A step toward systems that can assess competence using neurological data
wsj.com
wsj.com
That being said, I was born with a condition which leaves the sections of my brain loosely coupled. Usually this leads to dyslexia, schizophrenia, retardation, etc.
Luckily, the mutation that runs in my family is not the kind that lowers your IQ (it increases it, with a ~30% schizophrenia chance).
Because of that, I assume this scan would detect me having low skills. When I’m reality I’ve always excelled (as has my whole family). My only symptom is I don’t read linearly (kinda bounce all over the page).
I hope this doesn’t become a thing, else it’s kind of like judging job fitness based on genetic markers (I.e. race)
It's useful in that it's another way to find companies you don't want to work for. The whiteboard interview being another signal.
On the other hand there is one very paradoxical risk. Consider fields where people work to marginalize the magnitude or relevance of inherent differences between people. Imagine you're hiring for a basketball team and think people are mostly about equal and any differences can be made up with training and effort. What are you going to do? Simply hire all the tallest people! And the same would be true in any field where individual exceptionalism is not emphasized. It's quite a peculiar notion that focusing on 'blank slate' equality would be what would lead to Gattaca, but I can find no flaws in the logic.
From there, I'm guessing you can maybe find something on Google. It's an active area that's still being explored too. From ancedotal evidence we do have schizophrenia run in the family, and we also regularly break 130 on IQ tests - so take it for what you will
"Seventeen surgeons and 13 medical students participated in this study." According to Table S1 they were classified as:
- 8 expert, mean age 35, 700 laparoscopic procedures in average
- 9 novice surgeons, mean age 31, 60 laparoscopic procedures in average
- 7 trainees and 5 controls, medical school year 1-4, 0 laparoscopic procedures.
The article has 8 authors.
the tech they have measures brain activity in different regions. great. the article mentions in experienced personnel there is less activity which would indicate conscious planning and more activity which would indicate doing. or maybe it's backwards. it doesn't really matter. what it's really saying is that people who are more experienced are more efficient at performing a task on a neurological basis, which is measurable.
but the efficiency of a brain circuit at performing a task is irrespective of whether that task turns out correctly or incorrectly. you can learn how to do things incorrectly. your brain's efficiency for performing a task in a certain way increases the more you do things that way, regardless of whether the outcome is what is desired.
so, here's the thought experiment: we have one master surgeon who is known for getting great patient outcomes via consistently meticulous, premeditated, and intentional application of tradecraft, and another surgeon who is awful, having killed half of their patients. the awful surgeon is very experienced -- just as experienced as the master surgeon, in fact.
the master's perfectionism leads the master to see small flaws in each of their executions, driving them to do better next time via careful applications of past lessons. in contrast, the awful surgeon thinks they're pretty good, but that the patients they've had who died were more or less beyond helping or perhaps that another member of the surgical team did something wrong. the awful surgeon never really learns from mistakes, and spends most operations thinking about dinner rather than thinking about how to help the patient.
who does the brain scan say is more skilled?
on the basis of the science described in the article, it's the awful surgeon every time. the awful surgeon doesn't put in as much conscious effort, leaving them to rely on the incorrect patterns that they've learned and never engaged with, which is what the scan will see. in contrast, the master surgeon's attentiveness will be perceived as inefficiency and lack of skill, even if the corresponding motor regions are as efficient as the awful surgeon's.
to put it differently, this isn't a "we can do more technology and get around this" so much as a fundamental drawback of the tech itself. you'd need to introduce other data to even start to make a case for the scans as corresponding to skill, and even then there are plenty of other issues.
I don't know if this using machine learning but one might see the whole machine learning field as resulting in a rush to correlation-based "cargo-cults" of various sorts (see "racist AI" and etc).
(wsj paywall articles are annoying)
This has not been generalized to cognitive skills beyond, "the subject is inactive"
For anything team based, skill, beyond basic competence and trainability, doesn’t matter very much. A team full of mediocre team players is going to perform better than a team of selfish rockstars. Implication: focus on soft skills, organization, facilitation rather than picking the best people with brain scans.
Job aids are a really significant factor - see the checklist manifesto. It doesn’t matter how good the surgeon is, they’re still human. Things like checklists, automated code analysis/testing/fuzzing, best practice review processes, pair programming, and agile can make or break projects regardless of the skills of those involved.
Another implication: as a manager, you have a lot of control over how your team performs. When you say that you need to hire Johnny because he has the best brain scan, you’re totally ignoring the fact that Sally can totally learn to do the work.
If you survive, we encourage you to pay attention for future openings. Thanks!
We wish you luck, but our HMO has given us a healthy workplace credit for pre-identifying your condition and we are not allowed to consider you for future positions.
There can be metrics that are targets which still remain good metrics. For example, in many machine learning competitions, the submissions optimize a known, given metric; but the test data is not known. Therefore, it is still a good metric.
I agree with the sentiment in this case, though.
I am not an expert. But I'm inclined to believe that a brain scan taking while performing programming tasks would mostly measure how good of a touch-typist you are.
While phrenology ended up really far into, or even outside the fringes of science, one could argue that it was "based" on a true fact. A zero volume brain is going to be less useful than a brain with non zero volume. Then some rather brutal extrapolations happened, and the results were both terrible, and disastrous.
I fully believe the risk for a similar repeat of history is very real. Not because science fails us, but because society still posses many of its old weaknesses as clearly shown during the last year or so. As the performance improves, it is becoming more and more likely that we'll have to outlaw functional brain scanning for any non-medical purposes, or it will be somehow co-opted by actors wanting money or power at any price.
I don't think I'm either malignant, or creative enough to figure out how, but someone will, because the tech will become endlessly abusable when it becomes - or seems to be - sofisticated enough.
I've heard girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.