Never presume that any action of society is objective.
Perception
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Category Archives: Sociology
Past use of language governs future use of language!
The early adopters set the trends once they have carved niches for themselves! They create them around their own skillsets. They don’t exist before then, and that explains how research fads come into being and why there are always one or two leaders at the very origin of a field! The very language of the field grows around these individuals!
Sorry if I got somewhat carried away with that insight. It just happens to support something I called the “initialism” principle, which I had largely discarded a while ago. That principle states that the present state of nearly everything is influenced by its origin. Please don’t mistake it for determinism; it makes no claim that the present state of things is exactly determined by the state of their origins.
An interesting alternative
Now that I’m thinking about interviews, I just realized a very interesting idea for an alternative: the bottom line is performance on the job, so that’s all we should really test.
Why not hire the candidate for a day and see how he/she does? That seems like the most pragmatic interview of all.
There is surprisingly little literature that treats an interview as a statistical test. I sense a research opportunity.
Sensitivity and specificity of an interview?
My newly-discovered penchant for freezing up and forgetting rudimentary facts during interviews makes me question the sensitivity and specificity of a multi-round interview process. That also makes me question whether such thing as a ground truth for good employees exists (maybe performance on the job?)
Anyway, once we have a ground-truth, we can perform an ROC analysis at various performance “thresholds” (note that we need only interview a population of candidates once; the criteria are the stringency of selection). The area underneath the curve would yield a measure of the method’s accuracy, while the curve itself would illustrate the relationship between sensitivity and false positive rate (that is, how many good candidates are hired vs. how many bad ones are hired). Of course, what we’re really interested in is the Positive Predictive Value: how efficiently does the interview process select good employees?
I wonder if any studies were performed on this? Hopefully so; I’d hate to think that such a stressful process exists simply based on tradition.
The two types of "social" sites
I’ve had this theory kicking around in my mind since before this blog started, but since it wasn’t around then, I never posted it.
There are two types of “social” sites: those where one person naturally invites others (exosocial) and those where others are required for one to join (endosocial). Quite simply, an exosocial site attracts people as population grows, while an endosocial site attracts users only once a critical population is reached.
Why is this important? Well, an endosocial site (such as HireGeeks) requires heavy marketing as a catalyst, since no one will come until people are already there. Exosocial sites do not create such dependencies between a user and the rest of the population (though they might build one between two individual users), and are free to grow almost unchecked.
That’s why HireGeeks was a stupid shoestring business. Technically, that is some of the nicest Perl code I’ve ever written, but it means nothing if I can’t attract two separate groups of people to the site at the same time.
A game-theoretic observation
The larger and more complex a system becomes, the more likely it is that a nonoptimal Nash equilibrium emerges. Especially when dealing with traffic.
Theory of Synchronized Spontaneity
I hypothesize that both small and large-scale sociological behavior (that is, the behavior of individuals and of organizations; the connection being formalized through my 9th psychological postulate: the “linking principle”) are governed by a sort of circadian rhythm, by which various relationships will form and various behaviors will manifest at specific times each year. For example, this is the fourth May in a row that freelance work has begun streaming in (I should note that I no longer actively search for work of any type; the process is entirely passive and yet I’m still being found), yet it’s usually fairly quiet during the rest of the year.
One of my friends brought up a very interesting point: this may be the result of prior conditioning; after all, this is about the time that the school year traditionally ends. I suppose the question is then whether this sort of behavior manifests in response to the targets (in the case of freelance work, the workers) or conditioning of the sources (the clients).
…Or both.