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Comment by dlu | Hacker News Reader

Jessica Livingston is giving a killer talk. I love her point of view as a non-technical partner at YC and her huge role as a judge of character

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Damnit. I'm having a hard time playing the live stream.

Exactly. I think a lot of us nerds underestimate how vital of a skill that is, to be able to evaluate personal skills of a person. Someone could be a great programmer, but if he can't work well with others he'll be more of a detriment to the team rather than being helpful.

There's a lot of interesting research on "judging character". I particularly recall reading in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Kahneman) that subjective judgement was consistently worse than even relatively arbitrary objective judgements. I believe this study was conducted in army recruitment and so obviously may not be universal. Very thought-provoking notetheless.

EDIT: ... that's not to cast any aspersions on any particular people involved here, I'm just trying to make a general point that "intuition" or "judgment" may not actually be as good as we think they are.

The vibe I get is that it isn't character they're really trying to judge. They're really trying to calculate whether a person is palatable to downstream players. I think there's likely some market risk associated with various personalities and they need to address it somehow even if there's no quantitative approach.

A wild experiment would be to test their judgment system by planting a few charming serial killers in their "character judgment" sample pool. My hypothesis is that the charming serial killers would pass at a higher rate.

I really liked her take on her judging interactions, especially during the technical conversations. I think having an outside (even slightly outside) perspective is incredibly useful

They have written books on the subject:

http://guykawasaki.com/you_have_to_lov/

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