51–60 of 71 posts
Whereas to tell someone in advance "don't you dare to tell me I don't know" the person will just hold on to the thoughts until he or she has to spell that thought out (because he or she has to say something to get out of the misery).
Some commenters, and possibly the author, want this advice to extend to job interviews, but the reason an interviewer is pushing you to answer a question isn't that they want you to be right or wrong. A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem. An even better interviewer will make that clear, by telling you "there's no trick here", "I don't know the answer myself, let's s…
> A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem. I consider that a red flag. In this case, the interviewer is almost certainly less concerned with whether or not you can do the job than they are concerned with whether you think like them. Though I do like your suggestion to try offering a terrible solution to get the conversation started. Usually it's breaking the ice that's…
I've found that the ease with which someone answers "I don't know" has a positive correlation with their wisdom in general. (Of course, if they answer "I don't know" to everything, they probably just don't care, and that's a separate problem.)
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> Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy) Democracy isn't about having an efficient system, it's about having a stable system. Democracy is an awful way of getting things done, it's just a reasonably good way of stopping very bad things from happening.
Favorite quotation from Kelly Johnson, former head of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works: > Voting on everything prevents anything very stupid from happening, but also anything very brilliant. You can guess who called the shots in his aircraft design teams. He did, because he was truly fucking brilliant.
He didn't have the same control over things as a dictator would. You can do these things in business more safely because it's less likely to kill large numbers of people.
I think part of this conditioning from taking tests in school. For twelve or more years of your life, in any situation where you are asked to demonstrate your knowledge, a null response is treated in the same negative fashion as an incorrect response, and getting outside help is disallowed. No wonder we try and guess, we've literally been trained for years that it's the best approach! Compounding that, an interview i…
My graduate advisor is Spanish, but is faculty at a university in the States. In his first year of teaching, he penalized for incorrect answers (as is apparently the Spanish custom). But his students threw fits during office hours, so he caved in the face of potentially terrible teaching evaluations. After tenure, he said, things will be going right back to the way they were in the old country.
To put it differently, would I get a better score in OS design than Linus Torvalds? After all, he wrote an operating system that contains bugs, while I wrote no operating system as all.
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Hm, thinking about it, maybe I was wrong. Maybe you can actually express "I don't care" vote in the mandatory voting system as well, by voting for a randomly selected candidate (and these contribution will average out to same votes for all candidates). But it's rather impractical compared to simple non-mandatory voting.
What about the difference between "I want X, but there's no way they're getting in, so I won't bother" and "I don't want any of them"?
I have long suspected this to be true. That's my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don't know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know. However, it's a bit unclear how this ties together with Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy). The D-K effect would suggest that if you allow people to express…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My graduate advisor is Spanish, but is faculty at a university in the States. In his first year of teaching, he penalized for incorrect answers (as is apparently the Spanish custom). But his students threw fits during office hours, so he caved in the face of potentially terrible teaching evaluations. After tenure, he said, things will be going right back to the way they were in the old country.
I could see throwing a fit, too, depending on how the weighting is handled for partially incorrect answers. If the question is "What shape is the Earth?", if a student answers "A cube", I can see taking off points. However, if they answer "A sphere", do they also lose points? Do they lose just as many points as the person who said sphere or do they get partial credit for being closer to the correct answer of "oblate…
Some commenters, and possibly the author, want this advice to extend to job interviews, but the reason an interviewer is pushing you to answer a question isn't that they want you to be right or wrong. A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem. An even better interviewer will make that clear, by telling you "there's no trick here", "I don't know the answer myself, let's s…
Permitting "I don't know" doesn't actually seem to help candidates get more correct answers in the study (looking at the actual paper, the group discouraged from saying "I don't know" actually got a slightly higher number of questions right at the first time of asking)
It simply means those encouraged to say "I don't know" guess wrongly fewer times - no surprises there - whilst still revealing their ignorance to the interviewer.
Applied to job interviews: interviewing people for a job by asking simple factual questions the interviewer knows the answer to is doing it wrong. If they're indiscriminately negatively marking "wrong" answers that aren't prefaced with an explanation that guessing is inadvisable, they're doing it even more wrong - how candidates answer questions they don't know is valuable decision making heuristic.
A more usual interview will involve many questions where there is no clear "correct" answer, in which case "I don't know" will usually be one of the worst possible answers. Even where the questions are fact-based, a decent interviewer should usually give more credit for how a person guesses than an admission of ignorance, in which case "I don't know" is neutral at best. Sure, some candidates that aren't good at guessing or are especially bad at bullshitting will appear worse than if they're encouraged to say "I don't know", but that's valuable information for the interviewer which lost by encouraging everyone to give a non-answer. Same applies if humility is a key requirement and "I don't know" actually is a decent answer.
TLDR: Since correct answers are unaffected, allowing candidates to say "I don't know" only improves the interview performance of weak candidates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem. I consider that a red flag. In this case, the interviewer is almost certainly less concerned with whether or not you can do the job than they are concerned with whether you think like them. Though I do like your suggestion to try offering a terrible solution to get the conversation started. Usually it's breaking the ice that's…
I don't know who downvoted you, but I don't quite get what you are saying (why is that a red flag and what exactly do you mean that's a red flag?) Red flag as in it is theoretical (like "of course that would be nice.....but that's usually not true)? or red flag as in interviewer is tricking the interviewee to do bad job? (making bad impression to interviewer)?