Oh, Hi There
Been busy personally, professionally, mentally ... I've had the next two films in my final Lynchathon push in the apartment for a week and haven't watched either one. I'm basically working, coming home, going to the gym, watching basketball, staying up way too late to take advantage of my having gone to the gym, and then doing it all again and again and again.
Some brief thoughts:
Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)
Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:
I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.
ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.
Some brief thoughts:
Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)
Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:
I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.
ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.
Labels: Basketball, Lynchathon, Personal, Work
posted by medrawt at
22:59
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