8 ms·

"but I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, and surprisingly often, considering I only have 10 minutes to observe

• sekasi 12y ago
  My job relies on me trying to establish the character of people in a quite limited time as well, and I can totally vouch for this. Human beings are notorious for overestimating their ability to 'judge character'. Myself included. There's been so many scientific studies done on this that I don't think you can make this claim anymore. Personal bias combined with past experience of similar character (or read character) influences your mental state a lot. I don't really like it when people say 'I can work out if they are good people or not', simply because it isn't true. Sorry, but evidence trumps opinions.
  • lazaroclapp 12y ago
    Telling whether someone is a good person is not only hard, it's ill-defined. Good with respect to what ethical standard? Good by which morality? At most, a hypothetical perfect empath could tell you if the person is self-consistent, list which values it shares with you, or maybe predict their actions given an input situation. Even those things seem more within the purview of yet to be proposed ASI than humans. That said, this part (for example) sounds both realistic and useful: "They'd get excited talking to the applicants about all the things they could do, and afterward think the interview went well, when sometimes all the applicants did was reflect their own ideas back at them. But it was second nature to me to notice these things." and I imagine there are many other insights someone trained to observe people (say a psychologist or anthropologist or someone self-trained in doing just that job) could gather that most engineers would miss by miles. Edit: Humans also overestimate their understanding of say, software systems (ask anyone who has ever tried to formally verify anything). Yet an experienced programmer can still tell a bad architecture from a good one with far more success than an untrained/novice one. Aesthetics are as hard to define as Ethics, if not more, yet designers do know what they are doing to a far greater extent than your average person. Isn't it likely to be the same for reading people?
    • protomyth 12y ago
      There is a second problem with reading people. When they come from an "alien" background and exhibit the characteristics of that background down to differences in movement, people make some poor assumptions. As an example, I've had some sorrow watching some DC folks who are "amazingly good at reading the mood in a room"[1] badly misread a group of Native Americans. It was scary broken since they had no frame of reference. I would imagine a person who spent a lot of time jumping cultures[2] would get the feel, but I worry from experience. 1) direct quote 2) "a particular society that has its own beliefs, ways of life, art, etc." definition
  • bootload 12y ago
    "My job relies on me trying to establish the character of people in a quite limited time as well" @Sekasi, in your opinion, what would be required to test and establish a persons character?
    • sekasi 12y ago
      I don't know how useful this information is, because it's purely my opinion.. but, besides 'experience' and 'open mind' that are two pretty obvious ones, there are a few things I always look for and probably just as many that are unconscious; * What they are motivated by [the motivation itself gives you clarity in their personality. Lack of motivation does as well. None are bad traits, they just reveal things] * Posture and body language * Eye contact and eye movement when speaking * How they speak of other people, good and bad * Lying [everyone lies. some people lie about important things] * Reaction to criticism/blame * Evidence of perseverance * Dealing with silence [some people call them 'awkward silence'. That's pretty revealing ;D] * Balance of aggressiveness and passiveness * Ambition or lack thereof [no right or wrong here] * Levels of child-like enthusiasm for passions versus task driven enthusiasm * Social interests [again, unsocial introverts aren't necessarily a 'bad' trait. Just something that adds to your personality] * Instability I just wrote those up then, it's hard to verbalize, admittedly.
• myth_buster 12y ago
  I'm sure she learns from her mistakes and tweaks her "social radar" model. Hence with more experience/interaction with founders she will be getting better at it. Given that YC has become incredibly successful, there is something right being done there and hence it may be easy for her to determine what works and what doesn't.
• paul 12y ago
  This is a fair question, but like most things with humans, almost impossible to answer in a definitive way. There was once an accidental control group though. Jessica missed about half of the interviews and PG, RTM, and Trevor were left to decide on their own. I would estimate that the error rate without her was about 2x-3x as high. The other thing to remember is that we keep track of the startups that we interview, and for the ones that we accept, we end up working with them for many years. We make a point of studying our mistakes (and successes), so there is a feedback loop, and I believe that we're getting better at it every time. But of course there are about a million other variable in play, so it's very difficult to be certain about anything (which is part of what makes this business so interesting).
  • negrit 12y ago
    How accurate it is with foreigners? The way to communicate from a country to another is really different, same for the culture, ... How do you integrate the 'foreigner' factor in the evaluation?
    • paul 12y ago
      That definitely makes it harder, especially since norms for what is or isn't honest or ethical are far from universal (e.g. what kind of copying is ok and what kind is stealing). This is another reason why it's beneficial to have a culturally diverse team.
      • lazaroclapp 12y ago
        I wonder if formal training in, say, anthropology or social psychology, would help as well. Seems unlikely that you can have a dedicated judge of character from every different culture on earth.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
  • n72 12y ago
• Mz 12y ago
  If you are good at this, over the years, you collect evidence, often of a sort that you cannot in good conscience share. As one example I can share: When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I once got myself moved to a different team very, very quietly because the individual taking it over was going to be trouble for me. He had not yet done anything worthy of bringing it to the attention of HR, but I wanted nothing to do with him as my new boss. A bit over 2 years later, he was quietly fired. The rumor mill had it that he was either having an illicit affair or was engaging in sexual harassment. I believe either or both as plausible stories. A former team member (a woman) and I then talked about how terribly he had treated her, something she had been unable to effectively address while she worked for him. I felt terrible for not telling her sooner why I had been quietly moved. If you earnestly want a more in-depth write up, I would be willing to put one on my blog sometime. Edit: Maybe "quietly fired" isn't a good descriptor. More like "disappeared" overnight. One day, he was his usual jovial self. The next, we came in see a manager cleaning out his desk. The many people who bought his smarmy bullshit and adored him were in shock. I spent the week trying to hide my desire to pass out kazoos and party hats amidst a funerary atmosphere at work. Lots of people were completely taken in by this creep.
• abdullahkhalids 12y ago
  The research shows these results for typical human beings. If you did a survey, a typical human being would be terrible at and will overestimate their ability to discriminate good startup ideas from bad ones. But PG does have this ability. Similarly, she is probably a atypical human being with an excellent 'social radar'. Also, she gets feedback so she gets to improve.
• belorn 12y ago
  the reasons as posted: "I've always been a good judge of character–even as a little kid" "In fact my cofounders respected my opinions about character" "I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, .. whether they're good people or not." "Paul, Robert and Trevor are really good at technical stuff, but it's precisely because they're so good that they often misjudged founders as people. " while "I didn't always understand the details of the questions they'd been asked" "I just have a very intense reaction to people I think have bad characters. " At this point my reaction is as it always is when someone belive they were born with special abilities, but the article does end on a better note: "I now have experience dealing with literally hundreds of startups. So now when I see a problem I've usually seen the same problem ten times before." Born ability? I would call it earned experience, while I strongly suspect she was as bad as anyone else at being a judge of character before that.
• Mz 12y ago
  Let me ask you this: Why are you harshing on her explanation of her role in YC? Do you call PG out and assume he is full of shit and doesn't know what he is talking about? She is one of four people who founded YC. YC is wildly successful. Paul Graham's writing is practically worshiped here on HN. I am rather appalled at the reception this is getting. I don't know her, but I will suggest that the substantial success of YC suggests she isn't just fucking self-deluded. Perhaps she isn't explaining it in a way that appeals to the data-oriented mindset of the majority of people here, but the degree to which she is being outright dismissed as utterly full of shit smacks of, among other things, sexism.
  • n72 12y ago
    > Do you call PG out and assume he is full of shit and doesn't know what he is talking about? Absolutely. I think Paul Graham said silly things about hacking and painting. I think Paul Graham is utterly wrong about philosophy being just a confusion over meaning. I think Paul Graham at time tends to riff on things he just doesn't know much about. > outright dismissed as utterly full of shit smacks of, among other things, sexism. Please show me where she's being "outright dismissed." Please show me how I could make the argument I made without it being interpreted by you as sexist. Or is the mere fact that I made it about a woman proof of its sexist nature?
    • Mz 12y ago
      Or is the mere fact that I made it about a woman proof of its sexist nature? No, it is not the mere fact that it is about a woman. It is the context here and the framing of the comments. It is the fact that, on the whole, this piece is not being talked about with the kind of respect with which her spouse's writing gets treated here. It is the fact that you and others are not asking how she knows or what it would take to prove it or any other questions that come from a place of "Well, this very powerful, intelligent, successful person has said something I do not understand and I would like to understand it better and learn from it." No, the comments here are mostly dismissive of the very idea that anyone can be any good at this or can objectively know they are far better than average. Most men get asked to show their work. Women get told they are full of shit. There is a difference between the two, a very big difference, and that difference boils down to fundamental respect. It is in part a contextual thing that is very hard to prove bias on, but if you experience it, you eventually know that there are just no circumstances under which you will be taken seriously and there will always be some excuse and some plausible explanation why no one takes you seriously or respects you while they claim it is unrelated to your gender. I will just leave this link here on the off-chance that you genuinely would like to understand what I am trying to convey: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-creepiness-of-silence-of-lambs.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-creepine...
• brudgers 12y ago
  One of the features of the Y-Combinator context is that the interviews are designed to filter out false positives. So the process is focused on consistently selecting good character rather than correctly identifying both good and bad character. As YC often points out, plenty of good people don't get funded. The emphasis on avoiding false positives means that errors are more easily identified: bad character stands out in the small pool of YC founders, whereas good character may be common in the pool of unselected applicants. In other words, it's more of a bloom filter than a dictionary.
• hooande 12y ago
  With these criteria, how does anyone make any statement about their own abilities? If you went to a job interview and they asked "What is your biggest strength?" would you say "Well, humans are prone to overestimate their abilities. I couldn't answer that question without doing a double blind research study"? Think about it: The only way that you could change your view of your own abilities is by comparing your predictions about people's character to their actual behavior over time. Jessica did the same thing, but she found that her predictions were accurate. JL has the opportunity to make judgements about people, and then spend months or more with them as a part of YCombinator. She can say "I don't think the members of this startup will work well together" or "I don't like the looks of this guy", and then see if she was right or not. She has the opportunity to do this dozens of times per year, every year. That's how she knows.