I think the Null Hypothesis for interviewing is as strong as it is for educational interventions.
When I was in graduate school in the early 90s, my Organizational Behavior course (taught by Bob Sutton of "No Asshole Rule" fame) covered the research on interviewing in great depth. After grinding through all the studies showing that unstructured interviews don't work very well in terms of predicting job performance, Sutton asked, "How many of you would hire or be hired without such an interview?" All the hands stayed down except mine and two others (in a class of roughly 50).
So I learned _two_ lessons: (1) unstructured interviews don't work and (2) people have trouble accepting that. I was also taking a class from Amos Tversky at the time and had internalized his famous saying that, "The human mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions." So I was pretty convinced that people are just built to fool themselves into thinking that interviews work. Also, as Robin Hanson might say, "Interviews aren't actually about evaluation, they're about status."
Then, when I started my existing company, we faced the problem of evaluating a lot of people in a short period of time. I revisited the literature. The definitive paper seemed to be:
The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings”
Adding an unstructured interview to a measure of general mental ability increased validity by 0.04. Simply counting the number of years of work experience increased it by 0.03. Reference checks by 0.06. All of these from a base of 0.51 for the GMA measure alone. From a time efficiency perspective, interviews seem pretty useless.
Now, you may be thinking, "But what if super smart guys like Tyler ask really special questions?" Well, Google used to ask really special interview questions and people seem to think that Googlers are super smart. In fact, I live a few miles from Google's headquarters and occasionally get invited to interesting statistics or machine learning talks. Twice, I've met PhDs who work in the HR department and study various aspects of personnel performance. They take this topic very seriously and scientifically.
So what did Google learn from trying to ask really special questions? They reported several years ago that the approach didn't work. They now ask much more typical procedural questions:
But you might think the type of talent Cowen and Gross are looking for are different. Well, sure. This time is always different. Perhaps they have a well designed study showing their techniques work? I haven't actually read their book... yet. But given the excerpts that Tyler is promoting, my prior is very low. I expect a lot of anecdotes about successful examples of talent they picked and how they did it. However, if they have well designed studies on their particular approach, I'd love the pointer so I can check them out now rather than whenever I get to the book.
As it happens, I'm actually in the same business as Gross. I have almost certainly made at least as many investments as he. Very likely more. My firm has made 1400 since I co founded it in 2012, about 2/3 of those with me as the primary contact (meaning that I'm the one primarily evaluating the company). This year alone, I'll be the primary contact on perhaps 150. YC is one of the few organizations in the world that has done more investments than my firm, but Gross was only there a few years and they have waaay more people than we do.
We spend essentially zero time trying to learn about founder talent through interviews. I mean, we know when they founded the company, so we just look at how much demonstrable progress they've made since then. That tells us far more about their true capability to make more progress in the near term than any of the techniques Tyler has promoted from his book so far. And if you think people can systematically predict anything performance-related about startups farther out than the near term, I'd refer you to Taleb. I'm having trouble thinking of a better example of "Extremistan" than startups!
I like Tyler. I've been reading MR since reading blogs became a thing. I've read most, if not all of his general audience books so far. I think Fast Grants is great and, in fact, our investment process has a lot of similarities. But I am very skeptical of this approach to screening for talent. It seems like exactly the type of thing your brain would think it was good at when in fact it wasn't. And the smarter you are, the better your brain would be at producing justifications.
I'd like to push back on "being ambitious is like playing poker" and how linking business success to poker. Poker is a zero-sum game. If you win, someone else loses. Business success doesn't have to be that way. An entrepreneur can succeed without someone else being a loser. For example, Edison's success benefited many but were there any proportionate losers?
The word "ambition" can mean so many different things that used by itself it loses its meaning. Arnold, you have written about the satisfaction you derive from having grandchildren. For you I suspect that forms a part of your own "ambition, and something that you would not give up for the ambition that Thiel means.
> it comes down to the right people don’t have the right jobs for human progress
Indeed. Some of those people are, to use an already old quote, inventing better ways to make people click on ads, but I suspect that most of them are applying their talents to completely unproductive pursuits. As this screencap (https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1525202309252141056) jokingly puts it:
>> My brother literally listens to classical music and plays roller coaster tycoon all day
> Dudes like this used to run entire colonial governments 200 years ago
It's a deplorable and inexcusable - in the long term, quite possibly fatal - waste of human capital (note that such people have little chance in today's marriage market). The man who figures out how to mobilize and organize this capital will be King, or whatever the title is going to be called.
On Gross's LikedIn questions, "'what are things you are trying to hide?'" on your LinkedIn profile. It's a rather mean spirited question. It puts honest people on the spot. An honest person can't say she has nothing to hide. Surely, every person hides some things from public profiles. The interrogation >shames< a person into parting with a secret--perhaps an embarrassing one--to Gross's apparent delight. He says he "loves asking" the question. A quick-witted person would realize that Gross's question is really rather dumb. Dumb in the sense that a LinkIn profile isn't mean as a tell-all autobiography. Rather, it is a short, concise statement relevant to one's job or professional characterotics. LinkedIn is a job and professional network--not TikTok. Secrets and dancing grab eyeballs on TikTok, but aren't relevant on LinkedIn. Lots of stuff--public or private--get left out of a LinkedIn profile. No one wants to read you conception to now autobiography on LinkedIn. Yeah, folk dancing gets left because it's not really relevant to professional capabilities or productivity.
‘Another interesting one that I learned from a friend of mine is, do you have any good conspiracy theories that you’re liking lately? ’
Conspiracy theories aren’t what they used to be. As the last two years have shown, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s fact, Govt will introduce vaccine mandates, vaccine passports will be required to live a normal life, CoVid vaccines don’t stop disease or transmission but do cause deaths and injuries… for example.
Competitive ambition is just one application of ambition, but it is the one most celebrated in western culture. Laziness is a great social problem. Society doesn't necessarily need more Michael Jordans or Jeff Bezos. We need more people who appreciate the principle of self-determination and who are willing to strive to obtain for themselves a better life.
" I doubt that I am ambitious enough." That's almost certainly true, now.
Your Fantasy Intellectuals Team is a great idea, but needs to get better to scale, and in particular needs self-scoring and self-rating so that there is not "Kling referee".
It was and remains, so far, not tested in a form that could be scalable. But you've somehow lost drive to improve it - tho it remains in your mind. (Mine too!)
Your blogging has gotten better - nearly daily allows us to hang out here and pontificate. I now think blog comments are often a lot like Twitter tweets, but better (intellectually), tho far worse in getting read by masses of people.
I really enjoy the Monday night talks (Tues 2am for me), but they're genuinely not nearly as special as FIT. Nor is your Network University realistic in many specifics, altho it has lots of great ideas.
Why not try some brainstorm FIT zoom meeting? You could invite your commenters AND those who were owners last year, in April or May, and get ideas for improvement.
Preferably one meeting for just brainstorming - coming up with ideas, NO evaluation of those ideas. In an IRL meeting, it could be done with Post-It notes; there are virtual whiteboards that allow it (don't remember the name); not sure it's so much better than all sending ideas in on a chat - with all getting the chat file after the 30-70 minutes of talking (& joking? Nahh, we're too serious).
Success is not ambition as much as willingness to focus on one tough thing, and give up all the other interesting, fun, and less tough things. Certainly for me.
“If anyone other than Tyler asked me that in an interview, my reaction would be “WTF?”
I have a similar reaction to a lot of the specific interview questions Tyler proposes. Many of them are interesting but am I really going to feel comfortable entertaining a right-wing inflected conspiracy theory in a job interview for a Silicon Valley tech company where 90+% of donations are going to democratic candidates?
Maybe the idea is that by asking the question you signal that you’re not the type of person to cancel an interviewee for a non-pc opinion. Still, I don’t think I would trust it in most cases.
It’s been 50 years. Now try Argentine tango. Same dances (and music) repeated at every dance (milonga) worldwide. Not easy, but a good way to meet girls. PS. I’d wait until the Covid risk subsides before dancing tango cheek-to-cheek.
I actually saw a Romeo and Juliet based play on this exact premise. They get a happy ending, but then they turn out to have a bad relationship once the honeymoon is over. However, one gets in trouble and during the long adventure of rescuing each other they develop an actual bond based on shared experience and sacrifice that leads to a deeper and more robust love.
I question the whole Cowen/Gross premise.
I think the Null Hypothesis for interviewing is as strong as it is for educational interventions.
When I was in graduate school in the early 90s, my Organizational Behavior course (taught by Bob Sutton of "No Asshole Rule" fame) covered the research on interviewing in great depth. After grinding through all the studies showing that unstructured interviews don't work very well in terms of predicting job performance, Sutton asked, "How many of you would hire or be hired without such an interview?" All the hands stayed down except mine and two others (in a class of roughly 50).
So I learned _two_ lessons: (1) unstructured interviews don't work and (2) people have trouble accepting that. I was also taking a class from Amos Tversky at the time and had internalized his famous saying that, "The human mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions." So I was pretty convinced that people are just built to fool themselves into thinking that interviews work. Also, as Robin Hanson might say, "Interviews aren't actually about evaluation, they're about status."
Then, when I started my existing company, we faced the problem of evaluating a lot of people in a short period of time. I revisited the literature. The definitive paper seemed to be:
The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.172.1733&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Adding an unstructured interview to a measure of general mental ability increased validity by 0.04. Simply counting the number of years of work experience increased it by 0.03. Reference checks by 0.06. All of these from a base of 0.51 for the GMA measure alone. From a time efficiency perspective, interviews seem pretty useless.
Now, you may be thinking, "But what if super smart guys like Tyler ask really special questions?" Well, Google used to ask really special interview questions and people seem to think that Googlers are super smart. In fact, I live a few miles from Google's headquarters and occasionally get invited to interesting statistics or machine learning talks. Twice, I've met PhDs who work in the HR department and study various aspects of personnel performance. They take this topic very seriously and scientifically.
So what did Google learn from trying to ask really special questions? They reported several years ago that the approach didn't work. They now ask much more typical procedural questions:
https://qz.com/378228/google-is-over-those-ridiculous-brainteasers-but-some-employees-didnt-get-the-memo/
But you might think the type of talent Cowen and Gross are looking for are different. Well, sure. This time is always different. Perhaps they have a well designed study showing their techniques work? I haven't actually read their book... yet. But given the excerpts that Tyler is promoting, my prior is very low. I expect a lot of anecdotes about successful examples of talent they picked and how they did it. However, if they have well designed studies on their particular approach, I'd love the pointer so I can check them out now rather than whenever I get to the book.
As it happens, I'm actually in the same business as Gross. I have almost certainly made at least as many investments as he. Very likely more. My firm has made 1400 since I co founded it in 2012, about 2/3 of those with me as the primary contact (meaning that I'm the one primarily evaluating the company). This year alone, I'll be the primary contact on perhaps 150. YC is one of the few organizations in the world that has done more investments than my firm, but Gross was only there a few years and they have waaay more people than we do.
We spend essentially zero time trying to learn about founder talent through interviews. I mean, we know when they founded the company, so we just look at how much demonstrable progress they've made since then. That tells us far more about their true capability to make more progress in the near term than any of the techniques Tyler has promoted from his book so far. And if you think people can systematically predict anything performance-related about startups farther out than the near term, I'd refer you to Taleb. I'm having trouble thinking of a better example of "Extremistan" than startups!
I like Tyler. I've been reading MR since reading blogs became a thing. I've read most, if not all of his general audience books so far. I think Fast Grants is great and, in fact, our investment process has a lot of similarities. But I am very skeptical of this approach to screening for talent. It seems like exactly the type of thing your brain would think it was good at when in fact it wasn't. And the smarter you are, the better your brain would be at producing justifications.
I'd like to push back on "being ambitious is like playing poker" and how linking business success to poker. Poker is a zero-sum game. If you win, someone else loses. Business success doesn't have to be that way. An entrepreneur can succeed without someone else being a loser. For example, Edison's success benefited many but were there any proportionate losers?
The word "ambition" can mean so many different things that used by itself it loses its meaning. Arnold, you have written about the satisfaction you derive from having grandchildren. For you I suspect that forms a part of your own "ambition, and something that you would not give up for the ambition that Thiel means.
> it comes down to the right people don’t have the right jobs for human progress
Indeed. Some of those people are, to use an already old quote, inventing better ways to make people click on ads, but I suspect that most of them are applying their talents to completely unproductive pursuits. As this screencap (https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1525202309252141056) jokingly puts it:
>> My brother literally listens to classical music and plays roller coaster tycoon all day
> Dudes like this used to run entire colonial governments 200 years ago
It's a deplorable and inexcusable - in the long term, quite possibly fatal - waste of human capital (note that such people have little chance in today's marriage market). The man who figures out how to mobilize and organize this capital will be King, or whatever the title is going to be called.
On Gross's LikedIn questions, "'what are things you are trying to hide?'" on your LinkedIn profile. It's a rather mean spirited question. It puts honest people on the spot. An honest person can't say she has nothing to hide. Surely, every person hides some things from public profiles. The interrogation >shames< a person into parting with a secret--perhaps an embarrassing one--to Gross's apparent delight. He says he "loves asking" the question. A quick-witted person would realize that Gross's question is really rather dumb. Dumb in the sense that a LinkIn profile isn't mean as a tell-all autobiography. Rather, it is a short, concise statement relevant to one's job or professional characterotics. LinkedIn is a job and professional network--not TikTok. Secrets and dancing grab eyeballs on TikTok, but aren't relevant on LinkedIn. Lots of stuff--public or private--get left out of a LinkedIn profile. No one wants to read you conception to now autobiography on LinkedIn. Yeah, folk dancing gets left because it's not really relevant to professional capabilities or productivity.
‘Another interesting one that I learned from a friend of mine is, do you have any good conspiracy theories that you’re liking lately? ’
Conspiracy theories aren’t what they used to be. As the last two years have shown, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s fact, Govt will introduce vaccine mandates, vaccine passports will be required to live a normal life, CoVid vaccines don’t stop disease or transmission but do cause deaths and injuries… for example.
Competitive ambition is just one application of ambition, but it is the one most celebrated in western culture. Laziness is a great social problem. Society doesn't necessarily need more Michael Jordans or Jeff Bezos. We need more people who appreciate the principle of self-determination and who are willing to strive to obtain for themselves a better life.
" I doubt that I am ambitious enough." That's almost certainly true, now.
Your Fantasy Intellectuals Team is a great idea, but needs to get better to scale, and in particular needs self-scoring and self-rating so that there is not "Kling referee".
It was and remains, so far, not tested in a form that could be scalable. But you've somehow lost drive to improve it - tho it remains in your mind. (Mine too!)
Your blogging has gotten better - nearly daily allows us to hang out here and pontificate. I now think blog comments are often a lot like Twitter tweets, but better (intellectually), tho far worse in getting read by masses of people.
I really enjoy the Monday night talks (Tues 2am for me), but they're genuinely not nearly as special as FIT. Nor is your Network University realistic in many specifics, altho it has lots of great ideas.
Why not try some brainstorm FIT zoom meeting? You could invite your commenters AND those who were owners last year, in April or May, and get ideas for improvement.
Preferably one meeting for just brainstorming - coming up with ideas, NO evaluation of those ideas. In an IRL meeting, it could be done with Post-It notes; there are virtual whiteboards that allow it (don't remember the name); not sure it's so much better than all sending ideas in on a chat - with all getting the chat file after the 30-70 minutes of talking (& joking? Nahh, we're too serious).
Success is not ambition as much as willingness to focus on one tough thing, and give up all the other interesting, fun, and less tough things. Certainly for me.
“If anyone other than Tyler asked me that in an interview, my reaction would be “WTF?”
I have a similar reaction to a lot of the specific interview questions Tyler proposes. Many of them are interesting but am I really going to feel comfortable entertaining a right-wing inflected conspiracy theory in a job interview for a Silicon Valley tech company where 90+% of donations are going to democratic candidates?
Maybe the idea is that by asking the question you signal that you’re not the type of person to cancel an interviewee for a non-pc opinion. Still, I don’t think I would trust it in most cases.
It’s been 50 years. Now try Argentine tango. Same dances (and music) repeated at every dance (milonga) worldwide. Not easy, but a good way to meet girls. PS. I’d wait until the Covid risk subsides before dancing tango cheek-to-cheek.
A conspiracy is a secret plan by a group, two or more people, to do something unlawful or harmful.
I actually saw a Romeo and Juliet based play on this exact premise. They get a happy ending, but then they turn out to have a bad relationship once the honeymoon is over. However, one gets in trouble and during the long adventure of rescuing each other they develop an actual bond based on shared experience and sacrifice that leads to a deeper and more robust love.