Think Small to Solve Big Problems, with Stephen Dubner | Big Think

One argument that we make is that we could all benefit a little bit from thinking more like children, okay. Now you could say well, we're -- first of all everybody's biased in a lot of ways and we have our set of biases too. It may be that we embrace the idea in this book of thinking like children because we're kind of, you know, childlike. We have kind of obvious observations sometimes. There's observations that strike people as obvious. We ask a lot of questions that are not considered, you know, the kind of questions that people ask in good company or smart company.

But one of the most powerful pieces of thinking like a child that we argue is thinking small. So I realize that this runs exactly counter to the philosophy of the arena in which I'm appearing which is thinking big, Big Think, but our argument is this. Big problems are by their nature really hard to solve for a variety of reasons. One is they're large and therefore they include a lot of people and therefore they include a lot of crossed and often mangled and perverse incentives.

But also a big problem -- when you think about a big problem like education reform, you're dealing with an institution or set of institutions that have gotten to where they've gotten to this many, many years of calcification and also accidents of history. What I mean by that is things have gotten the way they've gotten because of a lot of things a few people did many, many years ago and traditions were carried on. And now to suddenly change that would mean changing the entire stream of the way that this institution has functioned for many years.

Therefore, attacking any big problem is bound to be really hard, and the danger is you spend a lot of resources -- time, money, manpower, optimism which is perhaps one of our most precious resources attacking a problem that you can't make any headway on. So, I mean, you know, history is littered with brilliant people who have attacked large problems in the past half century, century among them famine, among them poverty and most recently I think education reform, a healthy diet and so on.

So these are all really big problems. So our argument is -- you know what? There's a lot of people out there thinking big. Maybe some of them will be successful. Probably not so many honestly. It's very, very hard. Our argument is -- you know what? Let the people who are gonna try to think big solve big problems -- let them go. There's enough people doing that. Why don't you just try to think small? Why don't you try to find one piece of the problem that you can identify and peel it off and try to solve that problem or answer that question?

So there are a lot of reasons why it's better to do that. It's easier to satisfactorily answer a small question or solve a big problem because you can get the data, you can understand the incentives, it's just inherently much less complicated. If you can come up with a solution to a small problem, there's a much better chance you'll actually be able to get it done. A lot of people feel like they come up with the answers to big problems, but then you need to get all the political and capital will to do it. And that can be much harder than actually solving the problem.

So if you can peel off a small piece of a problem and then someone else peels off another small piece and you add them up, you're constantly, you know, working toward a better place. So I'll give you an example. If you think about, let's say, education reform. Even that very phrase is kind of weighted or biased toward the supply side, the schools. It's basically saying that oh, all the kids and the families who are sending their kids to school -- they're all doing exactly the right thing.

But education needs to be reformed because plainly the schools and teachers and principals, they're the bad people. So that's kind of an assumption already about where the problem should be solved. So you think, you know, people have been talking about the many, many inputs that go into education -- class size, technology in the classroom, resources spent, curricula -- the way the curricula are taught and so on. So, you know, what if you say instead, well, that's all -- those are big parts of the education puzzle and they can all be attacked in some way.

What if, however, what if we think about instead of the education side -- what if you think about the student side? What if you think about the kids who are showing up from school and what if you can look at areas in which they're not doing well and maybe try to learn something from that and gather some data and figure it out?

So I could offer two examples about this. One is a pilot program that was built here in New York City that was called School of One. And what School of One did was it basically tried an entirely different model for each kid. Let's say in a math class -- each kid would come into math class on a given day and have the option of learning that day's lesson or whatever lesson in a number of different formats.

In other words, it might be sitting in a room with a teacher and a bunch of other kids and getting group instruction. It might be peer learning with other kids. It might be virtual tutoring. It might be doing a computer game. In other words, you offer all these different options for each kid to try to learn the same material. Then at the end of each day, each kid gets tested on how well they did on that lesson.

And then you can learn what each kid -- how each kid best learned. What form of teaching best learned. Then you have a very nice algorithm that overnight computes the score of each kid with each kind of teaching, and in the morning each kid now comes in with a sort of playlist to determine what I'm gonna do today in what format of learning and what I'm going to tackle.

So that's, to me, a really neat idea in which technology and a smart way of thinking about the demand side of education, the students can change the way you can think about learning generally. Here's an even simpler one than that and an even smaller one than that. It turns out that if you look at the poorest learners in schools, I think pretty much anywhere but in the U.S. and in much poorer countries as well, you can notice that often a bunch of them have something in common which is they have bad eyesight.

So as ridiculous as this seems to be talking about in the twenty-first century, you know, who doesn't wear glasses now? I mean an estimated one million people in America wear glasses that have no prescriptions in them just because they want to look like me, okay. So Lebron James, you know, half of the NBA now goes to put on their fake glasses after a game because it's just become a thing, right. So you would think that the stigma of glasses is dead. But it's not, and in some places, it's really not dead.

So some scholars, some researchers went to a relatively poor rural province in China and they wanted to know how big a deal is poor eyesight for education generally. In other words, is poor vision depressing classroom scores? And what they did is they found out that a tiny, a pitifully tiny fraction of the students in this one region who needed glasses were wearing them -- almost none. And there was a stigma and there were beliefs that wearing glasses in childhood would have a bad effect later in life and so on, some of which may have logic to them, some of which may not.

So they did an experiment these economists did. And they said what if we take all these students who need glasses and we'll divide them up and make an experiment. We'll have a control group. The kids -- half the kids keep going like they were before -- they don't get glasses. The other half we give them glasses - $15 glasses I think it was funded by The World Bank. Much cheaper than all new computers and all new curriculums -- a $15 pair of glasses.

They gave them to one set of kids. Then after a year they measured their education, their test scores against the kids who hadn't gotten the glasses. And it turns out that having glasses is a really big deal in school. Surprise, surprise, right?

A tiny problem, incredibly obvious solution where thinking like a child, you know, sometimes we shy away from obvious ideas because we think, oh, that's not sophisticated enough, not smart enough. Here, however, was a bunch of low hanging fruit. A bunch of kids who needed glasses. The minute they got them, they started doing much, much better in school.

And that, to me, is the beauty of thinking small. You find a problem that you can actually figure out instead of pining about it and guessing about it for years and years, come up with a solution that's actually doable, in this case incredibly cheap. And happy ending, it works. Not every solution will be so easy or so cheap or they won't always work, but I think you can see why we think at least that thinking small can have a huge benefit.