Facebook - I don’t know the original story of loose-tongued engineer, but I’ll write an article when I feel like it, saying that it can be explained by a mathematical model.

  • If we use a mathematical model to represent a story that is qualitatively “what is it?”, it will be mapped to the world of logic, which will allow us to tweak the details and help us improve our understanding.
  • I thought it was just a simple handicap theory - but it’s deeper than I thought.
  • True human skills are affected by the fact that they are unobservable from the outside.
  • First, suppose that a human being has two abilities, and that these two are uncorrelated. Suppose that two randomly selected persons are compared and the one with the greater sum of abilities is chosen. In the distribution of the selected persons, the two abilities are negatively correlated.
    • I actually did it and found no discernible difference between the two comparisons, about -0.47 inverse correlation at 10 times the competition rate.
  • So if only one of the selected distribution of people can be observed, it is more likely that the person with the lower ability is more capable than the other.
  • On the other hand, I’m not sure about the distribution of the sum of abilities. Let’s try an experiment.
  • An interesting perspective is the existence of a play that deliberately lowers skills observable by others
  • Dare to behave badly, or “a wise man keeps some of his talents in reserve”. On what principle can this be rationalized?
  • Perhaps utility saturates as the number of evaluators increases, whereas cost is linear, so beyond a certain point of cost-effectiveness, it gets worse.

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