Must-Read: Noah Smith: Fixed Mindsets

…She’s also a hedgehog. Meaning, of course, that she applies her One Big Idea to everything and anything, and tends to exaggerate its power and the evidence in favor of it. That’s OK. Most promoters of big good ideas are hedgehogs…. I think that as a society we’ve gotten good at recognizing hedgehogs and mentally correcting for the hedgehogginess…. Dweck makes it clear many times that natural ability does, in fact, matter. She states that among people of similar natural ability, having a growth mindset makes a big difference. What she is saying is that the marginal effect of the growth mindset on performance is large for most people, even though natural ability matters a lot in the average…