Posts
Comments
Hi ChristianKL, I dug deeper and did some more research and found a few biases or fallacies, that cause this Henry Ford situation - (1) Appeal to Tradition - i.e. asking the same questions, because they were asked by everybody since ages -
(2) The Illusory Correlation - Finding a relation between two unrelated variables in this case - candidates who can't answer these specific questions in this specific form aren't eligible for the role
(3) Appeal to Elitism or Snobbish version of Argumentum Ad Populum
All the elites use Ritz, so if you are an elite you must also be at the Ritz! All the elite intellectual knows the answers to these questions and if you don't know that answers to these questions, may be you are not elite!
I have written an article about the same, please let me know if these fallacies/biases can directly or indirectly cause the Henry Ford Interview Situation! Also let me know if you can add to the list.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/henry-ford-fallacy-general-knowledge-interview-questions-boni-aditya
Thank you for the answer Christian - The objective isn't really to check if the interviewer is fair or unfair. Whether he is committing a logical fallacy with his knowledge or without his knowledge is out of the question. He might not be doing this deliberately. He might genuinely assume that all interviewees for the role must be aware of the generic stuff. We are not trying to understand the interviewers mind, but a simple error in asking generic questions for a specialized role. In fact, it is one of my friends who went for the interview, let me quote the exact thing - My first round of APM interviews for a giant internet / tech corporation in Israel, was going great.
Rocking the product, design, analytical & leadership questions.
Than iv'e got those 3 technical questions from hell, that made me crush & burn.
How an internet browser works?
Tell me how a wifi router works?
Explain how DNS works?
Summarizing the 20 minutes that came after those seemingly simple questions - catastrophic disaster.
Now here is the thing...
Day after failing the interview, i could sing you the answers to those questions backwards while asleep.
Do you think it makes me ready to apply for similar APM program?
Or should this experience indicate a bigger gap in my technical knowledge, required as a PM?
These questions are very trivial, anybody with a CS degree, must have written them down in multiple credits, but expecting general knowledge in a specialized interview is a fallacy or a bias. I just want to find the right name for this bias. I am not the first person, to face this kind of situation. Henry Ford Faced a similar situation - http://www.successlearned.com/napoleon-hill-think-grow-rich/files/basic-html/page64.html - I just need to know about the name of the exact bias, these people have become victims to or fallen prey to!
Again Raemon, emotion. The binding factor is emotion. I wrote this answer with a lot of emotion, in a single streak. I did not carefully plan the answer. This topic is very emotional to me, because I have researched about this topic for more than 10 years. I was trying to understand how to become a programmer, during the course of events, I thought, if I could figure out how to ace a natural language, english, german etc... I could use the theory of induction and use the same techniques to master computer languages. During the research, I read 100s of books written by writers and by programmers. I used tens of methods and techniques, SRS was one of them. Anyway, I did not carefully plan the answer or organize the reply, as the thoughts came to my mind, i put them. Thus, I think that you missed the important point that I was trying to say and focussed on the lack of proper structure and missing paragraphs. Well, that's all I can say. May be there is a logical fallacy or bias for this, where in the subject loses all the important stuff and focusses on the trivial ones, may be grammar nazi ?
What i fail to understand is "Are you sane?" Using ANKI for three years! Mastery for the sake of Mastery is stupid, and not recommended. Mastery for purpose/reason is required. What is a swiss army knife? A swiss army knife is so powerful because it combines a lot of tools and pushes them into one cool gadget. Our mind is that swiss army knife, but you are trying to fill this swiss army knife 1000 times with only one type of weapon i.e. a thousand cork screws or a thousand simple knives, that defeats the purpose of the swiss army knife i.e. our brain. Spaced Repetition System is one of the 1000 systems out there that exist in the world to maximize your memory. The japanese have tons of techniques, which might be inferior than SRS for words but might be extremely efficient when you are trying to remember pictures! i.e. visual memory boost. Similarly Indias have a system to attack math and formulae, from their ancient texts called Vedic Mathematics. There is Benjamin Franklin's method that he has developed to master writing. There is prousts method to master writing. If you believe that SRS is somehow this magic technique that you can use to remember every damn thing in this world forever! Sorry to say that you are extremely wrong! SRS works but only to some extent, i.e. to help you make associations quickly! So the question you have to ask is "Why do I need those associations?" Our brain does not remember things that you want it to remember, our brain remembers things which it perceives are useful, emotional, shocking, intriguing. You brain remembers things using feelings and emotions. With ANKI you are only forcing it to remember after a certain time with an emotionless character, are you adding smell to that word? i.e smelling a flower are you adding taste to that word i.e. chewing a gum - does somebody slap you when you open up that specific word - using the sense of pain and touch to enhance your memory. Not only does you brain remember the moment when you are humiliated before an audience but it will replay it randomly on multiple occasions out of sudden 10 to 20 years into the future - WHY? because the amount of trauma that a specific incident has caused, made the brain remember it vividly, so that if anything similar to that situation were ever to arise in your life in the future, your brain will recreate this situation and make sure that you don't repeat the same mistake and go through the same pain. So the people who fail at public speaking for the first time, will remember it for a long long time and will become frightened of the stage. So to imprint something upon the brian, the word must have an emotion/ a feeling attached to it. That is one other technique available. There is one more technique available, You remember the word better with application, if there are situations where you use the word, then with each usage, the word becomes your own, i.e. it moves into your personal inventory and soon you will find reasons to use that word. That is how the brain works. Thus my advice is use ANKI as a repository i.e. similar to a dictionary, don't try to remember the dictionary. Load all the decks which are related to your area of study and when, only when you come across a word somewhere, you pick up that word from the existing decks and move them to a new deck along with the reason i.e. the context which forced you to look at the deck in the first place, into the DECK and that context is the link that binds you to the word! Without the context, the word merely become an orphan lost in your mind and you don't have an anchor to recollect. These anchors of touch, context, smell, experiences, emotions, etc... are the key to memory. But, if at any point the brain feels "WHAT IS THE POINT" i.e. if the brain feels APATH attached with a word, this happens after a few months, when you see the word in ANKI so many times but it never gets used in real life ever. Then it is time to move the word into archive i.e. out of the active deck into APATHY DECK, a deck for useless words that take up your mind space but never get used and by now your mind cries about how useless that specific word has become. Thus ANKI is not a savior, it is one of the many tools in the market to help you. Take help from other tools too - Let me list a few tools for you - MINDMAPS - BLUMIND - EVERNOTE - Notetakers - Google Keep - Stickies - FLOWCHART TOOLS - EDRAW - Right tool for the right job and at the right time. Don't assume that you can keep hitting all the nails with the same hammer, depending on the size of the nail, the hammer must be changed, sometimes, often you need to flip the hammer for a screwdriver - Read these books - Getting Things Done - Fluent Forever and other productivity books to find other tools and techniques used! Don't just stick to one solution and assume that it is the only thing you will ever need ever again in your life. Do proper research about all the tools at you disposal! Sometimes you might find gems in the rough!