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Grognor comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
Possibly a side issue, but one motivation for signalling occurs when measurement is difficult for some reason e.g. regulation.
Giving prospective employees an IQ test can be quite hazardous for the employer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_public_policy
Spending $50,000 on college - and incurring toxic student debt in the process - to prove something that can be demonstrated by a $500 test seems strange, in the absence of other factors. Particularly when colleges use a near-IQ test (SAT) as one important criterion for admission!
College degrees are better signals for conscientiousness than intelligence, which is no coincidence, since employers in real life care more about conscientiousness.
I doubt this is true. I've seen research that claims that on average, college students spend less than an hour a day studying. I've attended 3 universities in my life (undergrad to grad school), and skipping classes frequently, dressing like a slob in class, and skipping the required reading seem typical. If I cared mostly about conscientiousness, I would be more impressed by someone holding down a job at McDonald's for 4 years than graduating college, because a McDonald's manager has no problem with firing someone who skips work frequently. Most college professors don't even take attendance.
Yet long-term McDonald's employees get very little career boost from this in applying for jobs at Goldman Sachs or whatever. A kid who manages an Art History degree at Harvard while mostly partying and doing the minimal work to pass has a vastly better chance than the a long-term McDonald's employee with a sterling letter of recommendation from his boss.
This is vastly over-simplified. I did an internship at a firm that designs employee-selection systems for businesses, and this varies widely. A company like Walmart or McDonald's doesn't care much about intelligence, they want reliable, polite workers who won't steal from them. On the other hand, intelligence receives a huge premium for high-level white collar work. For these kinds of jobs, beyond some reasonable level of conscientiousness, they no longer care, and more conscientiousness demands no premium.
If employers cared more about intelligence than conscientiousness, you'd think a college admission would suffice for employment. (Heck, I don't know, maybe it does with certain colleges.)
But as wedrifid points out, this would require the system to be sane, which is not that likely.
Of course it is. It is a single sentence, not a detailed map of the desired hiring conditions for every job in the world.
Using the term over-simplified was my attempt at generosity. As presently stated, your claim is entirely wrong. Intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance for all but the most narrowly-focused manual tasks, see for example Ree & Earles, Current Directions in Psychological Science vol. 1, No. 3 (Jun., 1992), pp. 86-89.
The strong claim you made in your original comment was entirely false, and I get the impression you were just speculating wildly about something you don't actually know much about.
After intelligence, Conscientiousness is probably the single best predictor of job success since it predicts even after controlling for IQ, education level, etc. (Cribbing from my usual footnote, the best starting point is the meta-analysis http://people.tamu.edu/~mbarrick/Pubs/1991_Barrick_Mount.pdf )
It's important to note that employers are not seeking to maximize employee performance. They're seeking to maximize the difference between the value provided by the employee and the wage provided to the employee.
As doubly pointed out, the system is unlikely to be sane. In an insane system, you cannot predict that most employers will even know that intelligence is the best predictor of performance, let alone that they will effectively apply the best available method to select candidates by this criterion.
The fact is, from personal observation (which I admit is anecdotal evidence from a tiny, biased sample size), employers generally do not care to effectively figure this out. All employers I've encountered have had an attitude of wanting everything to "just work" (through the magic of being awesome, presumably) and land them the best employees because they will it to be so. If this would expand to the population in a proportional manner, it would mean that the vast majority of "employers" are either simply acting irrationally for this situation (AKA not only is the system insane, but nearly all its players are, too) or do not assign sufficient utility to obtaining better employees for it to be worth the perceived cost of finding them.
I believe this was the main point being made. It's not being argued that intelligence makes you a better actual performer, what is being argued is that employers do not effectively pick the most intelligent candidates, or worse, that they are not even remotely aware of what they should select for, and that they believe it is relatively worthless for them to attempt to find out more on this subject than they already know.
Most employers want a track of record of doing job X successfully when hiring people to do job X. If job X requires intelligence, then they will be indirectly selecting intelligent people ... whilst filtering out "smart but doesn't get things done" people. Seems sane to me.
Yes, of course. These particular traits you have deigned to consider for your worthy evaluation do seem, to me as well, perfectly sane.
I think you forgot to activate your Real World Logic coprocessor before replying, and I'm being sarcastic and offensive in this response.
In more serious words, these particular selected characteristics do not comprise the entirety of "the system" aforementioned. I've said that the system is /unlikely/ to be sane, as I do not have complete information on the entire logic and processes in it. I also think we're working off of different definitions of "sane" - here, IIRC, I was using a technical version that could be better expressed as "close to perfectly rational, in the same way perfect logicians can be in theoretical formal logic puzzles".
Insane is not an obvious synonym for imperfect.
Opinions vary on the role of intelligence in the first place
That leads to a much-noted chicken-and-egg problem... but that aside, for all but the most menial and interchangeable X, employers don't generally have access to data about how well and how long prospective hires have done X. They have access to candidates' word for how well they've done more or less imperfectly related work, and usually to recommendations from their former employers and coworkers -- but the former is unreliable, and the latter demonstrates only that the candidate isn't a complete schlub.
I haven't read the paper in the ancestor, but it seems reasonable to me that IQ would often end up being a better predictor of performance, given these constraints.
One thing being imperfect doesn't make another thing better.
No. But it is evidence for the other thing being better, when the constraints under question don't apply to that other thing.
Of course, while we're talking evidence, we shouldn't neglect the fact that the traditional interview/resume method has reached fixation and doesn't look to be in immediate danger of being displaced. But "current practice" doesn't necessarily imply "optimal" or even "best known", especially when psychometric methods are legally problematic.
They don't have to, they just have to observe what other successful employers are doing and copy that, the ones who copy the correct features will themselves be more successful, a.k.a., memetic evolution works.
Downvoted for uncharitable reading. knb offered an alternative one-sentence oversimplification: "reliable, polite workers who won't steal from them".
You presume that "attendance" is the valued part of conscientiousness. Keep in mind that the students who are routinely skipping class and their required reading either failed out of college (and thus lack a degree to signal with), or succeeded despite this (and therefor can probably be trusted to meet deadlines even if their appearance is shabby and their attendance atrocious)
If the job is "write a first draft of the novel by September", with no need to coordinate with an editor until then, then attendance is completely irrelevant to job performance. The same is probably true for a great number of other jobs (many programming jobs require team work, many others can be done by a single person working alone, etc.)
I'd consider the college graduate far more qualified - I know they can handle a deadline and open-ended long-term tasks, and even if they appear to be slacking off, I can trust that they have the conscientiousness required to pull through in the end.
No I didn't. That was just one illustrative example. I also included this:
Getting a sterling letter of recommendation means more than showing up. At McDonald's, praise from a manager would probably be very close proxy for conscientiousness.
Note that you're just assuming that what lets the college kid succeed in passing in the end is conscientiousness. You could just as easily say, "I can trust that they have the intelligence required to pull through in the end." In fact that would be an obviously better fit, since someone who slacked off all semester isn't likely to make up for all the studying in hours that other students did. Instead he or she will rely on intelligence to quickly grasp enough concepts to pass.
Fair enough.
If they accurately estimate the amount of time that they must spend to get the job done to the specified quality (get some specified GPA, for example), and then put forth that effort, then they have demonstrated some combination of intelligence and conscientiousness. It doesn't matter to me if they are smart enough to succeed while partying every night or smart and conscientious enough to study three nights a week and pass, or conscientious enough to study five nights a week and pass, because their performance is adequate in every case.
Lots of jobs are perceived to require attendance, even in the white collar realm. For those jobs, a college degree is less effective signalling than a work history showing a long employment at a job that requires attendance.
Conformity too. This is a factor often overlooked in discussions of this sort.
(There are in fact two ways in which education signals conformity. The first one is the fact that you have conformed to the social norm that you are supposed to signal your intelligence and conscientiousness with this particular costly and wasteful endeavor, not in some alternative way that would signal these traits just as well. The second one is that you have successfully functioned for several years in an institution that enforces an especially high level of conformity with certain norms of behavior that are especially important in a professional context.)
(Conformity can feel like consistency from the inside.)
Both those things are true but much of that could well be coincidental. Mechanisms for the distribution of prestige, status and affiliation are not always sane from the perspective of the system.
Some employers, for some jobs, care more about conscientiousness. If it's universally true that "employers in real life care more about conscientiousness" then I would be interested to see some evidence.
(Perhaps you didn't mean to claim that it's universally true, but only that it's true on average or something. In which case, fair enough.)
That's how I interpreted the parent.
Dear whoever downvoted the above,
I regret that after some thought it remains unclear to me what you didn't like and what (if anything) I can or should do to improve. Would you care to offer some more informative feedback? Thanks.
Uncharitably interpreting the parent would be my guess? (I didn't downvote it.)