Tyler Cowen will often praise a book by saying it is interesting on every page. Together with Daniel Gross, he has written a book that very much matches this description. The topic is talent: How to search for it, how to identify it, interview and otherwise evaluate it, how to recruit it, how to buy it low and sell it high. The book asks, in various ways,
I think you're right about the clunkiness of the intelligence-to-political-success comparison. IQ is obviously good for solving problems, and there are indeed problems in politics - or you could consider "how best to be elected" as the problem to fix. But I think the reason that "the highest IQ person" doesn't always win is that who gets elected depends way more on the makeup of the electorate/country/events. Which sort of works into a potential Cowen-style subtext (maybe explicit, I haven't read the book) of maybe the key to getting better candidates (both types) lies in improving yourself/your company.
It is interesting, I get the feeling that the authors are not very good interviewers, and that you are a bit negative on the book. Which is odd because you said the opposite, I think.
Do you think it is possible they manage to get good talent (which seems true) but for very different reasons than they think? I have at least one guess for why Cowan might, but I don’t know anything about the other guy.
> ...at some point you risk crossing from Goodhart’s Law problems to 2nd level Goodhart’s Law problems, where you are effectively optimizing a metric that was originally predicting who would be able to successfully game the original metric, and so on.
>You absolutely want extreme forms of ambition and self-improvement, but in a sufficiently broken and hyper-competitive world this starts to select against caring about anything else, especially if those around you are running forms of meta-Goodhart and punishing caring about anything else.
Could someone help me understand the second-level Goodharting? You want to hire someone who will be more productive than other applicants. To predict this, you measure the ambition they displayed before and during the interview(s). Expecting this, the applicants tend to optimize for displaying ambition. This comes at the expense of productivity, and other useful behavior. There's the Goodharting, right? If so, what is second-level Goodharting?
How much of the question about relevance of IQ relates to the 'Whole Package' Question, the people who are palpably bright and have high levels of energy are rare enough, that you get people who are smart and feel that they are owed something due to that intelligence, sort of a lazy or entitled smart, so on aggregate the downsides of grouping together the entitled smart and the smart who get things done induces a higher failure rate than you would want to deal with. As a manager having a sense of the reliability of a hire can be more important than the quality. For certain roles you definitely want someone who does a 80% quality job but does it all the time vs someone who 50% of the time knocks it out of the park, and 50% drops the ball, and I feel this happens more often with the very intelligent who may not be perfectly calibrated. So maybe the overvaluing of intelligence is not directly related to the value of intelligence but the fact that when it isn't part of the whole package you can get divergent results.
Great book review. I'm in the middle of it myself and found myself cringing at how I would feel if I were asked these questions or in these ways many times.
I've interviewed ~low hundreds of people over the past 10 years, mostly for straight out of undergrad level jobs in finance where there is a premium on problem solving.
I used to ask a "google" type question but phased them out as I found the same things as the authors (I was probably the last person on that train by 2014 anyway). However, one of the questions I asked (I made it up myself, it wasn't one of the famous ones) needed as an input the population of the world, and boy was that enlightening.
You would be absolutely shocked the variance in estimates for the world population by people holding undergrad degrees in finance in the US. Over time I figured out that whether they knew the world population was a much better indicator than anything else in the question.
I still usually find an excuse to ask people I interview what they think the population of the world is.
I think you're right about the clunkiness of the intelligence-to-political-success comparison. IQ is obviously good for solving problems, and there are indeed problems in politics - or you could consider "how best to be elected" as the problem to fix. But I think the reason that "the highest IQ person" doesn't always win is that who gets elected depends way more on the makeup of the electorate/country/events. Which sort of works into a potential Cowen-style subtext (maybe explicit, I haven't read the book) of maybe the key to getting better candidates (both types) lies in improving yourself/your company.
I'm (somewhat) joking, but what do you think the 'Straussian reading' is of the book?
It is interesting, I get the feeling that the authors are not very good interviewers, and that you are a bit negative on the book. Which is odd because you said the opposite, I think.
Do you think it is possible they manage to get good talent (which seems true) but for very different reasons than they think? I have at least one guess for why Cowan might, but I don’t know anything about the other guy.
This seems to broadly agree with Joel Splotsky, who siad you want to hire for two traits:
1. Smart
2. Gets things done
> ...at some point you risk crossing from Goodhart’s Law problems to 2nd level Goodhart’s Law problems, where you are effectively optimizing a metric that was originally predicting who would be able to successfully game the original metric, and so on.
>You absolutely want extreme forms of ambition and self-improvement, but in a sufficiently broken and hyper-competitive world this starts to select against caring about anything else, especially if those around you are running forms of meta-Goodhart and punishing caring about anything else.
Could someone help me understand the second-level Goodharting? You want to hire someone who will be more productive than other applicants. To predict this, you measure the ambition they displayed before and during the interview(s). Expecting this, the applicants tend to optimize for displaying ambition. This comes at the expense of productivity, and other useful behavior. There's the Goodharting, right? If so, what is second-level Goodharting?
I presume the spelling of “But you can prey they don’t alter it any further” was deliberate at least on the part of your subconscious.
“What Did You Like to Do as a Child?” is a good question because it differentiates high agency kids.
High agency kids get around the bossing.
How much of the question about relevance of IQ relates to the 'Whole Package' Question, the people who are palpably bright and have high levels of energy are rare enough, that you get people who are smart and feel that they are owed something due to that intelligence, sort of a lazy or entitled smart, so on aggregate the downsides of grouping together the entitled smart and the smart who get things done induces a higher failure rate than you would want to deal with. As a manager having a sense of the reliability of a hire can be more important than the quality. For certain roles you definitely want someone who does a 80% quality job but does it all the time vs someone who 50% of the time knocks it out of the park, and 50% drops the ball, and I feel this happens more often with the very intelligent who may not be perfectly calibrated. So maybe the overvaluing of intelligence is not directly related to the value of intelligence but the fact that when it isn't part of the whole package you can get divergent results.
Great book review. I'm in the middle of it myself and found myself cringing at how I would feel if I were asked these questions or in these ways many times.
I've interviewed ~low hundreds of people over the past 10 years, mostly for straight out of undergrad level jobs in finance where there is a premium on problem solving.
I used to ask a "google" type question but phased them out as I found the same things as the authors (I was probably the last person on that train by 2014 anyway). However, one of the questions I asked (I made it up myself, it wasn't one of the famous ones) needed as an input the population of the world, and boy was that enlightening.
You would be absolutely shocked the variance in estimates for the world population by people holding undergrad degrees in finance in the US. Over time I figured out that whether they knew the world population was a much better indicator than anything else in the question.
I still usually find an excuse to ask people I interview what they think the population of the world is.