Yet the confidence of the doctors running the Ohio State University Hospital helped them allow irreparable harm. We become 38 percent more confident about a decision merely because we can’t undo it. We can simply manufacture confidence, without regard to ability or reality.
Having vast confidence that you can fix a problem is like wearing eyeglasses you don’t need. You will look at absolutely everything differently and see nothing clearly.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: CLIMBING OUT OF THE OVERCONFIDENCE TRAP
Make predictions. Think about one of your friends. If forced to choose between The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which magazine would your friend subscribe to? How confident are you? How much would you bet that you are right? When psychologists asked people a series of these kinds of prediction questions, then asked the friends what they would really do, the predictions turned out to be spectacularly wrong—with 97 percent of the participants having been wildly overconfident that they were right. If they had been making real bets, participants would have lost almost every time.2 Right now, make five predictions about something that could go either way. It could be anything. Which team is going to win the game tonight? Is it going to rain tomorrow? Anything. When you try to explain to yourself why one or two or all five of your predictions were wrong, remember there is no reason to pretend you are always right or that some outcomes aren’t arbitrary. Even those capable of making the best predictions in the world don’t know what will happen all the time—but they know better when they don’t know.
Shake It Up. How can you see something differently when you’ve already taught yourself how to “best” see things? Shake it up, literally. In an experiment, researchers had some subjects move their arms in a fluid pattern, with big, sweeping movements.3 Other subjects moved their arms in only short, precise patterns. Then, everyone took a creativity test, with questions covering such matters as how many uses you can think of for old newspapers. The fluid movers scored 24 percent higher on the creativity test. The body is a tangible metaphor for our thought process. In other words, a fluid, free-moving body produces new thoughts, while a rigid body is stuck with old answers.