Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Money quote(s):
Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When you judge people that way, you tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.
What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next.
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History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children’s success directly. It’s a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.
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The obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better. If the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study the way people beat them and try to plug the holes. You can use the cram schools to show you where most of the holes are.
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By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could probably make them more airtight. But what a long fight it would be. Especially when the institutions administering the tests don’t really want them to be airtight.
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Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.
Perfectly in keeping with what quadropole said in response to me over at Dr. Helen’s place:
I’ve done a fair bit of hiring. Hiring sucks. You are trying to filter through a large pool of applicants, most of whom are not appropriate, and filtering through them by hand is miserable.
So folks do a lot of things to try to improve the ‘hit rate’ on appropriate candidates. Requiring college degrees is one of them. If 10% of the folks you interview with a Masters in CS are even vaguely appropriate for the job you are interviewing for, and only 1% of those without it are, you tell your HR department to only bring you MSCS or equivalent candidates.
It’s a trade off on costs, on the one hand, you might miss out on a *really* good candidate without the credential you list, on the other, you save *enormous* time, energy, and frustration on screening applicants.
I think the essay linked makes it intuitively obvious what is wrong with quad’s logic, but I’ll walk through it anyway.
What’s being advocated is like a lossy image compression algorithm. Reality would be getting a skilled, qualified applicant; the status quo is an image of reality, getting a credentialed applicant. It’s not identical to reality, nor is it intended to be — it’s only supposed to be a close approximation. Something to help save this time.
Trouble is: How close is the image to reality? “Within tolerable limits” is the presumed answer to that. But no one ever checks it. Managers tell their guys to go do something, and as the guy walks out of the office the managers say Where does HR find these people??? Does the frustration find its way back to HR? No, it does not. So the system operates within a vacuum. The deviation from reality is presumed to be within tolerable limits, and is further presumed to be remaining static, not rising.
This is all blind faith. No one tests it.
I have exactly two reasons to be biased against this, one selfish, the other far more practical. First of all, I’m not educated. So I’m the first guy booted out of the process when the hunt goes on for these credentials…from “cram schools”…which are set up to preserve wealth in families…wealth the Freeberg family has never even come close to having.
The second reason, which is far more socially responsible, and boy I can list you some names of people who will give anything not to be able to see the logic in this —
— fields like mine don’t function well this way. People in my line of work have always been “escalation points”; they solve problems that others have tried to solve, and haven’t been able to solve. So in any one of a number of jobs I’ve held for the last few years, if you get hold of some sardine-guy who can be relied upon to do things exactly the same way as any other fish in the can, it really isn’t going to do you an awful lot of good. If the problem could be solved using “typical” methods, it would’ve been solved awhile ago. No, we’re the S.W.A.T. team, here to take out the problem the police couldn’t touch.
The passing-of-tests does something worse than leaving that whole talent area untouched. It credentials in opposition to it. That’s because a test doesn’t necessarily test outcome, it tests methods. It unifies the way people work on things. This is one step forward and three steps back, because you can’t solve a problem by thinking things out the same way as the other guy who tried to solve the problem, and wasn’t able to.
Or, for that matter, like the guy who made the problem.
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…“cram schools”…which are set up to preserve wealth in families.
Or perhaps to acquire wealth in families that don’t have it and see it as a potential game-changer. (Is that term past its sell-by date yet?)
Anyway, I know the feeling. I have accumulated fewer classroom hours than almost anyone I know. And while I’m not job-hunting these days, there have been times when I thought that the Buy-A-Diploma types with their fabricated MBAs and such had actually justified themselves, by furnishing credentials exactly as bogus as the perceived need for them.
- CGHill | 01/01/2009 @ 16:54It’s always dangerous to fasten any kind of system to the egotistical sensitivities of bureuacrats. Suddenly, that system, suspiciously, loses any & all flaws and stays that way. It becomes unique in our flawed cosmos as a nugget of perfection…then other systems are constructed that are dependent on this perfection.
What’s really disastrous is that the scrutiny to which these perfect systems are exposed, decreases even as the expense involved in suddenly realizing they aren’t perfect, increases. In this case that expense would be the financial commitment involved in hiring a bad egg. It just keeps going up and up. Meanwhile, we’re bitching about unemployment.
What do you do when it becomes expensive for you to do something the wrong way, and it becomes incrementally impossible to try to make sure you’ll be doing it the right way…?
- mkfreeberg | 01/01/2009 @ 17:09