Comment by eshear on Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments · 2011-01-26T18:25:41.928Z · LW · GW

Unfortunately, GPAs can lie. You cannot be certain of the quality of the problems and evaluation that was averaged to produce the GPA. So running your own test of known difficulty works well to verify what you see on the resume.

For example, I have to hire programmers. We give all incoming programmers a few relatively easy programming problems as part of the interview process because we've found that no matter what the resume says, it's possible that they actually do not know how to program.

Good resume + good interview result is a much stronger indicator than good resume alone.

Comment by eshear on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 · 2010-11-12T03:09:37.744Z · LW · GW

My guess is that it is Felix Felicis, liquid luck. It's golden, which matches the description, and it provides a reasonable false explanation for how the invaders were able to break Bella out of prison. It throws you on the trail of a master potion maker, instead of the truth.

Comment by eshear on Pretending to be Wise · 2010-09-29T07:15:16.516Z · LW · GW

The elves are totally worse than Sauron. See http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index3.html for the details.