Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’
For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what’s known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good, a few people to be very bad and most people to be average.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found that someone is shocked, shocked to find that you have non-normal distributions after you’ve run your sample through some kind of discriminator. Managers don’t tend to hire the unqualified. Students that aren’t college material tend not to go to college, or drop out. If you aren’t good enough to be competitive at a sport you won’t be on the team. Once you have limited your sample in a way that introduces a bias, don’t automatically expect the distribution to be normal.
“Managers don’t tend to hire the unqualified.” Promotion within hierarchal management is quantitatively worse than random choice,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2837
HR hires drinking buddies. Professional management is rewarded for enforcing process not creating product. Professional management exists to kill the future, for the only trusted employee is one whose sole marketable asset is loyalty. “Mensa” on a resume or innocently mentioned during jury selection will put you on the street with a whooshing sound. This is vaguely amusing when solicitng a technical berth (and nice for avoiding jury duty).
Google specifically hires the Severely and Profoundly Gifted. Mutant smart and unlovable, they are cared for by den mothers, fed on site, given every opportunity to be weird, and are carefully inflicted with a day/week with nothing to do. Some 12-18 months into the game their brains start to scream in boredom and they create to fill the void. They create the otherwise unthinkable. Google is unstoppable. Google will be crushed by Beltway lobotomites exercising obdurate somnambulant stupidity and the irresistible buoyancy of excrement.