Heh, I was wondering if I’d get called out on that. You’re totally right, everything that happens in the world constitutes evidence of something!
What I should have said is that humans are prone to fundamental attribution error and it is bad to privilege the hypothesis that it’s evidence of real skill/experience/resume signalling/degree etc, because then you risk working on the wrong things. Rejections are evidence, but they’re mostly evidence of a low baseline acceptance rate, and only slightly evidence of other things.
I can imagine someone concluding things like “I’d better get a PhD in the subject so I can signal as qualified and then try again” in a scenario where maybe the thing that would’ve shifted their chances is rewording a cover letter, spending a single day researching some examples of well-designed CEAs before the work task, or applying on a different year.
Heh, I was wondering if I’d get called out on that. You’re totally right, everything that happens in the world constitutes evidence of something!
What I should have said is that humans are prone to fundamental attribution error and it is bad to privilege the hypothesis that it’s evidence of real skill/experience/resume signalling/degree etc, because then you risk working on the wrong things. Rejections are evidence, but they’re mostly evidence of a low baseline acceptance rate, and only slightly evidence of other things.
I can imagine someone concluding things like “I’d better get a PhD in the subject so I can signal as qualified and then try again” in a scenario where maybe the thing that would’ve shifted their chances is rewording a cover letter, spending a single day researching some examples of well-designed CEAs before the work task, or applying on a different year.