Open thread, 7-14 July 2014

David_Gerard

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Previous thread

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Having such a variance is a really bad thing.

I agree that it's a bad thing that some people are mismeasured, because that's inefficient. I don't buy the argument that the concentration makes it worse on anywhere near the same scale.

It's also worth pointing out that this is a continuum. Dull for a systems analyst is sharp for an accountant, and dull for an accountant is sharp for a salesperson, and dull for a salesperson is sharp for a machinist, and so on. And so if someone with salesperson intelligence doesn't test well, and so only has machinist scores, then they can get a job as a machinist and outperform their peers, and eventually someone may notice they should be in the office instead of on the shop floor.

Perhaps it's a deliberate simplification for clarity, but that last paragraph seems to me to assume a one-dimensional oversimplification of how things are.

Suppose Frieda would be a great salesperson: she is enthusiastic and upbeat, she has a good memory for names and faces, etc. But her test scores aren't good, and she gets hired as a machinist. How much are those good-salesperson characteristics going to help her impress her colleagues in the shop floor? Suppose Fred has similar test scores and also gets hired as a machinist. He is conscientious, has a lo... (read more)

0Jiro12y

The argument works just as well with "the person who is bad at IQ tests gets repeatedly hired for lower-paying jobs" as it does with "the person who is bad at IQ tests gets repeatedly not hired at all". Back when you were permitted to discriminate in hiring based on race, black people didn't have absolutely no jobs--they were just hired for jobs that were generally worse. (And people didn't notice the good blacks should be in the office and promote them at a higher rate to make up for it, either. Rather. they allowed their bias to affect their assessment of how good blacks were at their jobs.) Edit: There's also a problem that's related to the first but where accuracy isn't involved. Imagine that IQ tests were always accurate for job purposes. 100% of the time; if one person has a higher IQ than another, he has higher performance. Employers would then start hiring people from the high IQs down. In a limited job market, employers would stop hiring before they reached the bottom. Someone could find himself having 95% of the productivity of someone with a higher IQ score but hired 0% of the time. Again, it's bad to have people who are hired 0% of the time. You could solve that by introducing noise into the IQ scores, but of course that is equivalent to not allowing IQ testing and forcing employers to use noisy measures of IQ. (You could also solve that by allowing employers to hire one person at X% of the salary of another, but employers tend not to do that even for the measures they are allowed to use now.)

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