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Re:How to Get a Job at Google by gwern on Saturday February 22, 2014 @05:58PM (#7284028)
'Restriction of range'. When you look at the general population, from janitor to tenured professor, one of the single best predictors of job performance is IQ; but when you look at, say, 'MIT physicist grad students', well, they're all very smart, so when you look at the minor differences in intelligence between them, the scores barely correlate with their future success even though no one becomes a MIT grad student in physics without being terrifyingly smart. Because they have been selected on that trait already. Hence the apparent paradox.

(No surprise Friedman doesn't understand this; the NYT article on the Google findings did not explain this.)

Re:How to Get a Job at Google by illuminate on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @09:34PM (#7302435)
I don't think marrying a billionaire heiress is the best way to get into Google.
Re:How to Get a Job at Google by jfb on Saturday February 22, 2014 @07:42PM (#7284417)
The limits of Friedman's understanding should come as a surprise to no man.
Re:How to Get a Job at Google by gwern on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:39PM (#7284829)
I dislike Friedman a fair bit, but I can't hold this one against him: restriction of range is a subtlety that pretty much no one understands in interpreting correlations, and I only know about it myself because I happened to read a paper torpedoing a previous famous paper as having fallen prey to restriction of range (and then did some more reading on range restriction).