Well, I'm an engineer myself, albeit with a lot of sidecar management experience, so I like to (perhaps naively) think that I'm somewhere in the middle of the s

Well, I'm an engineer myself, albeit with a lot of sidecar management experience, so I like to (perhaps naively) think that I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I believe everyone is naive in certain respects; there are so many hours in the day and no one can be an expert in everything. But your larger point is fair: it's a very tricky and problematic area. I do think that it can help to see how people's worldview was shaped rather than just trying to get a one-shot sense of someone's worldview based on your static impression of them at this moment in time, though. It's analogous to asking someone to describe their prior technical work experience rather than just explaining what they know in this precise moment, and akin to someone showing their work when completing a math problem. It makes it easier to tell whether someone actually knows what they purport to know, or believes what they purport to believe, if they can show how that experience was derived. I feel this is especially true in the case mentioned in the original article, where you as the employer are essentially taking a minor leap of faith in hiring someone. You can't rely as much on their prior work experience as a "web of trust" evidence point that they know how to conduct themselves. You need to reach for other data points.