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Comment by ible | Hacker News Reader

I think Gladwell has a good point that trying to do a job is probably the best predictor of who will be good at it, and as a general principle moving that point up, via apprenticeships, internships, coop programs, and so on would probably be useful.

What troubles me is he seems to say that because people do a bad job of objectively identifying predictors of future success, that those predictors simply don't exist, or at least aren't strong enough to be useful. Did the "exhaustive survey" of law graduates he mentioned really find no correlations between something that could be measured before a career starts and eventual success at that career? Perhaps there are no good predictors in various fields, but I think I'd like to see some much stronger evidence before I buy that.

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You're being skeptical for the wrong side. We humans have a long, inglorious history of inventing objective metrics that absolutely fail to be useful at predicting the things we want to predict. From the IQ tests to the NHL combine, we're traditionally quite awful at inventing predictive tests of performance.

Which is to say: if you're being intellectually honest, you should be far more skeptical that a test does what it claims to do, than you should be of the opposite argument.

We should be skeptical that any particular metric does what it claims to do, especially ones which are ad-hoc or based on intuition instead of evidence. I'm not suggesting that Gladwell is wrong about any of the examples he gave being 'mismatches', or that there are many of them, and exposing the misuse of metrics is certainly valuable. However, he seems to go further, suggesting that we can't find good predictors at all, which is a claim which I think deserves just as much skepticism. I doubt he would seriously make such a claim, and it is probably just an artifact of an early talk which won't be present in his book, but I have plenty of skepticism to go around, so I'm perfectly happy to deploy it wherever it is warranted at all.

I don't think he implied that. He just said that many of the metrics we use are wrong. He didn't say those metrics don't exist at all.

> From the IQ tests

IQ tests actually do a pretty good job.

http://iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

Assuming that linked chart is accurate (which I don't automatically grant), pointing out that the average IQ for a janitor is lower than the average IQ for a doctor isn't the same thing as predicting someone's success as a doctor based on their IQ. There's a lot of overlap between those ranges.

NFL Combine.

It's a self selecting population so a lot of statistics ideas need to be tossed out. If you test random 5 year old people with IQ's under 80 are unlikely to become successful doctors / chemists etc. If you look at the IQ of people graduating from Medical School it's hard to correlate IQ's with job success because you are looking at a population that passed a lot of tests to get to that point. If you look at the median pay of Harvard Graduates its well above that of the average Collage graduate but it's also taken from the high end of the High School talent pool.

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