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Jessica Livingston (2015)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#81

Post by notatoad »

asveikau wrote: post #63
alexpotato wrote: post #37

One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision". During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer an…

I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers. Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evide…

Yeah, this always seems like a truism. If you give people opportunities, they will tend to succeed. If you deny people opportunities, they won’t. So anybody in the position of giving or denying opportunities to people will tend to be “right” most of the time.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#82

Post by renewiltord »

tptacek wrote: post #9
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

I can only imagine this is related to PG‘s recent tweet about how the Wikipedia article on Jessica has “questionable notability” warning due to sexist nonsense.

Anybody in the world can put a notability tag on an article in Wikipedia. The notability tag is properly read as a "this article needs more sources and more claims of notability" call for help, not a "get this article off the site" argument. Livingston will have no trouble maintaining a Wikipedia article; she's had profiles written about her in mainstream sources. A big chunk of complaints about Wikipedia notability…

The typical Wikipedia complainant simply is a talker, not a doer. I have started Wikipedia pages, edited controversial ones (including the Derek Chauvin page), and fixed things very straightforwardly. I would have fixed this one, but someone was faster than me.

My experience with this is quite simple: it is really fucking easy to do all these things but that 1% rule is real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Most people cannot do things. They simply cannot. There's always a reason they can produce: "Oh it'll just get deleted", "oh I don't want to get into a fight", "oh the editors will delete me". You can see this because they cannot provide situations where this happens because they cannot try. They will Google to show "there is some evidence this is happening" and produce some newspaper article where the reporter has not tried it either.

But the reality of the thing is that they cannot do it. The faculty it takes to see a problem and make it not a problem is not available to them. Presumably, at work they are told what to do and they just do it - execution agents incapable of autonomous operation.

Of course pg cannot modify his wife's page. But I see it a lot.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#83

Post by mxstbr »

asveikau wrote: post #63
alexpotato wrote: post #37

One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision". During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer an…

I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers. Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evide…

There are people that can do this, that are "social radars." It's rare, but I've seen one and it's mindblowing to observe. 100% hit rate.

(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#84

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #42
alexpotato wrote: post #37

One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision". During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer an…

Not to be argumentative, but how did someone get hired if 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass"? What's the point of having 7 interviewers if only one of them gets to decide? Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.

At a company I worked at in the past we had a "champions" rule:

1. First, only select few interviewers with a great track-record could be a "champion".

2. If this interviewer was going against the rest of the interview panel, they could choose to be that interviewee's "champion". This means they are essentially saying "I have such a strong conviction that this person will do well that I'll put my professional reputation on the line for them." E.g. this person agreed to be that person's mentor when they started, and if things went south they would carry the burden of additional mentorship or finding the least problematic way to fire that person.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#85

Post by thebigwinning »

alexpotato wrote: post #37

One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision". During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer an…

I can take a wild guess about some traits she never selected.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#86

Post by mywittyname »

spoonjim wrote: post #54
ianmcgowan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be argumentative, but how did someone get hired if 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass"? What's the point of having 7 interviewers if only one of them gets to decide? Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.

She’s probably the most senior one. So she can override anyone but doesn’t always do it.

Or, 7/8 people were "weak no", they heard her argument, then changed their minds to "weak yes."

The whole point of a committee is to reach consensus. I've flipped my beliefs on many candidates before after hearing what other interviewers think. I think most of us understand that interviews aren't exactly the best way to judge a candidate - at least I think that way. So I'm pretty open to forming consensus when I'm "weak" and they are "strong" in opinion (especially if I respect their judgement).

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#87

Post by mywittyname »

gus_massa wrote: post #62
saghm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe. I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus…

My guess is that this kind of people will add a few remarks here and there, look at the persons doing one question, look at you while you answers, look at the other person doing the question, smile, look at you while you answers, make a small nod, ... Not stare at you with the eyes open like a cartoon character.

I would hope someone would introduce the person as, "just observing."

My past few jobs required interviewer training, which involved observing interviews. So pretty much any interview I was involved in had an observer.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#88

Post by renewiltord »

echelon wrote: post #25
bluepod4 wrote: post #15

I understand the optics involved with the Wikipedia situation. But an automated script (AnomieBot) tagged that article because it met or rather didn’t meet certain guidelines. It’s a stub article and lacked certain citations. Why not just flesh the article out? The “Notability” tag on Wikipedia has a different meaning than “notability” in the dictionary. Either way, it seems like someone already removed the tag manua…

The photo situation on Wikipedia is so weird. Editors often upload bad photos, even if better alternatives exist in the public domain or are fair use. But the thing that grates me more than anything is Wikipedia uses elderly photos of famous figures that were at the peak of their careers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. The appearance of these public figures changes, and sometimes the changes are so dramatic that I have t…

Do you have unencumbered photos for those? The last time I added a portrait photo I had to ensure license was good and I needed a model release as well. If you provide the unencumbered photos, I will attempt to contact them or their publicists for a model release if required. It will likely take months for me, though, since this isn't a top priority.

But if you get me the photos, I'll take care of the rest. We can't make it the infobox because they're still living, but we can add the photo to show what they were like at the time, which is notable since that's what they're famous as.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#89

Post by no_wizard »

asveikau wrote: post #63
alexpotato wrote: post #37

One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision". During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer an…

I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers. Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evide…

I feel like anyone who fits the categorization (so called INFP/F types[0]) are unlikely to the ones to tell you.

That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.

I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.

To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.

[0]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/infp-personality.html

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#90

Post by cm2012 »

scarnz wrote: post #77
cm2012 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically anyone who can do this kind of thing falls into INFP or INFJ in Myers-Briggs. They're just incredible at reading people. Based on the article I'd be shocked if Jessica wasn't an INFP.

Fascinating. I've never heard this about INFP/F types, though I am one. Can you describe more about your experiences or point me to some examples?

There's a lot of sources out there on this topic, but Psychology Junkie is way better than I would have expected from the name. Two articles that mention these traits:

INFJ: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuitio...

INFP: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/the-infp/

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