You invest in skills of pattern recognition that come in handy in the field, even though most of your individual decisions cannot be boiled down to a simple principle.

Is this person so good that you would happily work for them? Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could? When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong?

“What are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?” “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?” “If you joined us and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?” Or ask the same question about five years down the line as well and see how the two answers differ. “What did you like to do a

The previously cached answers will be exhausted, leaving time for the real meat. You will then see the depth of the candidate’s intellectual resources and emotional resilience. How does the person respond when being challenged continually?

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 tr

The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else. It demands that everyone play by a set of overly rigid rules, that individualism be hidden or maybe even stamped out, and that there is never any hurry, so another set of procedures can be applied, virtually without end.

If a person seems to have a good grasp of a book or other artistic or aesthetic object, by all means be willing to let the conversation flow in that direction, because you will end up staring right into that person’s soul.

Another way of measuring time allocation and actual behavior is to look at what Sam Altman, former head of venture capital firm Y Combinator (YC), describes as speed of response.

“fallibilists,” to use a term that has been revived by Irish tech entrepreneur and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. That means we’re also going to tell you about things you might think you know but that aren’t true.