I think so. I’m drawing a distinction between the difference being due to an ability to measure and the difference being due to self-selection, predicated on the need to specialize.

If you’re interviewing with a group of mathematicians, there’s a greater likelihood they will consider math skills to be the Ine Important Thing, in part because they’ve had to focus on that so much it becomes disproportionately important in their worldview. It’s a bias due to being overly focused on a specialization.

> I tend to agree. But I do think it’s a solvable problem by valuing, teaching, and prioritizing leadership skills. I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)

I don't see where you drew the distinction, can you point it out?

How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

>I don't see where you drew the distinction, can you point it out?

>"I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)"

There's a distinction in avoiding a measure because it's not quantifiable and just plain not feeling as comfortable in that domain.

>How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Humans tend to be cognitively lazy, so they revert to what they know when faced with uncertainty. E.g., a mathematician feels more comfortable measuring math skills, even though a better measure may be a combination of math and leadership skills. So they tend to hire quants with poor management traits. It doesn't mean they couldn't evaluate the soft skills, it means they chose not to.

Using a different analogy, if you asked a sprinter to choose a decathlete, what skills do you think they would more heavily weight in their evaluation? I'm saying it's likely they would more heavily weight the sprinting events because they don't know how to evaluate the other events as well. They specialize in sprinting, after all, and that's what they know and feel comfortable with. The result probably isn't going to select the best overall decathlete, but it doesn't mean the other events couldn't be measured.