= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (169)
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.
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.