Academia is another example of negative selection.
This doesn’t seem like a fair generalization. At the undergraduate level, selection procedures are (and are rightly) negative. At the graduate level, things are very different across different fields and departments, but on the whole I think graduate admissions is a mix: people are weeded out until you have a small group of acceptable candidates, and then the exceptional ones are pulled out on the basis of their specific work. At the tenure level, you get a similar mix but there it’s very heavily in the direction of positive selection. Almost all of what a tenure committee is thinking about is the quality of your work (there are unfortunate exceptions to this, no doubt). Journal and book publishing are to an even greater extent a positive selection system, though again there are some unfortunate exceptions (like law).
So on the contrary, I think academia is largely a positive selection system. You’re description of the steps of academic success is accurate, but doesn’t provide evidence in the direction of positive or negative selection systems.
And one should also remember that positive selection systems tend to be enormously costly. With something like undergraduate admissions to sizable universities, positive selection is practically impossibile. Graduate admissions, where positive selection is at least present in the process (though it is still largely negative) requires months of work from a substantial portion of the whole department. Tenure hearings are also months in the making, but there you’re evaluating a single person.
This doesn’t seem like a fair generalization. At the undergraduate level, selection procedures are (and are rightly) negative. At the graduate level, things are very different across different fields and departments, but on the whole I think graduate admissions is a mix: people are weeded out until you have a small group of acceptable candidates, and then the exceptional ones are pulled out on the basis of their specific work. At the tenure level, you get a similar mix but there it’s very heavily in the direction of positive selection. Almost all of what a tenure committee is thinking about is the quality of your work (there are unfortunate exceptions to this, no doubt). Journal and book publishing are to an even greater extent a positive selection system, though again there are some unfortunate exceptions (like law).
So on the contrary, I think academia is largely a positive selection system. You’re description of the steps of academic success is accurate, but doesn’t provide evidence in the direction of positive or negative selection systems.
And one should also remember that positive selection systems tend to be enormously costly. With something like undergraduate admissions to sizable universities, positive selection is practically impossibile. Graduate admissions, where positive selection is at least present in the process (though it is still largely negative) requires months of work from a substantial portion of the whole department. Tenure hearings are also months in the making, but there you’re evaluating a single person.
So don’t knock negative selection too hard.