Richard Dawkins: Should employers be blind to private beliefs? [link]

Kevin

I disagree with Dawkins on this.

A guy who goes around talking about creationism in public, and wants to be an astronomer, either lacks common sense or wants to use the university as a platform for ideology. Those are bad signs in a job candidate.

But of all the crazy things a potential employee could believe, religious beliefs are the most likely to coexist with professional competence. Religion is usually instilled in childhood and linked up with a child's first introduction to morality; people frequently compartmentalize religious beliefs and go on to develop genuine real-world skills. In other words, a religious belief tells you a lot about an individual's upbringing, a little about his character, and not much about his intellect. (Robert Aumann is everyone's favorite religious-but-brilliant guy around here; but the ranks of mathematicians, at least, are full of Orthodox Jews who do excellent work while holding lots of plainly false beliefs. And Ramanujan was a believing Hindu. It's not rare at all.)

By contrast, a belief that the earth is flat tells you nothing about the individual's upbringing and a whole lot about his character and intellect -- he wasn't under thousands of years of pressure to believe bullshit, he came up with it on his own.

Dawkins wants to bite the whole bullet and actively encourage employers to refuse to hire people who have ridiculous beliefs, on the grounds that one stupid belief indicates bad character or unfitness for the job. He believes in judging people holistically. But think about what that means if it's extended beyond religion. Is it professional behavior to reject job applicants for their politics? Is it smart to reject a job applicant because she believes the Singularity is coming, or believes in polyamory, or believes that humans should colonize space one day, or wants to be cryo-preserved?

Some employers already do judge the "whole person," and to a greater or lesser degree reject people for private beliefs and life choices that are tangiential to job performance. Some industries care much more about demonstrated competence and less about whether you're weird in private life. I have a guess as to which hiring style actually gets more able employees.

Is it smart to reject a job applicant because she believes ... in polyamory?

Definitely not! :)

16Vladimir_M16y

It seems clear to me that this is matter of status and reputation, not competence. One of the worst nightmares of every university department is that they might let in someone smart and capable who is however concealing some seriously disreputable beliefs -- until the day he gets tenure and starts using the prestige and resources of this position for voicing them. Since academia are largely in the business of selling status and reputation, this is clearly an extremely serious threat, and from this perspective it's imperative for them to obsessively screen tenure-track job applicants and promotion candidates for even the slightest sign of disreputable ideas, whether or not related to their area of research. In my opinion, this is a much more important issue than any considerations about whether and how much various kinds of delusional beliefs are indicative of technical incompetence and flaws of character. Indeed, in practice universities have no problem hiring academics with delusional beliefs of high-status sorts as long as they have the necessary technical competence. (Of course, in some areas the academic mainstream itself consists largely of high-status delusional ideas, so espousing them may actually be a technical job requirement.)

8TheOtherDave16y

I don't think the hiring concern was due to the evaluators using theism, or young-earth-creationism, or whatever, as an indicator of the employee's intellect or competence. If it were, presumably the fact that they judged the guy vastly more competent on other grounds would counterbalance, and the question on the table would be "taking everything into account, is this guy competent enough to do the job?" And, judging from the article, their answer to that question was "Yes." As you say, people compartmentalize. The impression I got was that, having answered that question, they then asked themselves "will it make us look bad to have a visible public figure associated with us who believes this stuff?" and the answer was also "Yes." And they decided the latter was more important, but then ran into trouble because they documented that process and anti-discrimination laws prohibit acting on that decision.

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Richard Dawkins: Should employers be blind to private beliefs? [link]

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Richard Dawkins: Should employers be blind to private beliefs? [link]

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