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It called into question the validity of an immense range of supposedly sturdy scientific tools:
YES
voting behavior models;
why polling is so problematic
insulin administration for diabetics;
ALL height or weight or age based dosing
the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality. He gave a name to this error: “the ergodic switch.”
"the ergodic switch"
According to ergodic theory, you are allowed to use a group average to make predictions about individuals if two conditions are true: (1) every member of the group is identical, and (2) every member of the group will remain the same in the future.
ergodic conditions for validity and reliability...these suggest that averaginarism ignores evolutionary and revolutionary thearies
assumed that people were frozen clones. This was why Molenaar called this assumption the ergodic switch: it takes something nonergodic and pretends it is ergodic.
ihe ergodic switch flaw
the lure of averagarianism dupes scientists, educators, business leaders, hiring managers, and physicians into believing that they are learning something meaningful about an individual by comparing her to an average, when they are really ignoring everything important about her.
how the switch is fallacious
If you instead model the relationship between speed and errors at the level of the individual—for instance, by measuring how many errors you make when typing at different speeds—then you will find that typing faster actually leads to more errors.
successful individualization
This ergodic switch led him to believe in the existence of the Average Man and, even more important, was used to justify his assumption that the average represents the ideal, and the individual represents error.
ergodic switch of the gladiator statur
That’s how we ended up with a statue of Norma that matches no woman’s body, brain models that match no person’s brain, standardized medical therapies that target nobody’s physiology, financial credit policies that penalize creditworthy individuals, college admission strategies that filter out promising students, and hiring policies that overlook exceptional talent.
SOME unintended consequences of ergodic switching
“A Manifesto on Psychology as Idiographic Science: Bringing the Person Back into Scientific Psychology, This Time Forever.”
this is GOLD
This sentiment was perhaps the most common reaction among psychometricians and social scientists
individuaism as anarchy
the reason that averagarianism has endured for so long and become so deeply ingrained throughout society, and why it has been so eagerly embraced by businesses, universities, governments, and militaries: because averagarianism worked better than anything else that was available.
why Taylorism rules
averagarianism was a perfect philosophy for the industrial age, an era when managers—whether in businesses or schools—needed an efficient way to sift through large numbers of people and put them in their proper slots in a standardized, stratified system.
caste system
If he truly wanted to overthrow the tyranny of the average once and for all, he needed to offer an alternative to averagarianism—some practical way to understand individuals that provided better results than ranking or typing.
what alternatives exist? Fader's one-room approach...gifts & talents individual appraisal...holistic non-standardized appraisals...mastery selection...Buddhism...Taoism
Quantitative Developmental Systems Methodology core unit of the Social Science Research Institute, an entire research group he could shape as he wished.
why quantitative?
an interdisciplinary science of the individual.
needs better name?
the main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters19—the individual is not error, and on the human qualities that matter most (like talent, intelligence, personality, and character) individuals cannot be reduced to a single score.
science of the individual
Molenaar and his colleagues argue that to accurately understand individuals one should turn to a very different kind of math known as dynamic systems—the math of changing, nonlinear, dynamic values.
dynamics > statics
analyze, then aggregate: First, look for patterns within each individual. Then, look for ways to combine these individual patterns into collective insight.
basic procedurvery similar to what ethnography does
one neural process seemed to correspond
associative occurrence
Thelen discovered that many instinctive behaviors that biologists insisted were fixed and rigid were actually highly variable, depending in large part on the unique quirks of each individual animal.
Esther Thelen
There is one difficulty presented by this individual-first approach: it requires a great deal of data, far more data than averagarian approaches.
challenge of Big Data
Averagarianism forces our thinking into incredibly limiting patterns—patterns that we are largely unaware of, because the opinions we arrive at seem to be so self-evident and rational.
averagiarian perspective
once you free yourself from averagarian thinking, what previously seemed impossible will start to become intuitive, and then obvious.
over hyping benefits of individual analysis?
three principles drawn from the science of the individual that can replace your reliance on the average: the jaggedness principle, the context principle, and the pathways principle.
three principles
Ranking individuals on a handful of metrics—or even a single metric—is not only common practice when recruiting new employees, it is the most prevalent method of evaluating existing employees, too.
averaginarian ranking
Perhaps the most extreme version of these systems is what is known as “forced ranking,” a method pioneered by General Electric in the 1980s where it was known as “rank and yank.”8 In a forced ranking system, employees are not merely ranked on a one-dimensional scale; a certain predetermined percentage of employees must be designated as above average, a certain percentage must be designated as average—and a certain percentage must be designated as below average. Those employees assigned to the top ranks receive bonuses and promotions. Those at the bottom receive warnings or, in some cases, are
...more
rank and yank
“stack ranking.”
stack ranking is rank and yank technique
The performance rating system forced employees to compete for rankings, killing collaboration among employees and, worse, leading employees to avoid working with top performers, since doing so threatened to lower their own ranking as a result. While stack ranking was in effect, the article reports, the company had “mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.”
which is what grading on the bell curve does in education
During the Age of Average, our social institutions, particularly our businesses and schools, have reinforced our mind’s natural predilection for one-dimensional thinking by encouraging us to compare people’s merit on simple scales, such as grades, IQ scores, and salaries.
education's complicity
the first principle of individuality: the jaggedness principle. This principle holds that we cannot apply one-dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex and “jagged.” What, precisely, is jaggedness? A quality is jagged if it meets two criteria. First, it must consist of multiple dimensions. Second, these dimensions must be weakly related to one another.
jaggedness
if the stakes are high—if you’re altering an expensive wedding gown or designing a safety feature like an automobile airbag, or engineering the cockpit of a jet—then ignoring the multidimensionality of size is never a good compromise. When it matters, there are no shortcuts: you can only produce a good fit if you think about size in terms of all its dimensions.
tailor-making Rules
when trying to measure talent, we frequently resort to the average, reducing our jagged talent to a single dimension like the score on a standardized test or grades or a job performance ranking. But when we succumb to this kind of one-dimensional thinking, we end up in deep trouble.
ignoring jaggedness
basketball talent is multidimensional. One mathematical analysis of basketball performance suggests that at least five dimensions have a clear effect on the outcome of a game: scoring, rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks.
~sabremetrics in baseball
most of these five dimensions are not strongly related to one another—players
Each of the dimensions also must be relatively independent. The mathematical way to express this independence is weak correlations.
weak correlations bw dimensions
If the correlations between all the dimensions in a system are strong, then that system is not jagged and you are justified in applying one-dimensional thinking to make sense of it.
when one-thinking works
At the dawn of our modern educational system, when our schools were first becoming standardized around the mission of sorting students into average, above-average, and below-average bins of “general talent,” the first scientific investigation of this assumption revealed that it was false. But psychologists were so convinced that one-dimensional mental talent must exist, even if it was hidden, that most of Cattell’s colleagues rejected his results, suggesting that something was wrong with the way he conducted his experiments or analyzed his results.
ed been paying for this suppression ever since...or its students and faculty have paid
character—is
intelligence, personality, character are each jagged
Even if we’re willing to concede that, yes, there are multiple kinds of intelligence—like musical intelligence, or artistic intelligence, or athletic intelligence—it’s hard to shake the feeling that there must be some kind of “general intelligence” a person possesses that can be applied to a great many domains.
intelligence
mental talent is jagged and cannot be described or understood by a one-dimensional value like an IQ score.
intelligence is jagged
If you subdivide intelligence even further and compare, for instance, short-term memory for words to short-term memory for images, scientists have shown that these “microdimensions” also exhibit weak correlations.
intel microdimensions are jagged
why do so many psychologists, educators, and business executives continue to use one-dimensional thinking to evaluate talent? Because most of us have been trained in averagarian science, which implicitly prioritizes the system over the individual.
why one d predominates
we have managed to convince ourselves that weak correlations mean something that they do not.
fweak correlation
according to the mathematics of correlation, if you find a 0.4 correlation between two dimensions, that means you have managed to explain 16 percent of the behavior of each dimension.
correlation : explanation
if our goal is to identify and nurture individual excellence, then weak correlations tell us something different: we will only succeed if we pay attention to the distinct jaggedness of every individual.
where jaggedness counts
the real surprise for me and for a lot of people at Google,” Carlisle told me, “was that when we analyzed the data we couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for even most of the jobs at Google. Not one.”
no silver bullet in hiring
They completely ignored applicants’ educational background and previous experience. Instead of submitting a résumé, candidates submitted a statement of passion for IGN and answered four questions that tested their coding ability.
alternate to resumes
the jaggedness principle says otherwise: while we may have identified overlooked talent, there is nothing unorthodox or hidden about it. It is simply true talent, as it has always existed, as it can only exist in jagged human beings. The real difficulty is not finding new ways to distinguish talent—it is getting rid of the one-dimensional blinders that prevented us from seeing it all along.
jegged hiring
