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| Friday, May 6, 2005 |
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Making a market 
Reminder
| | Since WNYC is still a radio station, you can get it on a radio (on 820am), if you live inside the red line here in the day or here at night (when the power is 1/10 that of the day signal). Unfortunately for those in the "outlying" suburbs, WNYC pushes nearly all its signal right at the boroughs from the 3-tower transmitter site it shares with WMCA, on the tidal flats where the New Jersey Turnpike meets the Hackensack River. |
| | That bit of Old Radio Hacker digression aside, Dean tells me WNYC people are "passionate in their resolve that all three entities are equal slices of the WNYC pie." The third slice is WNYC/93.9 FM. |
| | Anyway, knowing Larry's work, it's sure to be an excellent program. |
Archy hiring
| | IQ distributions are a bell curve: there are very few people at the low (retarded) end of intelligence, and there are very few at the high (genius) end of intelligence. Most of us are bunched in the middle. |
| | The distribution is much the same as a distribution of humans' heights: Tom Cruise is below average in height and Yao Ming is above average. (But Tom Cruise is closer to the average than Ming.) |
| | Wrong. I've been 5'9 the whole time my IQ has been measured everywhere from very smart to very dumb. |
| | Intelligence is complicated, conditional and hard to measure. The belief that people have "an IQ," however, comes easy. Too easy. |
| | A friend of mine, a Ph.D. with specialties in psychology and statistics, once sat on a plane next to an older woman who had achieved a great deal — and spoke proudly of her five grown children, who were all achievers on their own, holding advanced degrees and honored positions in their professions. The woman credited their success to home schooling. |
| | My friend challenged her on that, saying that heredity must also have something to do with their success. "Yes," the woman replied. "It would if they hadn't all been adopted." |
| | The unwelcome point I've been making here, and that John Taylor Gatto has been making for much longer, is that most people are born smart and that we use theh likes of IQ tests to pound populations of uniquely gifted individuals into bell curves. |
| | IQ is a head trip. There's something misleading, even delusional, about it. |
| | No doubt those who score well are smart. But average or low IQ scores are often meaningless, except to the degree that they fortify our belief that intelligence is a fixed value, like height or weight, and as easy to measure. The whole culture we've built around IQ tests serves to legitimize a creepy form of elitism. Worse, it substantiates our need to treat individuals always as members of populations. As typicalities. Nowhere is this more apparent, and obsolete, than in corporate org charts. Yes, hierachies are useful. But so are human beings that like working, and advancing, in companies that value their unique gifts. |
| | Here's Dave Friedman again: |
| | The trick, of course, is that those that propose we end corproate hierarchies, such as the open-source movement advocates, conveniently ignore that corporations exist to collectivize human labor (whether manual or intellectual), and corporations need to be managed in order to avoid a devolution into chaos. |
| | Searls describes a utopian vision, in which academic pedigrees, and related qualifications and certifications are rightly consigned to the anachronistic times from which they first sprouted. But he offers no real alternative that a corporation can use in its hiring. A company's first interest, after all, is that the work be done. In order for the work to be done, one who can do the work must be hired. Companies waste billions hiring the wrong person, then removing them, and installing another person in his place. Companies, well aware of the high costs incurred in hiring someone who either cannot do the job well, or who does not fit into the culture, do everything they can to mitigate those risks. |
| | While Searls is probably correct that IQ should be an irrelevant consideration in companies' hiring practices, such filters persist primarily because no better alternatives are available, and companies would be remiss in not trying to adduce who is qualified to do a certain job, and who is not. In the absence of other filtering criteria, Searls' argument is merely a utopian one. It's a good argument, but it is still utopian. |
| | Second, I'm not consigning academic degrees and pedigreed qualifications to "anachronistic times." Or to anything. Those are terrific honors, and useful to have. They are also beside the point. (Several points, actually.) What I wrote, and Gatto writes, isn't about them. It's about those the old system missed or squashed, and that will find fresh advantages in a flat new world that rewards the growth and practice of intellegence, regardless of whether or not it shows up in grades, SAT scores or IQ tests. |
| | Third, the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of freely available services that make possible what we're doing here (e.g. the RSS feed of a Technorati search that automatically brought Dave Friedman's post to my attention), are flat-out utopian — Not in their aspirations, but in their achievments. Hell, look at Wikipedia. Pretty freaking amazing, if you ask me. Go back fifteen years and imagine the Internet we have today: something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Can you name the big, hierarchical company that made all that happen? Can you name the big, hierarchical companies behind HTML, HTTP, SMTP, POP, BIND, XML, or RSS? How about new ones sprouting like weeds... attention.xml, for example? Some helped, sure. But we live in a world now where a guy like Steve Gillmor — a journalist, fergoshsake — can call for a standard, enlist smart technical help (qualified by their good work, not by IQ scores nobody knows or cares about), and push it out into the marketplace. |
| | As for alternatives to IQ tests for selecting employees, how about this advice, provided by one of the best bosses I ever had: Recruit for the position, but hire for the person. |
| | By the way, back when I got out of college, I was spared boring jobs at two insurance companies by flunking IQ tests. One was Aetna. That was administered right at the employment agency. No waiting. Impressive. I forget the name fo the other one, but I remember the setting vividly. It was in Newark. Nice offices, friendly people. The guy who interviewed me told the employment agency something like, "I was so impressed by the interview. He seemed real smart, and he knew an awful lot of stuff. But then when we got the IQ test back we found out he was really dumb." |
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