yucca

В принципе это неумение тоже можно считать логической ошибкой. Не обязательно поставить себя на место другого эмоционально, можно чисто логически.

From:

verevkin.livejournal.com

Прочел пост. А чем этот человек сильно отличается от интервьюера? Тоже математик, тоже с PhD.

From:

yakov-a-jerkov.livejournal.com

Совершенно с Вами согласен. Более того, я как раз собирался написать, что эта heated discussion по сути та же дискуссия об оставленном в машине ребенке.

From:

Это испорченный телефон. Человек, у которого в оригинальном посте minor in math (то есть брал несколько продвинутых математических курсов, и никакого PhD) в процессе обсуждения превратился в "молодого математика".

From:

verevkin.livejournal.com

А, тогда понятно :)

From:

lena-shagina.livejournal.com

"Продвинутых" -- это громко сказано.

From:

Относительно продвинутых :)

From:

angerona.livejournal.com

это опять же "я похудел, а он нет, значит он просто слабак и жрет много", "я не в долгах, а он в долгах -- значит он дурак и транжира," "я могу процетировать шекспира, а он не может -- значит он неуч."

From:

The original post is about hiring someone to do a job.

Now, no one in his right mind wants to hire a liar of an incompetent (except government employees and MBAs in large corporations, of course - they're not spending their own money, so their incentives are to hire incompetents who would be loyal (because they know they are incompetent and thus are easily replaceable) and so won't be trying to get ahead at the expense of the hiring manager.

And only a total naif would believe people don't lie on their resumes. They do, especially Indians (I have yet to see a resume from anybody of this nationality - and I've seen hundreds of them - which wasn't padded in one way or another). Typically people avoid outright lies which are easy to verify (large companies usually hire screening outfits which check all the formal points), so if somebody did nothing useful at his previous job in a department which did "X" he'll write something like "participated in X" or "contributed to X".

The only way to check, of course, is to ask for details. And if a person is clueless about basic points of that "X", he's a liar. Nobody asks to remember all details - and if somebody forgets something the normal routine to give more and more clues and see if this rings a bell. Besides, the outcome of an interview never hinges on a single answer - it's the overall picture which matters.

Same goes for education.

This has nothing to do with proving who's smarter. In fact, a smart manager tries to hire people at least as smart as he is - if he's not an idiot, he knows that they'll increase his team's performance, and, thus, his own chances for advancement.

BTW, I re-read his post trying to find the alleged admission of emotional need to prove who's on top, and failed to locate any. (He does discuss the fact that people are unequal, but this is purely rational discussion). Would you care to point where he's admitting that asking questions on interview is a form of emotional self-gratification?

Now, in all this righteous anger about employers actually checking whom they hire - do I detect some fear? Are you afraid to be seen as incompetent?

Too bad employment laws prohibit asking about political views. I'd avoid hiring anybody who's espousing collectivist ideas - for he obviously is of low opinion about himself (simply because he identifies with a mass) and nobody knows somebody better than the person himself.

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman

From:

Конечно. При этом кому же захочется услышать "ты сам виноват", когда они в свою очередь пожалуются, что не хватает денег или еще чего-нибудь.

From:

You're not talking about my post. I have no objections to interviewer asking any question he wants. In fact, he said he wanted to hire this guy, so this is irrelevant. I referred to people with good memory sincerely not understanding in comments how others can forget something they haven't used for a while.

I wonder if you've ever tried to manage a team where everyone is of very high opinion about himself and hates collectivist ideas. Not an easy job, I imagine.

From:

how others can forget something they haven't used for a while

You can forget names of things. You cannot forget things you understood (unless you had some brain damage). It's a different kind of memory.

I wonder if you've ever tried to manage a team where everyone is of very high opinion about himself and hates collectivist ideas. Not an easy job, I imagine.

As a matter of fact, I did (I started several companies, and is a major shareholder in some which survived). It was a serious pleasure - all my managerial overhead was about five minutes per day, leaving the rest for doing actual job. This seriously contrasts with my managerial experience in large companies - which involved inordinate amounts of efforts spent on corporate bullshit and politics.

You see, a person who understands that he is not entitled for anything and knows his worth is not prone to footballing his work to others, and does take a pride in what he, personally, did, and not in belonging to the collective. He also knows that as long as he is delivering on his promises, he won't get any corporate bullshit from me - I don't care what he wears, don't care when he comes and goes, and don't care about his "people skills" (if he's not a sales rep, of course).

There's a strong correlation between individualism and competence - and an individualist is not a recluse (as collectivists are prone to misrepresent it), but understands that working together allows to be more productive. What an individualist in workplace won't do is to cover up incompetence and laziness of others - which makes manager's job much easier.

Also, individualists tend to be open about problems - they aren't afraid to lose face and to embarras their co-workers by talking about touchy issues - which makes it possible to spot the problems early and do something to fix them. A typical position of a person of individualist mindset is "you hired me for my professional knowledge and skills, here's my professional opinion, take it if you want your money worth", not the usual corporate "we need to come to agreement on that, blah-blah-blah, and before we're on the same page, we're not going to recommend anything, blah-blah-blah".

And, of course, individualists understand loyalty based on respect, not the "loyalty" based on fear. I don't remember if I ever had to raise voice to get people to do things I want done (there's one exception of a person who tends to fall into "output only" mode which can only be interrupted by loud noise - but once interrupted he becomes quite agreeable, and we're old friends:)

You probably don't understand how refreshing and pleasant it is to be around people who are not afraid to tell you that you're a fool if you're doing something foolish - even if you're the boss. Who know that their obligations do not go beyond of what's promised - and so do not go around with a chip on their shoulders expecting others to do their work and thinking for them and whining when they don't. It's always easier to negotiate and work with somebody who has explicit self-interest - instead of hidden agendas and emotional needs.

From:

There is, however, a funny detail that you fail to acknowledge: the interviewee wasn't at all lying, but the interviewer was clueless about the educational system he was dealing with. The interviewee honestly said: "I have a minor in math, I took a linear algebra class." Based on this the interviewee thought that he was dealing with a mathematician, who had specialized in linear algebra: obviously, nothing could have been further away from the reality the interviewee was trying to convey (no American college grad would have ever thought of such an interpretation). The interviewee reasonably believed, that (this being the United States) the interviewer was familiar with the standard meaning of the word "minor", as applied to a liberal arts degree. The interviewer was not.

There was an obvious miscommunication - but there wasn't any fishy intent on anyone's part. If anything, it was the interviewer, not the interviewee, who failed to demonstrate knowledge that could have been reasonably expected from him by a neutral observer. Not that I am blaming the interviewer - we all sometimes tend to overestimate our integration into a society and culture we are not very well familiar with. But, hilariously enough, the result was, mostly, an illustration of this latter point - and it beats my mind, how can anyone continue discussing this story as if it were about some "fall in educational standards", or whatever.

From:

I meant, "the interviewer thought", sorry.

From:

You describe simply a team of highly rational people. Nobody will argue against its advantages. The problem is, people who create all the corporate bullshit and politics are normally even more individualistic and thinking very highly of their abilities, even after spectacular failures. Individualism and rationality are not correlated.

From:

In fact, ivan_ghandi was complaining not about the interviewee's intellect, but about the quality of his education, so I don't see any contradiction here. He may know very well what the minor means, but disapprove this system.

From:

Nah. He's compared the guy to a "matmekh" graduate, "specializing" in linear algebra. These are absolutely different beasts; nobody, who knows the system, would seriously think of such a comparison, it is so preposterous. He was evidently under the impression that he was comparing "notionally similar" educations: "a good one" and a "bad one". Whereas what he was comparing was a professional degree w/ a non-trivial research orientation on one hand, w/ a math minor on the other, for god's sake. In the context it would have made more sense, if he claimed that "people are unashamed to acknowledge they don't know the basics" having discovered the guy doesn't know who St. Augustine was :) (I am only slightly tongue-in-cheek here).

From:

angerona.livejournal.com

There's a recent post, which is not public, so I can't link it here, which does say almost verbatim "we saved X while earning X+$15k, and those other people say they can't live without debts!"

From:

angerona.livejournal.com

Потому что в твоем случае ты не виноват, у тебя обстоятельства.

From:

Collectivism is abhorrent to rational people - because it is, fundamentally, a bizzare belief that a bunch of normal people taken as a group somehow start being superhumanly moral and thus are allowed to hunt down and kill those who don't want to be a part of their collective. A collectivist also holds (often without realizing that) the equally bizzare belief that people must be equal - and thus insists on equalizing people against their own will.

Irrational people (i.e. those who think with their reptilian parts of brain instead of neocortex) are attracted to collectivism simply because it justifies and validates their base instincts of envy, submission to power, resentment towards those who are superior, and aggression towards those who are different.

People who create corporate bullshit are usually sociopaths, not individualists[*] - and this bullshit is sustained by the hordes of MBAs who are both incapable of rational thought and brainwashed in the collectivist tradition during their education. In fact, judging by the on-going support of communist crap by the American business "elite", they cannot stand individualists - correctly perceiving them as the only group actually dangerous to them. So they funded Karl Marx, and keep funding and supporting his followers (including the current POTUS).

Sociopathy is ideology-free; a sociopath doesn't care about society, and thus holds no normative beliefs about it. The "pragmatism" is just another name for sociopathy.

[*] Conflating individualism and sociopathy is a staple of collectivist propaganda - exploiting obvious superficial aversion of both to being a part of a herd. Fundamentals are quite different, though: individualism is all about rights of individual people - and an opposite of sociopathy which generally involves total disregard to other people's rights. (Collectivists are willing to grant people rights as long as they belong to their own group - all others are fair game).

From:

Don't know about educational standards, but in the high-tech nobody (I mean - nobody, never) includes a transcript of courses taken in the resume. People list their shools and degrees, and that's it.

If somebody lists some specific field, it is automatically presumed to indicate that this is his field of expertise.

So if this is a miscommunication, then the guilty party is the applciant - who didn't bother to learn how to write resumes before applying. Which is just as telling as a resume full of misspelt words, or printed without regard to formatting. Laxity in planning and execution is a serious disqualification for a job in software engineering.

From:

So, are you implying that any applicant to a CS job in the US should expect to be interviewed by a foreigner, unfamiliar with the basic meaning of common English words, as standardly used in reference to the American educational system, and should write his CV accordingly? Perhaps, cv's should be submitted in Russian as a matter of course? Because no US college grad would have made the inferences from the cv that the original poster made (and from the response to questions: linear algebra was only mentioned in a response to a question, and was clearly mentioned to imply that the applicant was not much of a mathematician: he never took analysis). As far as any American would have been concerned, the applicant was absolutely clear and honest (minors are standardly listed on cvs and mean exactly what they mean) - and the interviewer was obviously clueless about the common meaning of English words (he was unaware of the standard meaning of the word "minor").

I suspect, your argument would fly well in Congress, next time they are discussing the H-1B quotas :)

From:

If somebody lists some specific field, it is automatically presumed to indicate that this is his field of expertise.

There's no such automatic presumption. People routinely list their majors and minors on their resume, simply by way of spelling out their education; no reasonable interviewer assumes that someone claims to be an expert in X just because they list a minor degree in X in the education section of their resume.

From:

"Linear algebra" is normally a course, not a degree. If you have something like that not in transcript, but in CV a reasonable (though somewhat puzzled) person would think that you studied this sub-field in depth (i.e. in this case somebody could be thought as taking advanced courses in linear algebra and adjascent sub-fields, but didn't get the enough courses in other sub-fields to qualify as a mathematican).

Besides, "minor" degree is still a degree (it is always granted in addition to "major" degree), and requires significant number of hours. Normally, it is as much as half hours needed to get the major degree - and you have to pass exams on these courses, just as you would have to do with all major courses. If somebody spent that much academic hours studying linear algebra, he's definitely a qualified expert.

In other words, minor means that you didn't acquire full set of courses needed to qualify for undergrad degree for this particular subject - but it doesn't mean that the courses you took are in any way inferior or requirements are any laxer than these you'd have for the "real" degree.

So, yes, knowledge retention exhibited for minor-degree courses is very well indicative of knowledge retention for major-degree courses, and, yes, it is directly relevant to evaluating the applicant's overall qualifications.

Similarly, when somebody lists hobbies on his resume (it is a common practice, by the way), an interviewer is justified in making a small chat regarding the hobbies and probe if they are real - as a way of assessing applicant's character, even if they are totally irrelevant for the job position.

From:

The CV only listed a minor in math; linear algebra came up when ivan_ghandhi asked the candidate what kind of things they studied as part of that degree.

If somebody spent that much academic hours studying linear algebra, he's definitely a qualified expert.

Uhm, no, that's insane. The candidate didn't spend half a degree studying linear algebra, they just took a course in linear algebra, and offered that as an example of something they'd studied. Nobody spends half a degree studying linear algebra in any undergraduate program in any university. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?

an interviewer is justified in making a small chat regarding the hobbies and probe if they are real

Sure, but academic degrees aren't like hobbies; the standard practice is to list all your degress in the education section of your resume. There's no presumption of being an expert in everything listed there.

From:

The way I understood the original post that the answer included only linear algebra. ivan_ghandi made it quite clear that it puzzled him.

Sure, but academic degrees aren't like hobbies; the standard practice is to list all your degress in the education section of your resume.

The standard practice is to presume that one actually studied on the courses listed in his CV. If you list a course and I find out that you don't know something which is rather fundamental and not complicated at all, the only conclusion I can make that you didn't study, correct?

"Being an expert" is, well, fungible. In this case (if we're talking about a particular case, and not a general principle) the question was about a basic notion. Hardly an expert-level stuff.

From:

ivan_ghandhi showed himself to be clueless on what major/minor degrees are, so I'm not surprised he was puzzled. He basically asked a guy with a minor in math what he studied, and when the guy offered linear algebra as an example (that's the only reasonable reading of ivan_ghandhi's description of the scene), jumped to a conclusion that he "specialized" in it, in the way a matmekh student might specialize in something. "Clueless" is a charitable way to describe the combination of his ignorance and propensity to jump at inane conclusions.

The standard practice is to presume that one actually studied on the courses listed in his CV.

That is correct.

If you list a course and I find out that you don't know something which is rather fundamental and not complicated at all, the only conclusion I can make that you didn't study, correct?

Nope. People forget, including things that are rather fundamental and not complicated at all. In the post you're commenting on, a math Ph.D. describes forgetting what an eigenvector is.

A few years of not using a concept is enough for many people, including some very smart people, to forget it. And yes, that includes concepts that have been thoroughly understood rather than memorized by rote. If you don't understand that, you should work on your understanding, ask a bunch of smart people, etc.

From:

Well, I already stated my position (in your blog) that having a degree and understanding something are different things.

And, no, one doesn't forget things he understood. You cannot forget how to ride a bike, you cannot forget how to swim. In fact, there's quite a few documented cases when people had total retrograde amnesia - but still retained their skills, including their professional skills, - without remembereing anything about their past lives.

Basically, if you forgot something, it wasn't incorporated in the procedural memory - it remained in the episodic or semantic memories, which are subject to cleaning (aka "forgetting") and revision (confabulation, false memories). In fact, these memories can be erased by recalling them while taking a drug which blocks explicit memory re-consolidation.

From:

Beware. I will take a note of this statement :)

From:

Well, I already stated my position (in your blog) that having a degree and understanding something are different things.

That doesn't contradict anything I've said.

And, no, one doesn't forget things he understood.

*sigh*
Yes, one really does sometimes.

I'll try to refrain from attempting some glib psychological analysis of why you find it so important to believe in something so obviously false, so utterly removed from common experience, so downright idiotic, but I won't be discussing this sort of nonsense anymore. If you lack the common sense and life experience to know that people sometimes forget things they'd understood before (I doubt that you do), you'll find plenty of examples in professional literature. You'll have to be intellectually honest enough not to redefine anything contradicting your views as not really understanding, thus avoiding begging the question, but I'm confident you'll manage.

From:

why you find it so important to believe in something so obviously false

Oh, sure. You know the difference between me and you? I only write about subjects I studied in depth.

From:

Nah, that doesn't look like the difference between me and you.

From:

That's your right to think whatever you want, can't blame you for that. See how easy is to get you down to arguing at the kindergarden level.

Now, please go learn some neurophysiology. When you know the difference between hyppocampus and basal ganglia, we may revisit the topic.

From:

Sorry, only one of us is arguing at the kindergarden level.

we may revisit the topic

No, we really won't. It's reasonable to conclude by now that there's nothing useful or interesting you can say on the subject.

From:

Oh, well. Here we are. The erudite espousing willful ignorance.

If you had a rational argument to debunk what I say you would use it. Now if you care to actually learn something you may want to listen.

The problem (for your contention) is that the fact that procedural and explicit memories are vastly different and handled by different parts of the brain is well established and generally accepted in both neurophysiology and cognitive science - as is the fact that explicit memories are reincorporated (or not) every time they are retrieved, which is the mechanism for forgetting (see, for example, Han, et al. "Selective erasure of a fear memory", Science, 2009, 323 (5920), 1492-1496). The explicit memory reincorporation can be blocked with propanolol, a non-selective beta-blocker and epinephrine and serotonin agonist.

There's no similar mechanism for procedural memories - which get less accessible when not used, but are never lost and can be recovered quickly after a short excercise period which merely serves to prime neurons in the corresponding area. (In fact, there's ample evidence that procedural learning causes significant structural changes in the brain, such as measureable increase in size of specific regions - for example, studying music increases size of right precentral gyrus and right Heschl's gyrus).

To put it bluntly - if you really learn something, it changes anatomy of the brain. This change is permanent, and is not reversible. The resulting difference in real-world task performance is drastic - like the difference between just doing what's right, and trying to figure out what's right.

The erasure of procedural memory is usually the result of general metabolic deterioration of the brain with age - or pathology of traumatic, infectuous, ischemic, etc, origin.

And, yes, please learn the difference between hyppocampus and basal ganglia (and cerebellum). These are directly relevant to the topic.

From:

Oh, well. Here we are. The erudite espousing willful ignorance.

No, wrong again.

you may want to listen

Why? For you to infodump a bunch of completely irrelevant basic info on procedural memory? Since you didn't present any evidence that understanding of say mathematical concepts must be stored in procedural memory, and taking that on faith is as idiotic as any of your other claims in this thread, why did I just waste time reading through this? On second thought, don't answer that.

Yeah, if understanding eigenvalues was like learning to swim, you'd have had a case, kind of. Since it's blindingly obvious that in general it isn't, and the only way you could possibly pretend otherwise is by redefining "understanding" to insist it must always be stored in procedural memory, there's nothing to talk about. I said a few comments ago, "You'll have to be intellectually honest enough not to redefine anything contradicting your views as not really understanding, thus avoiding begging the question, but I'm confident you'll manage"; it didn't take you long to prove my optimism misguided.

From:

ivan-ghandhi.livejournal.com

А можно немножко цинизма? Я знаю диссертацию (кандидат физматнаук), состоявшую в решении системы из четырёх линейных диффуров.

Что я хочу сказать? Слово PhD, к сожалению, не значит ничего.

From: