Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
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Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#2Corollary: "There's no such thing as a stupid question", because you're not afraid to be wrong. All creative and innovative people are like this, without exception, IMO. As Richard Feynman said in the title of an autobiography: "What do you care what other people think?"
Everybody wins when people leave their egos behind.
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#3When reading the title, I assumed this was talking about job interviews, a much different type of interview. How do these ideas apply to job interviews? Is it a good idea for an interviewer in a job interview to encourage interviewees to say I don't know, and should you be more ok with saying I don't know and then elaborating in a job interview?
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#4lucidity as the fastest path to clarity ?
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#5When reading the title, I assumed this was talking about job interviews, a much different type of interview. How do these ideas apply to job interviews? Is it a good idea for an interviewer in a job interview to encourage interviewees to say I don't know, and should you be more ok with saying I don't know and then elaborating in a job interview?
Purely anecdotal of course but I always set the scene for interviewee's that "I don't know" is a completely acceptable answer. If the question could be attempted with an educated guess then "I don't know" is perfectly fine as long as an educated guess is then attempted.
If you only get "I don't know" with no attempt at a guess or explanation for why they don't know then you may have issues.
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#6I'll usually ask at least one question in an interview to see if the candidate will answer with "I don't know" or ramble on incoherently making something up. Guess which I prefer.
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#7When reading the title, I assumed this was talking about job interviews, a much different type of interview. How do these ideas apply to job interviews? Is it a good idea for an interviewer in a job interview to encourage interviewees to say I don't know, and should you be more ok with saying I don't know and then elaborating in a job interview?
On the job interview point:
I'm always as truthful as possible in a job interview - especially technical ones. My background is not in tech, however I'm an autodidact with programming and whenever technical questions are asked that I may not know, I'll say it. And then I'll say how I think it should/would be done, or the steps I'd take to figure out the answer and solve the problem. Not sugarcoating some of my technical inability has faired me well so far. And then after I hear the question, think about the steps to do it, and/or get coached by the interviewee - I know the answer, and am ready to use it in my technical/creative arsenal. I feel like it's a win-win to not bullshit about something I don't know.
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#8I 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 doubt, the experts will doubt more, and overall performance will decrease.
It would be interesting if someone did a psychology experiment on that. (I am actually in favor of doing these kinds of demonstrations in high school, because it's in my opinion important for people to understand how democratic voting works, for example the fact that voting won't get you a simple average of the results - which is usually used as an argument against democracy.)
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#9This is obvious. See also the child abuse panic of the 80s, where kids were pressured to make up stories of abuse.
And the general fact that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.
Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
#10One of my best technical interviews was from a lead engineer who simply asked more and more difficult questions until he found your limit (believe me, he knew more than anyone he would interview). His interest wasn't in what you knew so much as how you reacted when you hit the limits of your knowledge.
There's a lot of value in that approach. I don't use it myself when interviewing people, but I do try to accomplish the same end.