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