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Grognor comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - Less Wrong
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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".