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It seems logical that keeping the people who did well at the task and dismissing those who didn't would be the way to find people with forecasting talent in a s

by jrapdx3 12y ago

It seems logical that keeping the people who did well at the task and dismissing those who didn't would be the way to find people with forecasting talent in a specific domain. It's the same principle as evolutionary selection. If I want to have a stand of only unusual purple flowers whereas the usual ones are red, then save seeds of the purple ones and plant those seeds and keep selecting. Maybe it could be called a purple flower meritocracy. It sure seems to be the case that many employers aren't distilling the most capable employees among those employed so an effective workforce doesn't evolve. One thing that bugged me a little was the hantavirus prediction. Seems the incidence hadn't changed much over time, I wonder how hard it was to predict accurately?

drunkpotato 12y ago
Define a metric for "did well at the task". Whatever you define will be, at best, a close proxy to what you want. The downfall of an organization lies in that gap. Evolution fails spectacularly badly at matching our intuitions for what we want. A naive optimization process will optimize exactly for the cost function, at the expense of everything else in the universe. This is to say that what you propose is not that easy to accomplish when you get beyond the domain of words and into the implementation. I found this an entertaining read on why allowing an evolutionary process to optimize for you does not always lead to the results you expect: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_you/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...
astazangasta 12y ago
I'm not sure selection is a good way to think this particular problem, or management in general. Selection operates by replicating or destroying an immutable unit (a genetic variant). People cannot be replicated, only fired. Furthermore, people are not immutable; most importantly, they can learn from their mistakes, and they can be taught. Someone who fails at forecasting something correctly the first time might be someone who goes back, looks deeply at why they were wrong, and improves their method. Someone who succeeds might merely have gotten lucky. These people will not be identified correctly by a selection mechanism. Time and judgment, collaboration and the inculcation of expertise seem better tools in this regard.

by jrapdx3 12y ago

drunkpotato 12y ago

Define a metric for "did well at the task". Whatever you define will be, at best, a close proxy to what you want. The downfall of an organization lies in that gap. Evolution fails spectacularly badly at matching our intuitions for what we want. A naive optimization process will optimize exactly for the cost function, at the expense of everything else in the universe. This is to say that what you propose is not that easy to accomplish when you get beyond the domain of words and into the implementation. I found this an entertaining read on why allowing an evolutionary process to optimize for you does not always lead to the results you expect: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_you/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...

astazangasta 12y ago

I'm not sure selection is a good way to think this particular problem, or management in general. Selection operates by replicating or destroying an immutable unit (a genetic variant). People cannot be replicated, only fired. Furthermore, people are not immutable; most importantly, they can learn from their mistakes, and they can be taught. Someone who fails at forecasting something correctly the first time might be someone who goes back, looks deeply at why they were wrong, and improves their method. Someone who succeeds might merely have gotten lucky. These people will not be identified correctly by a selection mechanism. Time and judgment, collaboration and the inculcation of expertise seem better tools in this regard.