Re:Judge rules that student loan debt is dischargeable in ba...
by dragonwriter on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:19AM
(#22033253)
> IMO, I think there is going to be a huge market for software companies that can adequately verify someone's aptitude.
Measuring aptitude isn't hard and we've got firms that have been doing it quite well for decades with high predictive power on future success in the domain for which aptitiude is tested.
But employers don't care about aptitude (capacity to learn a skill), because we aren't in a system of lifetime employment. They care about present skill. And, it's uolely we are going to find good tests for that that don't involve lots of samples of applying the skill, which for simple tasks that can be repeated dozens of times an hour is easy and already readily available, for complex abstract processes that involve a mixture of lots of small task skills integrated through abstract reasoning, a quick easy test would be a breakthrough. But I think there is good reason to think that that is fundamentally intractable, the issue not being in the testing method but the nature of the phenomenon being tested.
Measuring aptitude isn't hard and we've got firms that have been doing it quite well for decades with high predictive power on future success in the domain for which aptitiude is tested.
But employers don't care about aptitude (capacity to learn a skill), because we aren't in a system of lifetime employment. They care about present skill. And, it's uolely we are going to find good tests for that that don't involve lots of samples of applying the skill, which for simple tasks that can be repeated dozens of times an hour is easy and already readily available, for complex abstract processes that involve a mixture of lots of small task skills integrated through abstract reasoning, a quick easy test would be a breakthrough. But I think there is good reason to think that that is fundamentally intractable, the issue not being in the testing method but the nature of the phenomenon being tested.