I’ve read this post three times through and I still find it confusing. Perhaps it would be most helpful to say the parts I do understand and agree with, then proceed from there. I agree that the information available to hirers about candidates is relatively small, and that the future in general is complicated and chaotic.
I suppose the root of my confusion is this: won’t a long-term extrapolation of a candidate’s performance just magnify any inaccuracies that the hirer has mistakenly inferred from what they already know about the candidate? Isn’t the most accurate information about the candidate here in the present rather than a low-confidence guess about the future?
It’s also unclear what all the questions in each step are meant to be assisting with. Are you really saying that, based on a candidate’s application and short interview(s), you can make meaningful predictions about questions like “Who, other than Jamie, paid the price for their struggle, and in what way?” or “Where are they moving to? Do they keep in touch?”. From my point of view, trying to generate weighted probabilities for every possible outcome just seems a lot less practical than merely comparing an applicant’s resume and interview directly against another applicant’s.
I completely agree that the risk is trying to invent magical information about the future by inferring from what we know in the present. The reason I find this format helpful (and hoped the reader will too) is that to me it highlights the absurdity of trying to make a prediction based on the limited, currently available information, and as a result I’m more likely to take a rational approach—starting with the base rate (rather than biasing on current information that is unlikely to be all that relevant for the future), making very small corrections based on the information I have (instead of the very bold predictions the people often make) and make uncertainty explicit in the process.
I can see that it’s possible to go through this process making the same mistakes you’d do if you started from the beginning, but I find it harder. If you haven’t yet, give it a try (by using this end-to-beginning process) when you have a low-certainty / high-stakes decision to make, maybe you’ll find that it works for you too.
I’ve read this post three times through and I still find it confusing. Perhaps it would be most helpful to say the parts I do understand and agree with, then proceed from there. I agree that the information available to hirers about candidates is relatively small, and that the future in general is complicated and chaotic.
I suppose the root of my confusion is this: won’t a long-term extrapolation of a candidate’s performance just magnify any inaccuracies that the hirer has mistakenly inferred from what they already know about the candidate? Isn’t the most accurate information about the candidate here in the present rather than a low-confidence guess about the future?
It’s also unclear what all the questions in each step are meant to be assisting with. Are you really saying that, based on a candidate’s application and short interview(s), you can make meaningful predictions about questions like “Who, other than Jamie, paid the price for their struggle, and in what way?” or “Where are they moving to? Do they keep in touch?”. From my point of view, trying to generate weighted probabilities for every possible outcome just seems a lot less practical than merely comparing an applicant’s resume and interview directly against another applicant’s.
Thanks a lot for the helpful feedback!
I completely agree that the risk is trying to invent magical information about the future by inferring from what we know in the present. The reason I find this format helpful (and hoped the reader will too) is that to me it highlights the absurdity of trying to make a prediction based on the limited, currently available information, and as a result I’m more likely to take a rational approach—starting with the base rate (rather than biasing on current information that is unlikely to be all that relevant for the future), making very small corrections based on the information I have (instead of the very bold predictions the people often make) and make uncertainty explicit in the process.
I can see that it’s possible to go through this process making the same mistakes you’d do if you started from the beginning, but I find it harder. If you haven’t yet, give it a try (by using this end-to-beginning process) when you have a low-certainty / high-stakes decision to make, maybe you’ll find that it works for you too.