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I think he is right. Past and future performance don't correlate. That is why employers do usually not look a resumes or references. Or why, say, Google and Mic

by ckuehne 15y ago

I think he is right. Past and future performance don't correlate. That is why employers do usually not look a resumes or references. Or why, say, Google and Microsoft don't ask tricky questions in interviews. Or why admission to graduate programs is never determined by your past grades and achievements. Wait, what?

pekk 15y ago
Past and future performance do correlate in many cases, but "Google and Microsoft do it" has never been a valid argument for the correctness of anything. I hear that in Imperial China one had to pass a classical literature exam to get civil service jobs. There is a great deal of arbitrary convention in the things done by big companies, this is not evidence of optimality. When people are at a loss for how to make a hiring decision and they have a giant pile of applications in front of them, they are liable to just choose whatever filter is available. It might not be any better than reading tea leaves, but at least the decision gets made. This is rational behavior when the cost of devising or applying a better criterion is high, but it doesn't mean the resulting criterion is the best thing possible.
- ckuehne 15y ago
  We are talking statistics here. When you see a hypothesis like "past performance does not correlate with future performance" you look around for evidence for or against it. All the examples I cited clearly speak against this hypothesis. Insofar, the fact that people use past behavior as a predictor for future behavior clearly speaks against the hypothesis. I could go on with examples. Why is it for example, that people want to get to know each other better before they hop into some kind of mutual arrangement or contract? Could it be, because we all try to predict future behavior from past behavior? Of course we could all be wrong - in general or in certain circumstances. Maybe a pedophile will never molest a child again in the future. Or maybe the girl you dated who was very obnoxious will change for the better. Yet, this is unlikely (remember: this is still a statistical argument). So the burden of proof is with the guy who came up with this hypothesis. EDIT: Regarding the "the fact that Google does it doesn't proof anything" argument. Would you say that Google should just throw a coin to decide which applicant to take or simply take the first k applicants (say, in alphabetical order) and Google would not be worse off than they are with the current interview process?

by ckuehne 15y ago

pekk 15y ago

Past and future performance do correlate in many cases, but "Google and Microsoft do it" has never been a valid argument for the correctness of anything. I hear that in Imperial China one had to pass a classical literature exam to get civil service jobs. There is a great deal of arbitrary convention in the things done by big companies, this is not evidence of optimality. When people are at a loss for how to make a hiring decision and they have a giant pile of applications in front of them, they are liable to just choose whatever filter is available. It might not be any better than reading tea leaves, but at least the decision gets made. This is rational behavior when the cost of devising or applying a better criterion is high, but it doesn't mean the resulting criterion is the best thing possible.

ckuehne 15y ago
We are talking statistics here. When you see a hypothesis like "past performance does not correlate with future performance" you look around for evidence for or against it. All the examples I cited clearly speak against this hypothesis. Insofar, the fact that people use past behavior as a predictor for future behavior clearly speaks against the hypothesis. I could go on with examples. Why is it for example, that people want to get to know each other better before they hop into some kind of mutual arrangement or contract? Could it be, because we all try to predict future behavior from past behavior? Of course we could all be wrong - in general or in certain circumstances. Maybe a pedophile will never molest a child again in the future. Or maybe the girl you dated who was very obnoxious will change for the better. Yet, this is unlikely (remember: this is still a statistical argument). So the burden of proof is with the guy who came up with this hypothesis. EDIT: Regarding the "the fact that Google does it doesn't proof anything" argument. Would you say that Google should just throw a coin to decide which applicant to take or simply take the first k applicants (say, in alphabetical order) and Google would not be worse off than they are with the current interview process?