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Comment by aspaceman | Hacker News Reader

How do you find good psych people? Showing my bias but it’s a genuine question. I remember in school all the psych and social psych folks being total jackoffs in blowoff classes.

How do you find people you can take seriously? Who don’t just quote psychology today and act like it’s insight? Like I know the field is professional and has skilled professionals - but how do you find them?

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Well, first you put out a job ad. Then because the psych people are so numerous, you'll be inundated with resumes. Since you don't know what to really look for, you decide that an AI from some company will help out with that. So you use an AI to hire people to get rid of the AI, except in the case where you hire people to get rid of the AI, because you don't know how to hire those people. ;)

So how do you find the right psych person to monitor the psych hiring AI?

I actually built an AI to do that for you

Who's gonna monitor that AI?

It made a strangely compelling argument that it would be fine if it forked off a subprocess to monitor itself.

But it also has to fork off a subprocess to hire that subprocess from a pool of randomly generated subprocesses

For hiring and assessment design look for people with at least Master degrees in Industrial Organizational psychology. PhD isn’t necessary because it’s an applied field and there aren’t many applied PhDs so work experience is more important. Most start out in public sector which is much more rigorous in their interviewing and defining roles than the private sector is. SDSU and SFSU have great programs in CA and their professors can connect you to their alumni networks. SIOP is the professional organization. IOPredict, Biddle, and RocketHire are some consulting firms.

You don't hire right out of university, but middle-to-senior people who have established themselves in academia.

That makes sense - thank you.

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