"fetishization of IQ"

That's epidemic in the medical profession. Hospitals have difficulties herding doctors. Like cats, doctors are very intelligent and insist on doing things their way. Locally, the ER is staffed by slave labor as part of a requirement for the doctors using the hospital facilities. CME (continuing medical education) and MoC (maintenance of certification) is standard practice in medicine as everyone expects doctors and practitioners to be up to date on the latest technology, procedures, and creative billing practices.

You also don't carry malpractice insurance. If you were doing engineering where the general public might be at risk, you would need to become a registered professional engineer in California.

That was too long ago for me to remember if that was his personality or simply to instill fear and thus cooperation in the entering student horde. Of course, nobody believe that there would be 50% attrition in the first year, and nobody expected that they would be the losers. Somewhere between cruelty and coddling is a workable middle ground. I suspect this instructor was experienced enough to find it.

Agreed. To err is human and I sometimes need reassurance that I'm still human.

Incidentally, it is possible to buy a diploma (suitable for framing and wallpaper) solely with one's IQ number: Sigh...

Anybody who lets the personnel department anywhere near the process of hiri ng technically qualified people is setting their organisation up for failur e.

Personnel departments haven't got a clue about technical skills, and haven' t got a clue how little they know.

A Cambridge Instruments, the personnel department selected applicants for i nterview. I had to do some of the interviews, and most of the candidates sh ould never have been invited for interview. Of course, one of the best peop le we ever hired had his CV rejected three times by the personnel departmen t, and if the guys wife hadn't played badminton with the wife of one of our engineers, the guys CV would never have got to our chief engineer, who did get the guy in for interview. He interviewed really well, and performed ev en better until some American firm head-hunted him wiith an offer of US cit izenship for him and his family - he was from mainland China, and ahd come to the UK to do a Ph.D.

Smart people and prima donnas want to change things, which is always a pain in the posterior. Smart people want to change things to make them work bet ter, which is a good idea. Prima donnas want to change things because it ad vertises the fact that they are the prima donna, which is almost always a t otal waste of time.

Smart people aren't too worried if any particular change doesn't go through - they'll think up another way of creating the same result.

Prima donna's throw tantrums, which tend to be diagnostic for the type.

My point is that it was in a teaching hospital. He has a platoon of assistants working on the assembly line. Much of the work is done by PAs (he must have at least a dozen on his staff) and I'm sure a good part of it is done by interns, too. But he's there if something starts going South.

That's wrong, on several levels.

The Binet-Simon tests was first devised in France in 1905 for picking out hard-to-educate kids when universal education was first introduced, and teachers could no long just chuck them out.

Terman - at Stanford - adapted the test for use in the USA around 1916, and the the US Defence Department made extensive use of it for sorting out WW1 recruits.

There are certainly bogus universities around, designed to suck in the money students can borrow, without delivering much in the way of training.

Trump University comes to mind.

Somebody from the libertarian Cato Institute talking about the blind spots of the left has to score a fairly high for irony.

There are lots of different kinds of smart. IQ tests try to lump them all into a single number, which can be better than nothing, if you haven't got the time to be more analytic.

You've obviously never looked at the mobility numbers (the number of people moving into and out of the various groups over their lifetime. Lefties don't care about facts, though.

...and the unknown can? You can't know that and neither does the employer.

For *very* different reasons than you state.

Your statement would be a lot better it it started " My experience is that ...."

Some personnel departments are very knowledgeable, some are not.

Dan

-people/485618/

sure

It's not just about IQ - more the willingness of scientist to swallow resul ts that they are comfortable with when they should have looked harder for c onfounds

Herrnstein was dead by the time "The Bell Curve" came out, and Charles Murr ay turns out to be somebody who writes stuff that flatters rich Republicans .

dismantled the sloppy thinking, and incompetent statistical analysis that m ade the "The Bell Curve" attractive to rich Republicans.

It was a brilliant hatchet job, almost wasted on the crap it dismantled so comprehensively.

Lots of largely independent Turing machines, programmed to do a wide range of different things. The machine which pays attention to reproduction, the machine which looks for status, and the machine that keeps you fed all have different goals. Then there's the face recognition machine (which can be s ub-divided),and the speech recognition machine (ditto) which provide input for the goal directed machines.

The issue isn't whether they're qualified, or not, rather do you want to keep a friend. Many things can go wrong in an employment situation and many (most) are bad for friendships.

If you have two people looking for a job and one has stuck it out to get a degree and the other sat in mommy's basement for four years playing Mortal Kombat, which do you choose?

Not in an at-will state (as they all should be).

So many things can go wrong. So what? Do you really think that not hiring a qualified friend is going to strengthen the friendship?

Dan

My point is exactly the opposite (I thought that was obvious). When things go wrong and there are a *lot* of things that can go wrong, friends often stop being friends. It's kinda like borrowing money from a friend (or one of my power tools ;-).

Hiring (or borrowing from) family is even a worse idea.

Sorry, missed a negative. Yes, it's certainly better than having to fire one, or even worse.

The facts about intergenerational mobility in the US are perfectly clear

It's not as high as it is in some other countries - Scandinavia does a lot better, and a lot of Northern Europe - though not the UK - also does better.

Krw doesn't know the facts, so his claim that "lefties" don't care about them is somewhat comic.

ven't got a clue how little they know.

at ...."

There may be knowledgeable personnel departments, but I've yet to run into one.

One of my friends worked in the University of Melbourne appointments board for years, and had a lot of contact with personnel departments around Melbo urne - his comment was that most the people he had to deal with were less t han knowledgeable. One of them was appreciably brighter than the rest, and made a quite a bit of money out of running courses for the others. Even he wasn't all that bright.

I've been around a bit, and I can be pretty sure that knowledgeable personn el departments are rare. Cambridge Instruments did a have a competent perso nnel manager for a while - she didn't know much, but did at least have some idea of the extent of her ignorance. I'm fairly sure that she was the then managing director's mistress, and she left not long after he did.

The guy who owned the company wanted to do things that that particular mana ging director did not like, so he left. When the consequences of the owner' s bad ideas meant - somewhat later - that a number of people had to be made redundant, that personnel manager didn't like the way the people were bein g selected for redundancy, and she resigned.

For the three serious operations I've paid attention to, that's been the case. Good, just fine.

Back in the 50s my father an operation for otosclerosis which failed, leaving him permanently deaf in that ear. The surgeon wanted to do the other ear, but fortunately my mother said no.

They later found out this was, in this country, a pioneering operation, and that the surgeon was wanting to make a name for himself.

I also remember a TV interview in the early 90s by Dr Phil Hammond with the head of the GMC. Hammond (also known as Private Eye's "MD") mentioned that while training he had watched an operation where the surgeon said "and if you need do re-attach the urethra...", swift movement with the scalpel, "...this is how you do it".

The head of the GMC spluttered something to the effect of "I'm sure that didn't happen, you must be mistaken". Hammond's response was a simple direct "No, I'm not, I was there, I watched it happen".

There are some interesting graphs of spending vs. test scores to the effect that, since the onset of 'progressive' education, we're spending nearly 3x per kid (inflation-adjusted), for zero difference.

Ahh, here's an example:

So, education is not under-funded. It's over-funded, with the excess being soaked up by the usual government-supported suspects.

Chalk up another 'win' for big-government and the NEA.

Cheers, James Arthur

Again, with that number of training "opportunities" there is little reason to invent problems. They'll come to you.

When I lived in Vermont, wondering why our property taxes were so astronomical, I looked up the public school teacher stats. They claimed a state-wide average of 13 students per classroom teacher. That's pretty good (we often had 25-30). On the next page there were stats for "non-classroom teachers", one for every two classroom teachers. And on another, "teaching assistants", again, one for every two classroom teachers. The upshot was that there were not 13 students per "teacher", rather *6*. That doesn't include administration. Public schools in Vermont are not great. Some are OK (some are atrocious).

I beg to differ. I've worked for and with a few tiny companies that didn't have a personnel or human resources department. Instead of working on product, engineering and management were spending their time doing the job of what a personnel department normally does. It wasn't all filling boxes in the organizational chart. There were the multitude of government reports that required filing. Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity burned some time. Dealing with the various benefit dispensaries and insurance companies was tune consuming. Membership in industry trade and lobbying organizations required filing reports. Oh yes, my favorite was making sure that anyone leaving the company was properly terminated so that any disagreement didn't land in front of the local labor board. I almost forgot that almost any personality conflict in a company usually ends up in human resources if it can't be resolved by management.

If all that the personnel department did was hire new employees, I might agree with your assessment. However, that's not the case unless the department is huge and one person is assigned solely to that task.

Have you ever sifted through 3,000 resumes (paper, email, or online)? I helped a friend, lacked the help of a personnel department, do that.

Yeah, I know. One such personnel department hired me, which was probably a major mistake. They were clueless, but so was I.

Nope. Smart people know what can be changed, as distinguished from what will explode when touched. It's the prima donnas that want to change everything in sight, just to attract attention. Smart people know that attracting attention is very much like posing as a target and therefore tend to be invisible. Prima donnas make good targets.

Yep. Circumventing authority is an excellent past time for smart people.

Tantrums have their place. For example, if a project needs additional funding, begging for moeny in a calm and diplomatic manner is often a futile exercise. When everything else fails, a tantrum often gets the necessary attention and funding.

I know of a company where the VP of engineering is a functional prima donna. It doesn't matter what is invented or designed by his engineering group, he demands that he gets the credit and basks in the resultant glory. He has plenty of irate employees demanding their fair share of the credit for their work. However, they climb back into their cubicles when they discover that the VP is directly responsible for obtaining contracts, obtaining funding, keeping the Board of Misdirectors happy, and getting the attention of Wall Street. You can't do all those acting like the office furniture. It takes a prima donna.