Thomas Edison's 146 question interview for prospective employees
openculture.com
openculture.com
1. What countries bound France?
2. What city and country produce the finest china?
...
145. What is the heaviest kind of wood?
146. What is the lightest wood?
http://www.sharecsv.com/s/1a4ebb9acec12392376164b7e770b54f/E...
I'm surprised it doesn't have an instant answer for the heaviest and lightest woods. Some of its answers don't quite get the question either. What are violin strings made of? Well we can be sure it's not cat guts. How is glucose made? We're only told the make up of it.
Full list of Questions converted to Google queries: http://pastebin.com/wsr7UrGK I'm not going to run the full list because I don't want Google thinking I'm a robot for the rest of the day (Captcha will trigger for my network).
Classically, the high e string is made of catgut, roughly cattle's gut.
Maybe this is true for the 95-99% most common of conditions. Doctors can be shockingly bad at diagnosing anything they don't see on a daily basis. (rare-ish conditions, unusual presentations, or anything discovered since they studied medicine)
Google search is probably very inefficient for this kind of thing, but specialised search engines based on bayesian networks or similar might get you some leads on what to test for a lot faster than going from doctor to doctor in the hope that one of them might have an idea that pans out.
Can you explain why you believe this? I'm having a very difficult time understanding where you're coming from.
No. Watson is a family of algorithms IBM uses. Not even a single machine, it's more of a brand name. And some of the impressive feats like Jeopardy are more like gimmicks than actual advanced AI.
We've of course had massive improvements in machine learning in the 43 years since then. I think the practice of human doctors could be massively improved by having them stop spending time on things that machines are much better at. Hopefully things like IBMs Watson can make a difference in this regard.
Strangely, huh, the AMA seems to have prevented that undermining of their guild.
Granted, I couldn't find much info about the extent of the AMA's power.
An intelligent database that can cross link a million conditions and varieties with voice-recognized list of identified symptoms?
I just spent two months in three separate hospitals for family members. Diagnosis can be vastly increased in quality and sped up with proper databases and voice recognition.
How about you walk into a waiting room and for the hour you waste there get diagnosed by a intelligent computer expert system. Then when the doc gets around to you they do a separate diagnosis.
Those two will resolve to a set of probability-based diagnoses and automatic recommendations for further tests and questions. It can access a state-of-the-art managed database with references to relevant research and a place to enter commentary and questions.
Let us all hope that you are wrong, because the system clearly isn't working.
I devoutly hope that you are not, upon contemplation, equate a well-versedness in general knowledge with mindless memorization. Is emergent behaviour of neural networks really that alien a concept? Is it possible to believe, in all earnestness, that factoids such as these remain isolated and inactive in your memory until recalled?
These questions aren't there to test your ability to learn atomic facts without rhyme or reason. These questions, pitiful as they may seem, try to probe the breadth of your mental landscape.
I don't see any flaw in the theory. When you code for example, if you don't know in advance about several idioms, data structures, algorithms etc that's (most of the time) not something that you will make up later by researching and changing your program. It's simply something that will take you down a narrower path and constrain your programming.
I'm not talking about knowing the details of algorithm X, or how to implement it from memory. But if you don't know it's existence even, it wont be an algorithm you'll consider when you write your program.
Take the numerous distance calculations. Great circle? Theoretical tunnel thru the earth? Traditional maritime shipping routes or aircraft navigation routes which take into account prevailing winds and international boundaries etc? Oh so you produced a number which happens to be correct, here is a slide rule and the geographic coordinates I used, you can demonstrate spherical geometry to me now.
Perhaps some ageism was involved although hard to tell if it was enforced to eliminate old people or young people, such as "deepest depth of the ocean". Data points that have stabilized in recent decades were not stable a century ago. How deep you think the ocean is depends a lot on when you learned how deep the ocean is, at least back then.
Another thought is that there are a couple of different types of memorization going on here. For example no one memorizes a list of bordering states/countries; answers to those questions would indicate the strength of photographic memory.
Finding answers to questions like these was difficult pre-Internet.
You'd only have a chance of getting them right if you read very widely all the time, and remembered most of what you read.
If I was competing with Edison and I genuinely thought his employees were able to ace that test, I'd be seriously worried, trivia or no.
In reality they probably couldn't. Only a very tiny percentage of the population is going to have the wide interests and the eidetic recall needed to ace this list.
incidentally, I think Edison's test is trying to measure curiosity
Edison's formula: Invention is going to come from trying 99 dead ends to find the 1% that works.
He is measuring raw ability to recall. He explains it here: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9906E4D813...
Great documentary can be found here: ;) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/edison/
Finding a long-lasting bulb filament was, to Edison, basically an implementation detail. But he knew it wouldn't catch on without a full system to power it that was mechanically and economically sustainable.
It's analogous to Apple's approach to a smartphone. The iPhone succeeded not just because it was a good piece of hardware running a good OS, but because of the systems that supported it. When it launched, iTunes was running on a ton of computers already thanks to the iPod, so that's how Apple synced personal data and updated the OS.
And then when they released the SDK, they again took a systems approach--not just a collection of APIs to build apps, but a whole networked and managed online store for qualifying, distributing, and updating the apps.
"I do not think I can pass the interview and be hired and after seeing it, I don't think I want to."
I doubt such geniuses were digging through job ads to apply to Edison's company in the first place. If they were in need of jobs, they would probably be recruited heavily directly from university departments.
So yeah. This ad probably wasn't meant for Einstein. Which gives us no reason to think that "it's a bad ad because even Einstein couldn't solve it".
In Isaacson's biography there's mention of Einstein's visit to Boston, where he defends the value of a college education and he 'fails' one of the Edison-test questions about the speed of sound ('I do not carry such information in my mind, since it is readily available in books.').
https://books.google.com/books?id=rYQ3AQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA181&ots...
It is difficult for people living today to understand what information was like even 25 years ago. We absolutely look at information differently now because our storage, retrieval, and processing methods have advanced so fast that to look back a hundred years and try to understand their thinking we might as well be looking at the stone age. Try it sometime. Swear off the Internet for a week and try to be productive in your job.
As to whether Einstein would have done well at this test, Einstein would have made a lousy business executive, especially by Edison's metric as Einstein was notoriously forgetful.
This interesting stuff to me personally. My great-grandfather worked directly for Edison. At one point he managed a brick-making factory. He died long before I came along but I've always wondered what it was like to work closely with Edison.
147. Would you be OK with getting electrocuted with AC to show it's danger?
148. Would you be willing to hand over your inventions?
149. Would you be OK with verbal non-committing payment contracts?
None of them are HOW and WHY questions.
Which, arguably, can give a better insight of a person's talent or intellect or his world view.
134. Who discovered the Pacific Ocean?
Balboa.
And what of the people living by it for millennia?
(From http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/take-the-intelligence-test-th...)
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/take-the-intelligence-test-th...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...
"I'm sorry, we're looking for original ideas. Next applicant!"
Scientific or technological questions would be more appropriate. Sure, there are a few, but knowing the name of who invented something doesn't mean you understand it...