There’s a wrinkle here that I think changes the model pretty drastically: people vary widely in how readily they pick up skills. The immediate implication is that selecting on skills is selecting on a mix of age, teachability, and alignment between their past studies and the skillset you’re testing. Counterintuitively, this means that a test which is narrowly focused on the exact skillset you need will do worse at testing for teachability, so if most of what you need is ultimately going to come from future training and study, then the more broad the skillset tested, the better.
Nice point. I wanted to note that the converse is also true and seems like an example of Berkson’s Paradox. If you only see individuals who passed the test, it will look like teachability is anti-correlated with the other two factors even though this may purely be a result of the selection process.
This may seem pedantic but the point I’m making is that it’s equally important not to update in the other direction and assume less alignment between past experience and current skillset is better, since it may not be once you correct for this effect.
There’s a wrinkle here that I think changes the model pretty drastically: people vary widely in how readily they pick up skills. The immediate implication is that selecting on skills is selecting on a mix of age, teachability, and alignment between their past studies and the skillset you’re testing. Counterintuitively, this means that a test which is narrowly focused on the exact skillset you need will do worse at testing for teachability, so if most of what you need is ultimately going to come from future training and study, then the more broad the skillset tested, the better.
Strongly agree with this. Good explanation, too.
Nice point. I wanted to note that the converse is also true and seems like an example of Berkson’s Paradox. If you only see individuals who passed the test, it will look like teachability is anti-correlated with the other two factors even though this may purely be a result of the selection process.
This may seem pedantic but the point I’m making is that it’s equally important not to update in the other direction and assume less alignment between past experience and current skillset is better, since it may not be once you correct for this effect.