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At this point we might as well adopt that joke where you blindly throw away half the resumes because you don't want to hire unlucky people.

pjio 4mo ago
This hurts more than it should.
agnosticmantis 4mo ago
A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime. The remaining half of the candidates already spent some of their luck in this selection, so they'll be on average less lucky than the discarded half.
- throwawaythekey 4mo ago
  > A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.
  - cyanydeez 4mo ago
    everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.
- latexr 4mo ago
  Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.
  - addandsubtract 4mo ago
    But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - lobocinza 4mo ago
    assuming luck is spendable
- t-3 4mo ago
  No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones). I see two possible solutions. 1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions! 2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”
- sfn42 4mo ago
  This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.
  - aspenmayer 4mo ago
    Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair. I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...
    - sfn42 4mo ago
      I already said the coin is known to be fair.
      - aspenmayer 4mo ago
        > I already said the coin is known to be fair. The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair. However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question. Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers. Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.
- Terr_ 4mo ago
  Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline. This may be compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem [1], where some candidates may be too lucky to end up with our company, causing them to appears later in the stream or not-at-all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
zipy124 4mo ago
Or more to the point. There are generally far more qualified applicants than job roles. That is training and education greatly expanded over the last couple of decades to produce more and more job seekers, whilst job creation hasn't really kept pace.
taffronaut 4mo ago
At one point in the past a major UK a medical school adopted random selection for qualified candidates (Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry - part of Queen Mary University of London). The approach benefitted qualified students from less well-off backgrounds vs those who can afford to win at the ever more elaborate (manual at the time) hurdles of resume assessment criteria and effectively game the system. There was an orchestrated campaign against the lottery around "Why gamble with would-be doctors?". Random selection was quietly dropped.
- Herring 4mo ago
  That's probably a good litmus test for political capture by elites. The Netherlands introduced a weighted lottery for medical schools in 1972, abolished it in 2017 for basically the same reasons, studied the (worse) outcomes for a bit, then put it back in 2024.
citrin_ru 4mo ago
May be LLM resume screening is a symptom of a bigger problem - with tens of candidates per vacancy employers can screen resume badly and even throw half of the resumes away and still hire someone qualified.
- AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
  That's really what it is, or at least what I've noticed. Any position you have these days is inundated with applications. Most don't meet the qualifications (because in a lot of places say in the US you must apply to jobs to keep with benefits, regardless of what you are applying for), and for the remaining, you'll find that there will always be some that are all similarly qualified. Who do you hire for one position? It sometimes just comes down to luck. AI doing the job of filtering I can't imagine making the process easier, and more applications are just going to get tossed because of it.
latortuga 4mo ago
The author made this exact joke in TFA.

pjio 4mo ago

This hurts more than it should.

agnosticmantis 4mo ago

A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime. The remaining half of the candidates already spent some of their luck in this selection, so they'll be on average less lucky than the discarded half.

throwawaythekey 4mo ago
> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.
- cyanydeez 4mo ago
  everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.
latexr 4mo ago
Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.
- addandsubtract 4mo ago
  But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- lobocinza 4mo ago
  assuming luck is spendable
t-3 4mo ago
No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.
CuriouslyC 4mo ago
Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)
bee_rider 4mo ago
But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones). I see two possible solutions. 1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions! 2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”
sfn42 4mo ago
This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.
- aspenmayer 4mo ago
  Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair. I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...
  - sfn42 4mo ago
    I already said the coin is known to be fair.
    - aspenmayer 4mo ago
      > I already said the coin is known to be fair. The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair. However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question. Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers. Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.
Terr_ 4mo ago
Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline. This may be compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem [1], where some candidates may be too lucky to end up with our company, causing them to appears later in the stream or not-at-all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

zipy124 4mo ago

Or more to the point. There are generally far more qualified applicants than job roles. That is training and education greatly expanded over the last couple of decades to produce more and more job seekers, whilst job creation hasn't really kept pace.

taffronaut 4mo ago

At one point in the past a major UK a medical school adopted random selection for qualified candidates (Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry - part of Queen Mary University of London). The approach benefitted qualified students from less well-off backgrounds vs those who can afford to win at the ever more elaborate (manual at the time) hurdles of resume assessment criteria and effectively game the system. There was an orchestrated campaign against the lottery around "Why gamble with would-be doctors?". Random selection was quietly dropped.

Herring 4mo ago
That's probably a good litmus test for political capture by elites. The Netherlands introduced a weighted lottery for medical schools in 1972, abolished it in 2017 for basically the same reasons, studied the (worse) outcomes for a bit, then put it back in 2024.

citrin_ru 4mo ago

May be LLM resume screening is a symptom of a bigger problem - with tens of candidates per vacancy employers can screen resume badly and even throw half of the resumes away and still hire someone qualified.

AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
That's really what it is, or at least what I've noticed. Any position you have these days is inundated with applications. Most don't meet the qualifications (because in a lot of places say in the US you must apply to jobs to keep with benefits, regardless of what you are applying for), and for the remaining, you'll find that there will always be some that are all similarly qualified. Who do you hire for one position? It sometimes just comes down to luck. AI doing the job of filtering I can't imagine making the process easier, and more applications are just going to get tossed because of it.

latortuga 4mo ago

The author made this exact joke in TFA.