Notes on the book "Talent"

Mostly quotes

Some months ago I read the book “Talent” by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. Published in 2022, it discusses how to spot talent using one’s individual judgment (e.g. assessing a founder as VC). Importantly, it’s not a book about how to create a standardized hiring process at a big company (“please recall that this is a book about talent search, not just a book about hiring”). For instance, the book advises tailoring an interview to the interviewee and having unstructured conversations, which is the opposite of what managers are instructed to do when interviewing candidates in a standard corporate environment (to avoid bias and coordinate on consistent standards).

The book is interesting largely because it describes how people like Cowen and Gross think. It’s hard to figure out what parts of their advice are actually useful, and what parts are spurious or overengineered, though in some instances I am particularly suspicious. In this post, I’ll note what I thought were their most interesting points (it’ll be heavy in quotes, bold emphasis is always mine).

On casual interviewing

Cowen and Gross advocate for a casual, conversational interviewing style, where the interviewer is genuine and spontaneous.

In the conversational mode, you are getting a much better look at how that person will interact with others on a daily basis on the job

The idea is that, though the interviewee may be behaving strategically, their behaviors in a situation that they couldn’t prepare for are more revealing.

The conversational mode still involves a lot of conscious and subconscious presentation of the self to the outside world. It reflects that person’s signaling, airs and affectations, feints, and conditioned social habits. Still, at the very least, you are getting “the real version of the fake person,” and that is still more valuable than trying to process prepared interview answers.

They dismiss research indicating that interviews, unlike work trials or tests, don’t predict job performance well.

Many of the research studies pessimistic about interviewing focus on unstructured interviews performed by relatively unskilled interviewers for relatively uninteresting, entry-level jobs.

However, I think the authors go too far in the “throw person into an unpredictable social situation and see how they react” direction. At multiple points they note that it’s important to steer away from canned responses and questions the candidate would have prepared for. This leads him to suggest a bunch of unusual questions, many of which I don’t like at all, particularly personal questions like “what are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?”, “what’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?”, “what did you like to do as a child?”. Cowen is a fan of questions that sound silly and low-signal to me like “what are the open tabs on your browser right now?” (allegedly his favorite interview question) or “what did you do this morning?”. I think these questions aren’t that predictive of anything, perhaps besides in cases where charisma is particularly important (in which case almost any weird question would do). Over-relying on such questions seems like a way to select for people who are good at making up nice-sounding things on the spot (or to be less polite, good at bullshitting), which is sometimes contrary to the nature of particularly earnest people. I’d predict that if Cowen took his Emergent Ventures grantees and, two years later, rated them by how happy he is that they received their grant, it would correlate very weakly with how well they performed at “what are the open tabs on your browser right now?”.

The authors use people’s responses to these unusual questions (”what’s something weird or unusual you did early on in life?”, “if I was the perfect Netflix, what type of movies would I recommend for you and why?”) to assess candidates for “their general quality of resourcefulness”.

Keep on asking yourself whether the candidate is successively able to draw upon intellectual and also emotional resources in his or her answers. They might just keep on showing innovative responses, no matter how far or how hard you push them. That is a sign of the broader stores of intellect and energy that the individual will be able to bring to the job.
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As the candidate tells their story, Daniel continuously asks himself: Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss?

But they simultaneously warn readers to “not overestimate the importance of the person’s articulateness”. This sounds a little contradictory considering the other messaging in the book that implies that articulateness is a key trait to assess for.

Do not overestimate the importance of the person’s articulateness. Focus instead on the substance and quality of the answers to your questions. Many very qualified candidates are not that quick on their feet, nor do they speak off the cuff in well-formulated, smooth-sounding sentences, but if they have good content, notice it.

Cowen is particularly interested in what people do during their downtime, thinking this reveals their true personality.

We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.” So for instance, “What subreddits or blogs do you read?” usually is better than “What did you do at your previous job?”

This sounds pretty reasonable to me for the type of talent search Cowen and Gross engage in, and possible to enquire about without asking questions about current browser tabs.

Some funny remarks on online interviews

The authors suggest that in-person interviews may privilege candidates good at projecting high status physically, whereas online charisma may be different.

You will do better in the online call if you realize how much your in-person presence relies on a kind of phoniness, and allow your online charisma to be rebuilt on different grounds—those that are easier, more casual, more direct, and just plain charming (but in the modest rather than pushy sense of that word).

They also read into Zoom backgrounds.

Tyler uses a David Burliuk sketch of books on a table for his Zoom background (Burliuk was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist from the early twentieth century), and if the camera tilts the right way you can see some classic Haitian art (Wilson Bigaud’s Night Market). Tyler is signaling openness, including openness to different cultures, plus a sense of the mysterious, encouraging you to probe more deeply into what he is doing. Daniel is flanked by a bright yellow background, identical to the color of his website, reflecting the Pioneer brand. It radiates “tech” rather than “culture.” There is not necessarily anything wrong with a candidate who has a mediocre background image, but still, it is one piece of information about that person’s self-presentation to the outside world—namely, that you are more likely to succeed with this match if you are hiring for a “substance job” than for a “flair job.”

Practice habits

The authors discuss how practice habits are important. I think this part is broadly correct and reasonable.

Try to learn the practice habits of the person you are interviewing, as it will reveal one aspect of their approach to work. You also should try to learn just how self-conscious a person is about what he or she is doing for self-improvement. And if they give you a fumbling or bumbling account of their practice habits, as we have heard numerous times, you can help them out very easily by suggesting they think about practice a little more systematically.
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One question that Tyler likes to ask people is “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?” Tyler likes to think of many jobs in a way that a professional musician or athlete would find natural. By asking this question, you learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement, and again, as noted earlier, you might learn some tricks yourself. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond whatever particular practices they engage in. If a person doesn’t seem to think much about self-improvement, they still might be a good hire, but then you had better be pretty content with their currently demonstrated level of expertise.
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a few good answers might be: “I give practice talks to my friends to hone my speaking abilities,” “I practice on obscure programming problems with no practical applications just to keep my skills fresh,” or “I am building up my knowledge in a very small corner of science just to figure out what it means to learn something really well and thoroughly.”

On the character traits of successful people

Being a fast mover

The authors include a couple quote from Sam Altman on the importance of being a “fast mover”.

[Quote from Sam Altman] Being a fast mover and being decisive—it is very hard to be successful and not have those traits as a founder. Why that is, I’m not perfectly clear on, but I think it is something about the only advantage that start-ups have or the biggest advantage that start-ups have over large companies is agility, speed, willing to make non-consensus, concentrated bets, incredible focus. That’s really how you get to beat a big company.

Altman suggests that whether one is a fast mover is harder to change than other character traits. I’m not sure why he, or the authors, believe this, but it’s interesting that they do.

[Another quote from Sam Altman] I look for founders who are scrappy and formidable at the same time (a rarer combination than it sounds); mission-oriented, obsessed with their companies, relentless, and determined; extremely smart (necessary but certainly not sufficient); decisive, fast-moving, and willful; courageous, high-conviction, and willing to be misunderstood; strong communicators and infectious evangelists; and capable of becoming tough and ambitious. Some of these characteristics seem to be easier to change than others; for example, I have noticed that people can become much tougher and more ambitious rapidly, but people tend to be either slow movers or fast movers and that seems harder to change [...] Also, it sounds obvious, but the successful founders I’ve funded believe they are eventually certain to be successful.

The authors note that how quickly someone replies to emails is a signal of whether they are a fast mover.

Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails.

Conscientiousness

How to assess conscientiousness?

You may have to look more closely at what a person has done, and as you will see later, we are big fans of “demonstrated preference”—actual life activities and achievements—as the most reliable source of information about an individual.

Just about everyone knows they ought to be trying to fake conscientiousness, so that is one reason to be wary of your interview impressions. Unless you devote serious time to interviewing references, often you don’t have a good sense of conscientiousness in advance; it’s something you learn about after the hire is made. For this reason, we view “looking for conscientiousness” as overrated in the hiring process, even when conscientiousness is important for the job. Or when conscientiousness truly does matter, make sure you interview the person’s references as well.

Conscientiousness as a double-edged sword

It is a recurring theme of this book that what predicts well for the median worker is not always what predicts well for the top performers and the stars.

The authors remark, in a number of places, on the downsides of conscientiousness. I generally agree with them.

Conscientiousness may be [...] less important for leadership positions..

Conscientiousness is correlated with people being employed, which is good, but it doesn’t do so much to boost their prospects of rising into the higher echelons of earnings.

Another possible downside is that some conscientious people stick to the job because they enjoy the familiar work process for its own sake. That keeps them on track and has some upside, but some of them end up piling on work for its own sake and taking delight in the satisfaction of process per se. Tasks end up taking more time rather than less, even though you observe the person working diligently the whole time. In the longer run, your organization can become less dynamic.

Many real-world instantiations of cooperation require some proactive behavior and indeed boldness, and the conscientious person is not always the bold one.

We wonder if conscientiousness is somewhat overrated for leaders and creators, and perhaps a degree of neuroticism is somewhat underrated as a correlate with job performance.

Conscientiousness, in essence, is too easily and uniformly valued in the marketplace.

On the relationship between conscientiousness and hard work

The authors suggest that conscientiousness as measured by personality tests may not even predict hours worked.

If you look at the rank-ordering table of all measured nations, there is no positive correlation between conscientiousness and hours worked; in fact, there is a (statistically insignificant) negative correlation.

They distinguish “stamina” as a more valuable trait. I didn’t fully understand the boundary they were trying to draw between stamina and conscientiousness, but my best interpretation is that they value being energetic and dedicated to a specific pursuit or goal more than being generally hardworking and scrupulous.

On stamina, economist Robin Hanson wrote: “It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it. I’ve known many such people.

Robin also points out that many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career. In essence, they are testing to see who has the requisite stamina for subsequent achievement. (You might feel those tests are wasteful in some way, but still, those tests seem to survive in some very competitive settings.) Successful politicians are another group who seem to exhibit very high stamina levels—many of them seem to never tire of shaking hands, meeting new people, and promoting their candidacies. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time.

Ideally, what you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.

Intelligence

The authors suggest that intelligence may be overrated because raw intelligence is quite easy to get signal on so it’s already “priced in”. This consideration is important because Cowen and Gross are particularly interested in identifying underpriced talent.

They also note that intelligence is more important at the very top of the market, whereas personality and conscientiousness predict earnings more for lower earners.

The data for that population show that personality and conscientiousness matter most at the bottom of the distribution. For instance, in the bottom tenth of earners, non-cognitive skills—which include, for instance, features of personality—matter two and a half to four times more than do cognitive skills. However, for the population in general, a boost of one standard deviation in cognitive ability is associated with a larger wage gain than is a rise of one standard deviation in non-cognitive skills.

Higher-intelligence people are also better at cooperating.

There is, furthermore, direct evidence that higher-intelligence people are better at cooperating. Researchers Eugenio Proto, Aldo Rustichini, and Andis Sofianos paid individuals to play varying games of cooperation for real money rewards. The researchers had data on the personality characteristics and IQs of the individuals playing the games, so it was possible to measure the strategies and successes of different types of people. The results were clear: high-IQ individuals in general cooperated more in these games, and IQ mattered the most in games where there were trade-offs between short-run goals and longer-run considerations. The researchers put it this way: in this situation, “intelligence matters substantially more in the long run than other factors and personality traits”.

Agreeableness

I agree with the authors that agreeableness is overrated.

Venture capitalists like to hear very positive, optimistic pitches, but the people making those pitches underperform when it comes to actual results. So don’t be too swayed by agreeableness, because very often it doesn’t deliver on its promises. The disagreeable founders, who will tell you that you have it all wrong and that the world is badly screwed up and on the wrong track, may end up doing better.

Conscientiousness and extroversion are good for earnings, agreeableness is bad for earnings.

Being one standard deviation higher on agreeableness is correlated with a reduction in lifetime earnings of about 8 percent, or $267,600. ... These people might just not be aggressive enough in pushing their own case forward, instead preferring to go with the flow.

Alertness

Kirzner stressed entrepreneurial “alertness” as a key variable behind good economic decisions, and here we have in mind alertness to the talent of others. For Kirzner, alertness is a kind of insight that cannot be reduced to mere hard work or deliberative search or formal rules but rather reflects a special ability of perception.

Generativeness

Being generative is a quality that is relatively high-status among the more intellectual segments of the Bay Area tech world. Balaji Srinivasan, the tech entrepreneur and crypto advocate, is a classic example of a person who is high in generativeness. He tweets his thoughts just about every single day on a wide variety of topics, ranging from media to crypto to the pandemic. A lot of it is speculative or maybe even wrong, but when he has a hit it is truly important.

“The ability to perceive, understand, and climb complex hierarchies”

Tyler, for instance, is struck by many of the chess players he met as a teen. Many of them were smart, indeed brilliant, and they also had the ability to work on their own. Of course, they understood the idea of winning and losing, and winning and losing rating points, but it was hard for many of them to look outside the chess hierarchy and see that they weren’t really headed anywhere fruitful. They saw only what was right before their faces. Chess gave them short-term positive feedback and a set of chess friends, and so they continued to pursue it locally, but too often they ended up at age forty-three with no real job, no health insurance benefits, and a future of steady decline.

“Demand avoidance”—bad for the standard worker but sometimes good for leaders or founders

Yet another underdiscussed personality feature is what researchers call “demand avoidance” (in some cases called “pathological demand avoidance,” though in our view that’s too value-laden a term). In its more practical (rather than clinical) sense, the term refers to people who have a hard time knuckling under to bosses. They perceive some workplace hierarchies all too well and suffer under them. Too many workplace requests become seen as impositions, and often unjust impositions as well. Such a view is by no means implausible, since most workplaces do place some unreasonable or at least inefficient demands on their workers, sometimes to an extreme.

On the bright side, demand avoidance sometimes spurs individuals to start their own companies. If you don’t like taking orders, well, you can be the boss—if you have the right stuff for an independent undertaking.

Individuals with demand avoidance can be super-productive if they find the right setting, but those settings can be very specific. Many of them work as academics, or also as founders, and then there are many others who still go around cursing the boss and moving from one job to the next.

How many conceptual frameworks does someone have at their disposal?

Another trait to look for is how many different conceptual frameworks an individual has at his or her disposal. We could have put this discussion in the intelligence chapter, but we believe there is something about this trait that makes it distinct from intelligence. Some people are simply keen to develop as many different perspectives as possible, for some mix of both practical and temperamental reasons. This is a kind of curiosity, but it goes beyond mere curiosity of the sort that leads you to turn over unturned stones. This curiosity is about models, frameworks, cultural understandings, disciplines, and methods of thought, the kinds of traits that made John Stuart Mill such a great thinker and writer. A more recent example is Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe (and also an active writer). His content can draw from economics, science, history, Irish culture, tech, and many other areas and influences.

Is the person trying to figure out how engineers approach problems? What distinguishes the mental frameworks of programmers? How economists think? How the viewpoints of managers and employees might differ? That’s a person who’s interested in multiple conceptual frameworks.

Tyler sometimes refers to “cracking cultural codes”—how good is the person at opening up and understanding new and different cultural and intellectual frameworks? Does the person invest time and effort in trying to do so? Does the person even know what it means to do so?

Assess the rate of change

One of your most significant skills as a talent evaluator is to develop a sense of when people are moving along a compound returns curve or not. So much of personality theory focuses on observing levels or absolute degrees of personality traits. You should instead focus on whether the person is experiencing positive rates of change for dynamism, intellect, maturity, ambition, stamina, and other relevant features.

On the skill of talent scouting

When you’re not the best employer

An interesting problem is scouting talent when you’re not the best employer, VC, etc.

If you are in this [not the highest] position, as many of us are, you need to think especially carefully about what is wrong with the people you are trying to hire.

The authors discuss how it’s worth considering what you’re open to compromising on, and being realistic about the calibre of person you can attract. For example, they note that, depending on what role you’re hiring for, you may want to not accidentally filter out people with autism. “Weird” communicators might be systematically underpriced by the market. They also suggest that men may offer more socially accessible cues about their intelligence (implying women may be underpriced), though the evidence given seemed weak (a study where “people who looked at photographs of men and women were, on average, better able to spot the men who measured as smarter in tests”).

Searching for talent vs. centralized evaluation

The authors suggest two types of approaches to finding talent:

1. Going around and scouting for underpriced talent

2. Attracting people to come to you and be evaluated

If you are doing talent search, you need to figure out whether the scouting model (search) or the gaming model (measurement) best applies to your endeavor. Most likely you will need some combination of both. Still, the market as a whole is not thinking very analytically about either scouts or games, so understanding this distinction is a source of potential competitive advantage to you.

On how the Soviets cultivated chess talent:

If you had the potential to be a top Soviet chess player, the chance you would be found by the dragnet was very high. It was hard to slip through the cracks, and talent search did not rely on finding an obscure candidate hidden away in a village somewhere. There was no scout going up to young kids at a Soviet shopping mall or discotheque and saying, “Hey, you look like you might be a good chess player!” Instead, through Soviet chess and scholastic institutions you would be identified and encouraged at a young age, and you would indeed have your chance to become a great chess player, even if you did not live in one of the major cities. Scrutiny and measurement were near-universal, and so potential talent had a chance to shine.

In the future talent scouting may be less important due to abundant data.

It is possible to imagine worlds where there are so much data on individuals, including genetic data, and at such a young age that measurement would once again dominate search. You wouldn’t have to “look for” anybody, at least not if you could access the data in the system.

The traits of a good talent scout

Good scouts typically are masters of networking rather than performance per se. Still, the quality scout still must have an excellent understanding of the topic area, but he or she does not need to have been a star. In fact, having been a star may interfere with the objectivity and judgment of the scout. Top stars too often have a kind of intolerance toward other, different kinds of talent, or they expect too much of prospects too quickly. Second, a good scout should have some measure of charisma.

How to convince talent to join your cause

If you are going to raise the aspirations of others, they should view their affiliation with you as a matter of pride. They should feel selected in some manner. They should feel like they have gone through trials and tribulations to get to their current point. They should feel like members of some exclusive club where they can look around and feel good about their affiliations with the other club members.