Let’s apply this framework to the Searching for Outliers essay. I suppose the lesson there is that, for sufficiently heavy-tailed outcomes (where, say, some people are a 1000x better fit than the average), selective methods (i.e. searching for outliers) dominate over corrective methods (e.g. better training). And then it talks about how to do selection well.
Yes. This is, indeed, a special case of a general point. The post says:
Corrective methods—apply such measures as will make the people in your system alter their behavior, to conform to relevant optimality criteria.
But of course this comes with a critical assumption: that “optimal behavior” is something that the people in your system are capable of doing. And while that may be a reasonable assumption in many cases, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it will hold in all cases.
For example, no amount of on-the-job training, social approval or disapproval, or even literal torture, will avail you if you hire me to play in your symphony orchestra! (Because I’m tone deaf.) Neither will corrective methods help if you sign Stephen Hawking for the New York Knicks.
These are relatively trivial example, of course—but the principle generalizes better than most people care to think.
For one thing, many sorts of complex behaviors have cognitive requirements; it does not suffice to simply “decide” to do good work, or to play effectively, or to rule effectively—so motivation-oriented corrective methods are inherently limited in their effectiveness. Skill-oriented corrective methods, meanwhile, suffer from the problem that many of them just don’t work in the general case, or themselves have ability requirements.
Furthermore, there is a weaker but even more widely applicable form of this point: that corrective methods may vary in effectiveness depending on the innate abilities of the people involved.
People are different; they vary in potential. To assume that anyone, even granting the most sincere and fervent wish to change, may become as they must be in order that they may play a role in your system, is to set yourself up for disappointment and failure. But recognizing this, you must again select. (On the other hand, it may be an easier selection task… or it may not be.)
And, of course—as you suggest—in cases where there is a sufficiently large gradient of ability, corrective methods may be essentially useless without first applying very strong selection.
And I suppose a counter-example to the outlier essay would be a fast food chain hiring tons of people for some seasonal increase in demand: here the idea is that workers are presumed to be replacable.
Now selection is much less useful due to the light-tailed skill distribution and high rates of churn. Instead, the organisation is designed such that work is split into simple and clearly defined roles (structural method) which anyone can be easily trained in (corrective method).
Let’s apply this framework to the Searching for Outliers essay. I suppose the lesson there is that, for sufficiently heavy-tailed outcomes (where, say, some people are a 1000x better fit than the average), selective methods (i.e. searching for outliers) dominate over corrective methods (e.g. better training). And then it talks about how to do selection well.
Yes. This is, indeed, a special case of a general point. The post says:
But of course this comes with a critical assumption: that “optimal behavior” is something that the people in your system are capable of doing. And while that may be a reasonable assumption in many cases, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it will hold in all cases.
For example, no amount of on-the-job training, social approval or disapproval, or even literal torture, will avail you if you hire me to play in your symphony orchestra! (Because I’m tone deaf.) Neither will corrective methods help if you sign Stephen Hawking for the New York Knicks.
These are relatively trivial example, of course—but the principle generalizes better than most people care to think.
For one thing, many sorts of complex behaviors have cognitive requirements; it does not suffice to simply “decide” to do good work, or to play effectively, or to rule effectively—so motivation-oriented corrective methods are inherently limited in their effectiveness. Skill-oriented corrective methods, meanwhile, suffer from the problem that many of them just don’t work in the general case, or themselves have ability requirements.
Furthermore, there is a weaker but even more widely applicable form of this point: that corrective methods may vary in effectiveness depending on the innate abilities of the people involved.
All of this is really an elaboration of this part of my comment on the problems of corrective methods:
And, of course—as you suggest—in cases where there is a sufficiently large gradient of ability, corrective methods may be essentially useless without first applying very strong selection.
And I suppose a counter-example to the outlier essay would be a fast food chain hiring tons of people for some seasonal increase in demand: here the idea is that workers are presumed to be replacable.
Now selection is much less useful due to the light-tailed skill distribution and high rates of churn. Instead, the organisation is designed such that work is split into simple and clearly defined roles (structural method) which anyone can be easily trained in (corrective method).