I co-founded an academy for game developers almost 20 years ago. As a co-founder, I had a significant influence on the department I managed, and to a lesser extent, other departments. Out of over 1,300 bachelor’s programs in the Netherlands, we were ranked #2 in our first year. The dean told me it was a fluke, and wouldn’t happen again. The following year, we were ranked #1. The program continued to do well, quite possibly in part to my efforts.
One of my responsibilities was to vet applicants to the school. We could accept a limited number of students, making it important to select the right ones. To make it more difficult, in the first several years, we were only allowed to select half of our incoming class each year. The remainder were selected by a random draw conducted by the government. The results of this were terrible. In most years, 100% of the randomly selected students were kicked out within their first year for poor performance. The remaining students had to be enough to sustain the program.
The first vetting process started before I showed up for my first day of work, but I was able to participate in about half of the process. The way it was set up, students had to provide transcripts from their previous school, do an assignment designed for the application process, sit for an in-person interview, and bring a portfolio of artwork. With these four elements, we were supposed to decide who would be accepted.
As the years passed, I started tracking application scores and comparing them with actual performance after acceptance. This made it possible to see that there was only one metric that correlated with success in classes and probability of graduation: the high school transcripts.
The portfolios, assignment, and interview were all a waste of time. The students were too inexperienced to have portfolios or projects that told us anything more than we could see in their transcripts, and the interviews were opportunities to cajole us into ignoring deficiencies we should pay attention to, to lie about abilities and intentions, or to honestly present information we already knew from the transcripts.
For these reasons, I told the dean I wanted to select applicants based on transcripts alone. He said this wasn’t possible because it would be perceived as unfair. With that door closed, I changed the purpose of the portfolios, application project, and interview. From then on, the portfolio became a lesson to teach certain needed skills, as was the project. The interview was designed to give feedback on the projects and to direct the student’s ambitions based on their work and transcripts.
In other words, if they weren’t suitable, they were told why, and vice versa. After that, they could decide if they wanted to leave their application active. This improved results from the lottery selection, by eliminating inappropriate applicants who diluted that pool.
The reason the transcripts were so predictive appears to be that they told us whether the students had a good work ethic. The classes didn’t matter, but the grades did. If they consistently earned the American equivalent of a B+ average, it showed they would do the work required, regardless of their enthusiasm for it.
This was important because game development tends to be very different from the expectations of high school students. The only way to get over that difference is to work your way through it, and the only students who predictably would do that, had good grades in all of their classes. Their portfolios and projects could be awful. Their interviews could have been embarrassing. If the grades were good, they did well.
This may apply to politics as well. I have long wondered why we select presidents (and other candidates) the way we do. Their interviews cannot tell us anything meaningful unless they have a track record we can compare it to, and reliable sources for the track record and the interview. Both can be distorted, making them difficult to interpret.
Public appearances by politicians are a real life equivalent to the famous puzzle: there are two villages on an island. The residents of one village never lie, the others never tell the truth. You meet a villager on a path. How can you determine which village he is from?
In the puzzle, we can ask direct questions of the villager. In political campaigns, most voters cannot interact with candidates in the same way. To the extent that interviews or campaign appearances reveal true and relevant information about the candidate’s past, they are useful, but voters can’t know at first whether the information is true or relevant.
Thanks to significant incentives to practice deceit in campaigns, it is safer to assume candidates are dishonest until proven otherwise. This leaves me wondering which metric is most likely to correlate with actual performance. Here are some possibilities:
Independently wealthy: indicative of proven past success and likely good organizational and risk-management skills.
This criteria would favor people like Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Ross Perot, and Mark Zuckerberg. It would disfavor Richard Nixon* and Ronald Reagan.
Military service or training: indicates discipline, team skills, and respect for law
This would rank Dan Crenshaw, General Milley and many others above Trump, who attended a military prep school but never served.
Lack of criminal indictments or convictions/lack of scandals: this should be an easy way to separate those who are obviously disqualified from others, but it isn’t.
Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton would score higher than Trump on this metric.
Willingness to engage critics directly.
This could be taken as an indication of honesty, confidence, and knowledge. Vivek Ramaswamy, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump would all score well on this. Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Nikki Haley, and Barack Obama would score badly.
Taken together, the only criteria of this group that reliably favors candidates who appear to be objectively honest, capable, and successful is willingness to engage critics. Unfortunately, that is a subjective measure and doesn’t do anything beyond telling us that the candidate meets the minimum standard required for most jobs. The fact that candidates who fail this test frequently win elections shocks me because I wouldn’t want to hire them for any job, even as janitors, on the basis of dishonesty alone.
The best criteria I could find is media reaction. If mainstream media overwhelmingly supports a candidate, then they are bad. If they uniformly criticize a candidate, then he is good. The reason this tends to work, but doesn’t always, is that there appear to be multiple advantages for those involved in media if they support corruption, and disadvantages if they don’t.
The corrupt forces that influence media are acutely aware of the abilities and skills of their own candidates as well as their opponents. Therefore, they transmit this information to media by instructing them to support or criticize any given person.
I don’t like this measure because it requires that the media remains consistently corrupt. If that changes, the meaning of this metric chjanges also. For now though, I think it is the best we have. Meaning: vote Trump!
*I increasingly believe that Nixon was similar to Trump in many ways. Democrats are extremely agitated by Trump because, regardless of similarities, he responds differently than Nixon and has foiled efforts that worked against Nixon.
I listened to an interview today of Roger Stone. He knew Nixon very well. He noted that Nixon did not have the internet—a platform on which he could fight back against the media.
He believes Nixon might have survived if he had that vehicle. He said that of all the Presidents he knew, Nixon had the greatest intellect.
Stone admires Trump’s extraordinary political and public relations skills. He is amazed at how Trump, “being his own man,” remains calm, resilient, healthy, and committed to his principles under the withering assault from media, which is the greatest he’s ever seen—much greater than what Nixon had faced.
Dr. Zark- as someone who ran for local political office 4 times and lost, I would like to offer my perspective. I live in a small town in upstate suburban NY and except for one instance when I was on the Libertarian line, I ran as a Republican.
In every instance when I ran, I was without a doubt and by any metric, the best candidate for the job. I say this because of my many years working as a volunteer good government taxpayer advocate as well as my career as a legal professional. However, none of the voters knew any of this.
Here's the problem- there is no objective test that one has to take to be qualified to run for office. There is no Regents exam, no LSAT, nothing. Instead, you have to go out and get signatures on petitions to get on the ballot and hope that you get enough good ones that can't be challenged. That's about it.
One day maybe we an have a discussion about running for office in NY and how it relates to the chicanery of our local boards of election, but that's another story.
In any event, a certain number of people got on the ballot and then ran their campaigns. Sorry to tell you but the voting had absolutely NOTHING to do with how good the candidates were. It doesn't matter if they were demonstrably stupid and corrupt, or if they had lost money for the town, or even if they had no idea what the issues were.
The elections were exactly like Junior High popularity contests. Our town supervisor for example, is a woman who has spent her whole life in local government. Despite the fact that she is demonstrably an idiot who has no idea how to run a multi-million dollar corporation that is our town, she keeps getting elected over and over because she's "nice" and doesn't say mean things.
The same is true for a couple of the other incumbents that I ran against. We never had real debates on the issues like I wanted, because they knew they would lose.
Instead there were "meet the candidates" events where they just got to schmooze with their various voting block members.
Meanwhile- since there are no term limits in my town, this same bunch of ass clowns could conceivably be in office for the next 20 years unless they die or become incapacitated. We once had a town supervisor who was in office for 40 years, back in the old days! Recently we had one who had been on the town board for close to 20 years before he retired for health reasons.
Same thing is true on every level of government. There is no real objective test to keep imbeciles like my town board members or FJB off the ballot. Maybe this is something that you can ask Claude about.