Beginning to realize just how much "achievement is not ability" is a well known truism in psychology but perhaps not in tech 😬
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@grimalkina reflected on those words and this is what I came up with: “achievement” is the bullseye you aimed at with “aptitude” and hit (outcome) with (skill * ability).
@grimalkina I think fairly well-known in tech, but more as "The engineers do the work, the Sales guys get the bonuses.".
@grimalkina I've always found it really odd that tech is this way, given that all you have to do is look around you to see that the big successes have much more to do with lucking into a winning lottery ticket than with exceptional ability.
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@gregtitus I tried to address this conflict and reasons for it in my book actually! So I have some theories about the various things it gets us and the cognitive biases it capitalizes on, like attribution errors. We love to assign explanations to immutable innate characteristics
@grimalkina Tech is a solid meritocracy. :always has been meme:
@grimalkina This is the first I've heard that one. I'll have to look it up later.
And also that aptitude is usually what we're actually trying to get at, but it's a third thing?!
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@grimalkina Todd Rose .and the "individuality science" folks seem to suggest that most of what we call "apititude" is, their word, "jagged", that is, made up of high-dimensional low-correlation features, and as such, can not be condensed into single-value measurements of apititude.
@grimalkina how do psychologists typically distinguish between ability and aptitude?
@grimalkina
Not sure where psychology is at on the question, but teaching has made me extremely skeptical of whether “aptitude” exists at all in any meaningful or observable way that is separable from the tangled mess of prior experience, socialization, motivation, trauma, etc. we all carry.
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@inthehands any reasonable model of achievement includes these things! Yes agreed; particularly because whatever we're born with interacts with those factors all the time (including in influences on what shaped our cells in the first place)
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@grimalkina
Yeah, I’m comfortable working with the idea of “achievement” given these caveats. It’s “aptitude” I really wonder about.
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@inthehands that was a vague post from me, I was more thinking "usually what commentary about abilities are trying to get at is this" but not necessarily what "we" should focus on
@grimalkina ability is what you have when you're interviewing for the job. Achievement is what you've accomplished once they fire you.