Kyle Korver's recipe for thriving in basketball's ecosystem

Finding your niche in an ecosystem
Q: How do you beat Bobby Fischer?
A: Play him at anything but chess.
Charlie Munger is famous for asking and answering that question. He has (well, he claims to have) built a career on doing just such a thing. Define your circle of competence—find out what you know and what you don’t—and then only play where you have an advantage. Do that, avoid mistakes and stupidity, and you’re off to the races.
You don’t have to be brilliant to be successful. But it helps to figure out what you’re good at doing, and then confining your activity as much as possible to realms where you won’t be prone to making many errors.
I’m not going to kill myself to get mediocre
Atlanta Hawks basketball player Kyle Korver is easy to root for—girls love him, he’s a great guy, comes from a good family, he works hard to improve, and so genuinely cares for the communities he’s lived and worked in that one team’s community relations manager cried upon learning of his departure. He also embodies the ethos of Munger’s ‘play Fischer at anything but chess’ as well as just about anyone.

Kyle Korver may be beautiful, but not as beautiful as his release.

Realizing that the NBA is a pick-and-roll league, and confronted with the reality that his (relative) limitations in terms of quickness and athleticism keep him from excelling the league average for players at his position in the pick-and-roll game, Korver tried a different tack. His response is right out of Munger’s playbook: “I’m not going to kill myself to get mediocre at that. I want to find things I can be really good at in the system we run.”

Finding one’s niche in an ecosystem

Figuring out what you’re good at can be tricky. If you’re LeBron James, for example, it turns out that the universe of your possibilities on a basketball court is pretty unlimited. Whether as a result of his unprecedented physical ability, or his incredible mental acumen, LeBron is good at a lot.[i]

If you’re Kyle Korver, though, finding your niche is a little tougher. Two recent wildly interesting pieces by Zach Lowe illustrate how Korver has forged a remarkably successful career in the incredibly tough ecosystem of professional basketball, despite being overlooked and underutilized at several stops.[ii]

Now, as a result of his ability to find his niche, Korver has been invited to play for the U.S. Senior national team and is a good bet to make the final roster.

Kyle Korver and the U.S. Men's National Basketball Team

 

Bigger isn’t always better

Sometimes, famous businessman Charlie Munger argues, it’s just the reverse. Machiavelli famously was the first to postulate that, in statecraft, sometimes being the wily, agile (and smaller) fox was better than being the bigger, stronger lion.

While I doubt anyone—well, anyone who is interested in fielding a competitive NBA basketball team and not in getting a date with an Ashton Kucher look-alike heartthrob—would select Korver before LeBron, Korver has come to resemble Machiavelli’s fox in many respects. Munger provides some insight into what makes this kind of transformation possible.

Munger tells the following story in the context of the advantages and disadvantages of scale.  Several years ago when Berkshire Hathaway was the largest shareholder in Capital Cities/ABC. ABC  “had trade publications there that got murdered—where our competitors beat us. And the way they beat us was by going to a narrower specialization.”

The story is familiar to everyone who knows Munger’s work well. It comes from one of his most famous speeches, On Worldly Wisdom. His arguments are interesting.

“We’d have a travel magazine for business travel. So somebody would create one, which was addressed solely at corporate

travel departments. Like an ecosystem, you are getting a narrower and narrower specialization.

“Well, they got much more efficient. They could tell more to the guys who ran corporate travel departments. Plus, they didn’t

have to waste the ink and paper mailing out stuff that corporate travel departments were not interested in reading. It was a more

efficient system. And they beat our brains out as we relied on our broader magazine.

“That is what happened to the Saturday Evening Post and all those things. They’re gone. What we have now is Motor Cross—

which is read by a bunch of nuts who like to participate in tournaments where they turn somersaults on their motorcycles. But they

CARE about it. For them, it is the principle purpose of life. A magazine called Motor cross is a total necessity to those people. And

its profit margins would make you salivate.

“Just think of how narrowcast that kind of publishing is. So occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage.”

Basketball’s Evolving Ecosystem

Grantland’s Kirk Goldsberry is among the forefront of writers and thinkers who characterize the NBA as an ecosystem in the way Munger has in mind. Whether you’re inclined to agree with his assessment of what that means for players like Monta Ellis, or are persuaded by counterarguments by smart people like blogger Jeff Fogle, thinking of basketball as an ecosystem can yield the kinds of insights that Munger has gleaned by applying the ecosystem mental model to stock-picking.
Take Korver, for example. The stuff the Atlanta Hawks let Korver do is far different than what he was allowed to do when he entered the league as a rookie for Philadelphia. Despite Korver’s reputation as one of college’s premier marksmen, Randy Ayers, the 76’ers head coach at the time, preferred Korver to ply a midrange game and get to the basket before shooting from long range.
Lowe describes the change what Korver’s team expected of him when the 76’ers fired Ayers and replaced him with Jim O’Brien:

“In the team’s very first practice, Allen Iverson ran a two-on-one fast break with Korver filling the wing. Iverson dished to Korver behind the 3-point arc. Korver took two dribbles, nailed a 17-footer, and waited for the applause.

O’Brien was livid. He screamed for Korver to look down at the 3-point line. O’Brien told him that if Korver ever passed up another open 3-pointer, he would remove him from the game. Korver remembers one thought flying through his head during O’Brien’s tirade: This is awesome.”

Stats LLC, the company that makes the increasingly ubiquitous SportVU cameras, developed a couple new measures of how much attention NBA defenders pay an offensive player when he doesn’t have the ball.
Korver, not surprisingly, does very well in both. On the ‘gravity score,’ which measures how often defenders continue to guard a player when one of his teammates has the ball, Korver was forth in the league. He ranked behind only Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and Paul George. Durant and Anthony are two of the best scorers of their generation, and George is becoming a great scorer who is really the only guy on his team capable of creating his own shot. That Korver tops the entire league except these three is amazing.
On the ‘distraction score,’ which measures how often a player’s defender leaves him to pay attention to another player (presumably usually one with the ball), Korver registered the lowest score in the league. No player in the league was able to keep the guy guarding him from helping his teammates than Korver. Well, at least no player was able to do so while he didn’t have the ball.
These numbers surprised even Korver’s coach, who Zach Lowe cites as saying, “I underestimated how much attention he gets from defenses. You don’t appreciate it until you see it every day.” Lowe rightly surmises that, “Korver is almost an offense unto himself.”
Adapt or Die & the Lollapalooza Effect
It’s obviously hard for each of us to figure out what we’re good at and how to cultivate our skills and abilities so that we can take advantage of the ecosystem we find ourselves in (or to find a different ecosystem entirely!).
Korver as a case study is probably most instructive, to us who aren’t blessed with a great jump shot and the physical ability and stature to get shots off against some of the world’s greatest athletes, in terms of his attitude.
Interestingly, Korver’s success wasn’t just a result of the way he was used; it was more than the basketball ecosystem that had evolved around him. Reading Lowe’s pieces makes clear that his coaches in Atlanta, head coach Mike Budenholzer and advisor Quin Snyder (who has since become head coach of the Utah Jazz) were open to developing new ways to use his talents. Equally important, though, is Korver’s ability and willingness to adapt himself.
““Kyle’s unique in the sense that players his age who have had success aren’t usually open to trying new things,” says Snyder. “It makes them uncomfortable.”
Sloan amplified the sentiment, saying, “Most guys just stay the same after they’ve been in the league 10 years.”
He’s always had that willingness to learn.

Consider another Lowe piece, on the advice shooting guru, erstwhile Jazz assistant coach and current Suns head coach Jeff Hornacek gave Korver. Lowe writes:

“Hornacek eventually shared one of his shooting secrets with Korver: As Hornacek wound up to shoot, he zeroed in on a tiny speck of the rim, and then aimed to shoot the ball just over that speck. The location of the speck changed with every shot, depending on where Hornacek was on the floor.

This struck Korver as insane, and maybe impossible. Lots of players target a general area of the rim. Some guys home in on the front of the rim and try to launch the ball just over it. Others direct their gaze at the back of the rim and aim just short of it.

But to find a tiny fleck of orange — to actually find one, every time — seemed implausible. ‘I was like, ‘My eyes are not that good, dude. I need to get my eyes checked.’

That sounds like an expression, but Korver actually went and got his eyes checked. ‘I’m serious, man,’ he says now. ‘I actually went to a doctor.’

His vision is fine.”

So is his attitude. And his combination of work ethic, desire to improve, and willingness to change, along with changes in the game he plays and in the coaches he has have contributed to a lollapalooza effect that have Korver thriving in his niche in a tough ecosystem.

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[i] Even LeBron, though, has had to evolve.

[ii] Lowe notes that, despite going 38-12 after getting Korver in exchange for Gordan Giricek and a draft pick, the Utah Jazz let him go after drafting Gordon Hayward. Lowe cites former Utah Jazz head coach Jerry Sloan as saying, “We loved him, but when we drafted Hayward, that cut down on his value here.” Coaches matter. Coach and analyst David Thorpe is fond of saying the first order of business in running a team would be to hire smartest guy you can find, send him on a one-year scouting expedition to find the best coach in the world then hire him. He’ll make all your personnel moves love smarter.

Sloan is a great coach. One of the best ever. His offense’s efficiency ratings are incredible. When you consider the personnel he had to work with, it’s even more remarkable.

But many wonder if the Jazz’s failure—and Sloan’s old school reluctance—to embrace the kinds of efficient scoring opportunities that the Spurs or the Houston Rockets have cultivated offenses have held the Jazz organization back. I’m not so sure. I do think, though, that swapping Hayward for Korver is an example of, if not failing to learn Machiavelli’s lion and the fox lesson, at least presents a significant downside from an efficiency standpoint. Hayward is certainly the more impressive physical specimen. He can certainly do more things than Korver. Hayward is more athletic; he’s younger, and, for a time at least, worked on a cheaper contract. But he certainly doesn’t have that singular talent that nearly perfectly fills a very important niche in the ecosystem of contemporary basketball.

Consider: last year, Korver made 47.2 percent of his 3s. He shot 58 percent on ‘stationary 3s,’ which means that when he shots after catching a pass when his feet are more or less set behind the three-point line, each of his shots produce about 1.75 points. That means a Korver stationary three-pointer is worth more than just about any shot that isn’t a dunk. Hayward experienced some growing pains last year, shooting just better than 30 percent on three-pointers. Hayward, as Utah’s lead offensive option, only managed to get off 3.6 three-pointers per game, meaning that Korver’s made almost as many as Hayward took. And the latter’s 2.6 makes per game dwarf the former’s 1.1. 

Of course, Dennis Lindsay, Kevin O’Connor and the rest of the team’s decision makers’ (tough to pin this one on Sloan, who is so competitive, I can’t imagine him signing off on anything even remotely resembling a tanking effort) realization that Korver would have kept them too competitive to bottom out, secure perhaps the most valuable commodity for a small market team—especially one located in Utah—a high lottery draft pick probably had as much to do with letting Korver go as any misevaluation of his talent. I’ll bet the Jazz knew what they had in Korver (hiring free-thinking  Quin Snyder instead of returning to Sloan who has recently expressed quite a bit of interest in returning to the bench indicates they’d likely embrace the kind of defense-bending three-point shooting that Korver provides), but wanted instead to lose games and unload players that might take Hayward’s playing time. 

Reading Rainbow Kickstarter? What about Charlie Munger's mental models!

Reading Rainbow and reading choice

I recently wrote about a U.K program that increased girls’ levels of physical activity when they had a say in the content of those classes. Education researcher Stephen Krashen has demonstrated the same phenomenon also happens with reading. 

A recent piece on Reading Rainbow and its limits in the New Yorker reports that Krashen’s findings have “shown that when kids choose what they get to read and when, their vocabulary and language skills tend to improve, as does their overall knowledge and ability to think for themselves.” 

Reading Rainbow's Kickstarter campaign ad.

The piece cites the new Reading Rainbow app as likely to foster that kind of positive result in children who use it.  And, interestingly, argues somewhat counterintuitively (it would, I think, certainly be counterintuitive to Charlie Munger, at least) that the app promotes an  “entirely onscreen reading experience” might not be so bad, either. The piece cites another recent U.K. survey that found that kids were more likely to enjoy reading “if, instead of using only books, they used both books and touch screens.”

Whatever the actual merits of the app and onscreen reading generally, I agree with the Adrienne Raphel’s conclusion that “there’s something nice about an app that, instead of rating and ranking kids, mostly just lets them read.”

Reading Rainbow’s smashingly successful Kickstarter campaign

The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign recently launched was a huge success. Aiming to to “Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere,” those behind the effort set out with the goal to raise a million dollars in thirty-five days. They reached that mark in fewer than twelve hours. Emboldened, they revised the mark to five million dollars. More than one hundred thousand people bought into the campaign—including, famously, Seth MacFarlane whose matching million dollars pushed the total donations to more than six million—allowing the organizers’ lofty goal to be reached and then some. 

Munger Mental Models Kickstarter?

Like many, I have fond memories of the program. I’m happy for what the New Yorker piece calls the “Upworthy-worthy goal of putting books in every child’s hands nationwide,” even if it did take a “smorgasbord of rewards for contributors” to grease the wheels of donation.

Inspired by the success of revivifying something that was such a small but obviously emotionally powerful part of our childhoods, I wonder what a Kickstarter campaign for Munger’s Mental Models might look like.

I know there’s interest. My post on Think Mental Models is by far the most popular piece on this blog. And it points to a pay site that, presumably, does a pretty brisk business. But, as I argued in that piece, there’s a lot that a canned program can’t really teach. And, as helpful as pneumonic devices like those espoused by Andrew are, they only work once a lot of other stuff has happened. More than just learning the array of models that Think Mental Models offers, even more than taking the additional step of learning when to apply which models a la Mason Meyers via Clayton Christensen, there’s something else required to successfully use Munger’s latticework approach in practice.

Michael Oakeshott uses the wonderful example of the Confucian story of a wheelwright and the Duke Huan of Chi to illustrate the difference between what he calls ‘technical’ and ‘practical’ knowledge.[i] Technical knowledge is the stuff that can be memorized and written down as rules; practical knowledge is the stuff that can’t be learned or taught this way.

Munger has already said that learning this stuff is pretty difficult even before the idea of having to conquer both the technical and practical aspects of our knowledge. Hard enough, in fact, that he thinks it a good idea only to try in elite educational institutions (an idea I strongly disagree with, by the way). One person who has thought a lot about Mungers ideas and how to put them to their fullest use is similarly pessimistic that they could be learned or taught widely.[ii]

Has Protagoras robbed you? How about Charlie Munger?

In his ‘Dialogues’, Plato recorded this exchange: Socrates, “What is the matter? Has Protagoras robbed you of anything?” His interlocutor replied, laughing, “Yes he has, Socrates, of the wisdom which he keeps to himself.”

This blog was founded because Munger and Greg Glassman shared much with us. Munger has been great at sharing what he knows and is remarkably generous with his time and energy. But I think he—and his heirs, and I mean his intellectual heirs, not those who will receive the monetary fortune he’s accrued and is currently giving away—could give us so much more if he tried. If he believed that, while success leaves clues, that teaching could provide so much more.

So, should we despair over ever learning or teaching Munger’s mental models widely? I don’t think so. I think there are a few people who have a firm grasp of Munger’s approach—who have an understanding of both the technical and practical aspects of how to put such a latticework approach to use—and who might teach it to others.

An historical counterexample

Munger is famous for his anecdote of the man from Arkansas (or wherever) believing in baptism because he’s seen it done. Well, I believe Munger’s ideas can be taught, because I’ve seen a very similar thing get taught.

Though clearly less advanced, less far-ranging, and less multi-disciplinary, Benjamin Graham taught Warren Buffett what he knew. Many, including Munger, have opined that what Buffett took from Graham was of immense utility. Munger, not surprisingly—armed with his black belt in chutzpah—is a more ambitious thinker than Graham.

But that ambition means not only more difficulty in conveying what he has learned, but more possibility in teaching it. Yes, what Munger is up to is a lot more difficult than the more technique-based ‘Geiger counter’ method espoused by Graham. At the same time, though, Munger has, in my view, the same chances of teaching what he knows as Graham did what he knew. Pending students capable of grasping the material, of course.

A lesson from Étienne and the education of Blaise Pascal

Euclid's "Elements"

Yes, Munger is 90 years old.[iii] Yes, he may not have the interest in personally teaching the course. And even a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign is likely to move the needle for a guy who has more money than he could ever use.

And, yes, I can think of an even bigger obstacle to success—Munger doesn’t think that such a class would work and is ideologically opposed to the attempt, on the grounds that getting people to find this stuff out for themselves rather than either pounding it into or spoonfeeding them is a better way.[iv]

I’ve got another historical example of a great—and presumably stubborn—teacher who changed his mind at the demonstration of something remarkable (though admittedly, a lot more remarkable than any campaign in the history of Kickstarter). Étienne Pascal, Blaise’s dad—wasn’t too keen on the education on offer for his children. So, he took to providing for their education himself.

He thought the best approach was to leave mathematics until later in his children’s study, so they started on a program devoid of instruction in the subject. At least one commentator has observed that this had the effect of only whetting his children’s appetites for the study of the discipline.[v]

Euclid's Proposition 32

Étienne continued on this course until one day he happened on Blaise who was in his room drawing on the floor. Blaise had independently worked out and illustrated the basis for Euclid’s 32^nd proposition right on his bedroom floor. Having been denied mathematics instruction by his father, Blaise, on his own, discovered that the interior angles of a triangle add up to the sum of two right angles. 

Of course, Étienne relented, gave his son a copy of Euclid's Elements and immediately began teaching his children mathematics.

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[i] Duke Huan of Ch’i was reading a book at the upper end of the hall; the wheelwright was making a wheel at the lower end. Put­ting aside his mallet and chisel, he called to the Duke and asked him what book he was reading. “One that records the words of the Sages,” answered the Duke. “Are those Sages alive?” asked the wheelwright. “Oh, no,” said the Duke, “they are dead.” “In that case,” said the wheelwright, “what you are reading can be noth­ing but the lees and scum of bygone men.” “How dare you, a wheelwright, find fault with the book I am reading. If you can explain your statement, I will let it pass. If not, you shall die.” “Speaking as a wheelwright,” he replied, “I look at the matter in this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but it does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words [rules]; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy, still making wheels. In my opinion it must have been the same with the men of old. All that was worth handing on, died with them; the rest, they put into their books. That is why I said that what you were reading was the lees and scum of by­gone men.”

[ii] He offered the New York Times Crossword puzzle as a good metaphor for the real multi-domain, holistic fluency mastering Munger's Mental Models requires. "Those [who] can complete it must have massive knowledge across multiple domains: the English language, literature, pop culture, etc. Bring anything less than that broad domain base of understanding, and it can’t be done." He thought this a good metaphor because it's easily recognized as a yes or no proposition: one either has sufficient knowledge or one doesn't. "If you don’t," he added, "no dice."  

[iii] At the most recent Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, Warren Buffett referred to the nonagenarian as his “canary in the coalmine”.  “Most 90-year old men are gone soon enough,” Munger shot back. Buffett looked amused, as the veracity of that statement sank into the crowd and said, "The canary has spoken."

[iv] I disagree with Munger on both of these points. To provide my argument as to why in brief, because there’s still a tremendous amount of work that people would need to undertake to learn even with him—or someone like him—explicitly providing instruction in the mental models and how to use them. I also think it’s possible to learn and teach because Munger did it—and lamented the fragmentary, haphazard approach he had to use to obtain the understanding he has achieved. Why would people be worse off in their pursuit of worldly wisdom if they had someone tell them what was possible and why (Yes, Charlie, WHY!) at the outset of their study?

[v] Admittedly, a pretty strong counterexample to my overall argument that Munger or a Munger protégé should teach the mental model approach! Perhaps Munger, by withholding his understanding is doing more to successfully get people engaged than he would even if he were to write a book and teach classes from now until his dying day.

History ended. The only fight left is over who gets to inherit Michael Oakeshott’s legacy.

The end of history and the last man

Francis Fukuyama, the author of "The End of History” the 1989 lecture, which, along with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”which was written in response, framed much of the debate in international politics departments around the globe, has made a resurgent comeback. In a recent interview with DW, the influential social theorist argued that he’s still right about the end of history—that he’s been right all along. 

Author Francis Fukuyama

In response to a question asking how he’d respond to critics who question whether the triumph of Western liberal democracy was the last step in the human species’ sociocultural evolution—the endpoint of all human history, by saying, “I think the biggest problems have been with the misunderstanding. The concept of the end of history was the question: Where does the direction of history point? Does it point towards communism, which was the view of many intellectuals prior to that point? Or does it point towards liberal democracy? Which I think, in that respect, I'm still right.

History, in the philosophical sense, is really the development, or the evolution - or the modernization - of institutions, and the question is: In the world's most developed societies, what type [of institutions] are they? I think it's pretty clear that any society that wants to be modern still needs to have a combination of democratic political institutions in a market economy. And I don't think that China, or Russia, or any of the competitors out there really undermine that point.”

The End of History according to David Brooks

David Brooks in a recent New York Times piece advances an argument that echoes Fukuyama’s position. “The Cold War settled this contest of historic visions,” Brooks writes. “Democracy won.” 

David Brooks of the New York Times

But he’s a little less triumphant about this ideological victory than Fukuyama. Brooks cites Mark Lilla’s New Republic essay called “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age” as holding that “the post-Cold War era hasn’t meant the triumph of one ideology; it destroyed the tendency to rely upon big historic visions of any sort. Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.”

Yes, history is over, Brooks asserts, but it has no shape. “The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most.” Brooks thinks Lilla is right to doubt Fukuyama in thinking that history is the inexorable march toward universal democracy—his piece “both describes and unfortunately exemplifies the current mood—and he laments it. “Arab nations are not going to be democratic anytime soon. The world is an aviary of different systems – autocracy, mercantile despotism – and always will be. Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.”

Andrew Sullivan thinks Fukuyama was right and David Brooks is the only non-libertarian left standing

Andrew Sullivan wades into the debate—he’s ready to take Brooks on regarding his take on Lilla’s piece, on geopolitics, and, as we’ll see later, on Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan’s recent blog post more or less concedes that Fukuyama was right, too—calling “foolish” anyone who would “deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms. While I think Sullivan overstates the degree to which Francis Fukuyama was right, I completely agree with his point that illiberal, undemocratic political formations each have their own distinctive natures that need to be understood in their own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia.

Andrew Sullivan of The Dish

Sullivan, the good Oakeshottian, rightly reminds us that “in the here and now, all sorts of hybrid [forms of government] are forming and will form, as they always have,” and that given such realities, “our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly.” 

Sullivan labels Brooks a ‘liberal’ on the basis of Brooks’s impulse to assert the universal values found in American droit de seigneur. 

The passage in Brooks’s piece that Sullivan cites as being the exemplification of this ethos of American exceptionalism is this: “Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.”

Toward a Libertarianism?

Sullivan argues that the same political ideology that regards government or governmental authority ‘axiomatically’ not keeping individuals from being what and who they want to be has been extended to apply to the international relationship of sovereign states. No super-power, even a benevolent one, has the “right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be.” So, there’s no principle to stop Putin from annexing Crimea or to keep Israel from pursuing its policy agenda against the West Bank. Sullivan cites the Iraq war as the cause célèbre of this movement—as “a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.”

Arguing over Oakeshott & what it means for politics

Michael Oakeshott argued that "politics is the art not of imposing a way of life, but of organising a common life… the art of accommodating moralities to one another." 

Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott, interestingly, while Sullivan espouses a theory hewed from Oakeshott’s politics, it was Brooks who used Oakeshott’s thought as a guide to dealing with the goings-on in Iraq as far back as 2003. Brooks even cites Sullivan as providing the best insight into how to understand Oakeshott. “Sullivan, he wrote, observes that “the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.”

Brooks, circa 2003, sounds a lot like Sullivan from this morning—a similarity that extends beyond their shared desire to cultivate intellectual and personal idiosyrancies to encompass their outlooks on geopolitics.  In his 2003 piece ‘Arguing with Oakeshott, Brooks wrote, “We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.”

Whose conservative?, Which rationality?

In thinking through the political landscape in 2003, Brooks made a ‘concession’ to his imagined Oakeshott: “government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.” 

What was Brooks’s basis for holding such a position? He broke to Oakeshott, who was ambivalent about the American revolution, and thought that the ideals espoused in 1776 and the political regime that followed worked “precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.” 

Compare that to Sullivan’s contemporary position that, in politics, we now must bracket “the simple democracy-spectrum and look for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.”

I’m not the rationalist, you are

Both Brooks and Sullivan are careful to avoid the ideological plague that Oakeshott identified: rationalism. 

“By a pardonable abridgement of history,” Oakeshott wrote, “the rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the skepticism of Decartes; modern rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.” 

Oakeshott traces the evolution of the rationalist from his seventeenth century origins, in which what “was ‘L’art de penser’, became Your mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost. What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success, and the early and more modest incursions of the sovereignty of technique into education has blossomed into Pelmanism.”

Sullivan and Brooks both advance positions relative to international intervention that draw heavily on the ‘conservative’ thought of Michael Oakeshott. Interestingly, both react to Lilla’s use of the aviary metaphor. It’s Sullivan, though, who makes explicit the anti-rationalist insight borrowed from Oakeshott that would guide the Oakeshottian confronting such an unfriendly world. Sullivan is right: such a world calls for aviarists, not ideologues. 

The Plan to resist all planning is better than its opposite, but…

Oakeshott dismissed Hayek’s brand of political economic thinking with the line, “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics.” He did so on grounds that Hayek had committed the kind of intellectual sin that Sullivan and Brooks are trying so hard to avoid: he was a rationalist. As Oakeshott put it, “This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine.”

Sullivan and Brooks come to slightly different political positions from a very similar ideology. One thinker who better articulates the principled reasons (and the reasons are important—Oakeshott argued, “when we come to consider what a man actually thought, it is not [the] bare ideas which are important, but the grounds or reasons for them which he believed to be cogent, the ratio decidendi”) we might hold for deciding one way or another is Richard Flathman. 

Willful liberalism and the liberal principle

Flathman persuasively argues in favor of what he calls the 'liberal principle'. Flathman’s liberal principle holds "it is a prima facie good for persons to form, to act on, and to satisfy and achieve desires and interestes, objectives and purposes."

In addition to the liberal principle, Flathman calls for a general presumption in favor of freedom—meaning when we assess what people should and should not be allowed to do, our default position should always be in favor of letting them do it. And any restriction on human action needs to pass a rigorous bar.

The highest ideal available to us, from Flathman’s perspective, is individuality "understood as self-making or self-enacting." And that the pursuit of this ideal requires "abundant social and political plurality and, essential to both, the widest possible freedom of action." His devotion to individual freedom is so extensive, those passages come from a book called Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist.

Flathman is consistently silent on matters of policy and how his ideas translate to the realm of politics (he comes by thisdisposition largely via Oakeshott, who thought that theory and practice were modally different enterprises. Many thinkers believe that theory and practice are different on normative grounds—for Oakeshott, the disjunction was epistemological!). But Sullivan’s take on politics can certainly fit easily within Flathman’s theoretical framework. Like Sullivan, Flathman argues insistently against the coercive power of the modern state.

Though Flathman is as wary of state power as any thinker I know, he’s no libertarian. Though it’s very begrudgingly, Flathman does allow that institutions are both necessary and desirable.

His reason? The most important question that can be asked about institutions is "whether or in what ways...[institutions] contribute to or obstruct attempts to pursue and...realize...the ideals of self-making, self-overcoming, and self-enactment."

Instead of libertarianism, Flathman posits a 'willful liberalism' in which a society will only work well so long as “a substantial number of people” for the most part “take care of themselves,” and don’t need to be “cared for” by others or by society. And there must be associates who, by cultivating virtuosities such as civility and especially magnanimity, care for others in the sense of not inflicting themselves harmfully or destructively on the latter.

Taking Flathman’s willful liberalism as a guide would allow for principled intervention—not on the basis of Brooks’s ‘spiritual’ purposiveness or Sullivan’s too-fatalistic libertarianism—but when it looks like stepping in is likely to do better for the institutions and institutionalisms people need to care for themselves.

Even better than Flathman: Mose Allison

I wasn’t convinced by either Fukuyama’s claim that history was at an end, or that any ideological opponent to ourselves as Hegelian last men would be on the wrong side of this post-historical world. You’d have to take a long—very long—view to be as sanguine as Fukuyama is here, “I think we're in for a rough period of time, with both Russia and China expanding. But I do think that it's a limited phenomenon - that in the long run, there's really only one important organizing idea out there: the idea of democracy in a market economy. So in the long run, I'm still optimistic.”

Whether Sullivan is correct that the answer is conservative—with conservatism properly understood—or more liberal—as Richard Flathman’s cultivation of a Nietzschean ‘pathos of distance’ vis-à-vis the coercive power of the modern state, the appropriate response to the set of circumstances we find ourselves in is perfectly embodied by Mose Allison:

“Ever since the world ended / There’s no more black and white / Ever since we all got blended / There’s no more reason to fuss and fight / Dogmas that we once defended / No longer seem worthwhile / Ever since the world ended / I face the future with a smile.”

Charlie Munger's solution for gym class: stopping the thing doing the most harm to girls' fitness

From at least the time of Aristotle, music and gymnastics were education’s foundation. Those charged with providing for children’s education sought to develop their pupils’ minds and bodies. A recent LinkedIn piece illustrates how far removed we are from that ideal. 

There’s plenty of discussion these days about the common core and what it means for our children. By comparison, there’s very little talk about how we’re providing for the common core of our children’s physical well being. 

Nick Morrison in a recent Forbes piece published to LinkedIn examines why school-age children—especially girls—aren’t participating in sport in greater numbers. He cites the United Kingdom’s Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation findings that show that girls start doing significantly less physical activity than boys by the age of nine.

Alarmingly, at age fifteen, only 15% of girls are physically active for one hour per day; boys aren’t great, either, but at thirty-two percent, they’re more than twice as likely to get the sixty minutes of daily exercise. Perhaps illustrating one cause for the dearth of conversation about physical activity in schools, the U.K. Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation found that one in five girls does no physical activity in any given week—despite it being ‘mandatory’ in school.

Why? Gymtimidation?

Morrison cites several reasons, including social pressures and the standard of changing rooms. The changing room phenomenon is significant, and was lampooned for an ad campaign to good effect:

In gym class, where there's this...

 

There's also this. "I hate gyms."

It turns out there may be another cause as well: many girls just don’t find the activities on offer appealing. And I wonder if that holds true for boys as well. In gearing so many physical education programs toward ‘traditional’ competitive sports, I wonder if we’re offering activities geared to those young people most likely to participate in—and failing to attract those least likely to engage in—physical activity. 

My boss is a great example. He’s tall and strong, physically fit and active, he nevertheless tells a hilarious story of not wanting to play baseball in his high school gym class. The class was divided into several teams who would compete against each other. One team would sit on the bench waiting for their turn at bat while the other played in the field. In between innings, the teams would switch sides. At the conclusion of each half-inning, my boss said he’d get up from the bench walk around shaking hands and congratulating his ‘team’ walk up the line a bit…and then turn around and head back to the bench, where he’d sit with the other team. 

No one ever caught on all year he never played the field or came to bat. Each team—and the instructor—just assumed he was always with the proper team. He got an ‘A’ in the class. And the extent of his exertion was limited to high-fives and handshakes. 

Troublingly, I suspect that the boys who took to baseball the most would have had ample opportunities to participate in athletic endeavors they liked elsewhere, but those who weren’t so inclined—like my boss—were probably less likely to find activities that engaged them elsewhere. 

Eliminate the thing doing the most harm.

Charlie Munger loves to apply the principle of inversion in tackling difficult, complex problems. 

Thinking that many conundrums that involve human behavior are so complicated that it’s practically impossible to fully understand all of the variables involved, Munger proposes to simplify the course to action by simply tackling first the single thing causing the most harm. Stop that, and you’re on your way to helping the situation. 

Interestingly, CrossFit may offer solutions, but more on that another day. 

One attempt to correct: ask them.

In the case of girls and participation in physical activity, several such obstacles have been proposed. Jennie Price, the head of Sport England, argues that girls should be given enough time to dry their hair and put themselves together after taking part in physical activities at school; Helen Fraser, chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust, advocates letting girls do stuff they like—such as Zumba classes—to get them  interested in sport and fitness.

So, what might be done to increase participation among young people—especially girls?

Civic republican thinkers, in the tradition of Aristotle, from at least the time of Machiavelli have argued that the people know what the best forms of government are for themselves. They’ve argued on the basis that no one knows quite how his shoe pinches his foot better than himself.

A recent pilot program in the U.K. used such an understanding to tailor offerings to suit the girls it aimed at reaching. It had some positive effects. 

Schools participating in the program recruited a small group of young leaders, and charged them with finding out what would motivate girls to get involved in sporting activity. The schools then developed plans  based on the reports of the leaders’ findings.

And it worked. At the end of the pilot program, the girls from the schools involved were surveyed. Those who reported looking forward to physical education in school rose from 38% to 71%. The proportion who said they liked the way they felt after exercise went from 41% to 73%.

The positive outlook extended beyond the gymnasium. Girls reported to feeling positive about school generally rose from 24% to 78%! So, doing what girls liked in gym class meant fewer than one-in-four feeling good about school to more than three-in-four feeling good.

‘Competitive Greatness’: a case of preferring poetry to pushpin?

Jeremy Bentham postulated a utilitarian theory that sought to improve society by providing the most happiness to the greatest number of people. According to his rigorous calculus, this kind of program would be an unmitigated triumph. John Stuart Mill—his partner James Mill’s son—kept his teacher’s utilitarian ideas mostly in tact, but couldn’t help think that some pursuits were inherently better than others. He was famous for arguing that—no matter the pleasure people might report—the human species does better when engaged in lofty pursuits such as poetry than base pursuits such as playing pushpin or checkers. 

Where Bentham would look at girls engaging in physical activity in high numbers and see nothing but positives, might a curmudgeonly old guard look at the same legion of Zumba classes and wonder if something important has been lost? Might a physical education teacher, following in the ideological footstep of both J.S. Mill and John Wooden, and think, “Zumba? Let’s shoot instead for something higher?”

John Wooden pyramid of success.

Wooden was famous for proposing a pyramid of success. At the top was competitive greatness (well, competitive greatness, patience, and faith).  Human excellence was something to be worked for and achieved. His teams won a lot. His players frequently accomplished individual and collective greatness in their sport and in their lives. 

They did it by following the lead of their coach and teacher—often in contradiction of their own personal interests and desires. In short, they often found themselves doing stuff they didn’t like to achieve something even more significant than what their personal predilections would have earned them.

The stuff Wooden sought--and CrossFit seeks--can be summed up in Wooden's quote, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable."

Girls as they are, gym class as it might be.

As impressive as Wooden achievements were, they were achieved in a very different setting than is to be found in any high school gym class. Wooden got to recruit his athletes (or had to—recruiting was reportedly his least favorite part of coaching and was likely the single biggest factor leading to his retirement).  

Instead of aiming for competitive greatness for all students—I’d argue for greater accommodation to what the students will take to for compulsory activity in class. Those who are interested in competition—or greatness of any kind—will be free to work to accomplishing it no matter the curricular focus. But letting people have a say in the manner of physical activity they’re asked to participate in will be more likely to get those who might not otherwise engage in physical activity at all the best chance to be active. Those who are interested in achieving competitive greatness will likely find avenues to do so no matter what gym class looks like. 

I agree with Alison Oliver, managing director of the Youth Sport Trust, who argues, “If we are to get girls more active…then we must work with them to understand what appeals to them,” she said. And I agree with Nick Morrison that “if getting girls to take part in sport involves giving them a say in what they do, then that seems a price worth paying”.