Cocktail Umbrellas and Invisible Pens

June 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?

At an ASA long, long ago, I went to a session on jobs outside of academia. One speaker – I can’t remember his name – spoke about getting a job as a consultant. The job interview, he said, was not going to be like what we expected. “You’re not going to be asked much about your vita or your research. Instead, they might throw a question at you like: How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?” And unlike students that aren’t paying attention in class, you probably shouldn’t say, “Could you repeat the question?”

No, they didn’t have a client who was going to be motoring around Mexico City and was worried about running on empty. Instead, they wanted to see both your general knowledge and your strategies for getting an answer. Maybe you have some idea of the population of Mexico City. Then you have to estimate how many of those people have cars. But what is a reasonable ratio of gas stations to cars? Or is there another strategy?

In any case, some companies are still at it.

• Argus Information: How many traffic lights in Manhattan?
• Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
• Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
• Google: How many basketballs can you fit in this room?

These were reported by Glassdoor.com based on information passed along by job seekers. These questions, and others, have been reported at HuffPo , Shine (Yahoo) , and elsewhere.

Some of the questions are looking not for imaginative calculation but imaginative problem-solving

• Goldman Sachs: If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?
• Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.
• Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
• VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.?

Some are just math or logic puzzles with only one correct answer.

• Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1’s and 0’s?
• Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?

And some are personal, even (from an academic perspective) to the point of being nosy.

• Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
• Merrill Lynch: Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.
• Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?

(The Pottery Barn question stands out as different from all the others. It seems much nicer. If I were choosing a place to work based on these questions, I'd have to go with Pottery Barn, unless it’s a trick question. Besides, I have a good idea of what the company actually sells.)

Which eminent (or even not-so-eminent) sociologists would have done well in an interview like this? Which would have had a hard time?

Sports as Life

June 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I questioned whether sports teams are a useful analogy for broader spheres of life, at least when it comes to affirmative action.

After I posted it, I tried a different thought experiment: suppose that sports really were life. Imagine a world in which the most important factor determining where you stand is your achievement in sports. If you’re a good athlete, on the starting team, the world is yours. If you’re on the bench but getting some playing time, you’re still OK. But if you’re not good enough to make the team, your chances in life are pretty bleak.

Let’s call this world High School.

Suppose you’re a white parent, and your kids are in a high school where whites are in the minority, maybe a quarter of the population. Suppose that your kids are not athletic enough to get on any of the teams. The high school is especially sports minded Sports determine how kids are treated, whether they are accepted and respected or looked down or ignored – and not just by the other kids but by the teachers, the administrators, everybody. Kids’ chances for success in other areas, their ability to have the good things in life, maybe even their physical and emotional health – all these depend on making the team.

Your kids try, but they can’t quite get there. Maybe it’s because they didn’t play all that much when they were in grade school and just never developed the skills. For whatever reason, your kids and most of the other white kids fall on the low end of the sports distribution. Always low in the status hierarchy, your kids are miserable – unhappy, discouraged, possibly resentful.

If this were really high school, you could tell them, “It’s only a few years.” But remember, our imaginary high school is not just school; it’s a world. It’s the world. It’s not just four years; it goes on and on. It’s life.

Would you go to the coach and ask him to cut your kids a break? I mean, they might not be quite as good as the others, but given the chance, they can do a credible job. Would you try to organize the other white parents to get the school to change its policies on how the varsity is selected? Remember, your kids and most white kids are excluded from the good things in the school; to the extent that the non-whites notice them at all, the white kids are looked down on. Nobody wants anything to do with them.

Might you suggest that the attitudes and ideas of the majority non-whites might be improved by having more white kids on the teams with them? Might you also argue that playing with the better players might even improve the white kids’ game? Would you want the school to put some more white kids on the team even if it meant that a slightly more skilled non-white was kept off?

Or would you say that the only thing that counts is the ability to bring the ball up the floor, drive the lane, and stuff the ball through the hoop? If the other kids can do it better than your kids, even if it’s only slightly better, then it’s only right that your kids continue to live their second-class existence.

Hypocrisy or “Tacit Knowledge”?

June 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Is a university admissions office the same as the basketball team? Should selecting an entire student body for the college be like selecting players for the varsity?

Remember that kid at UC Merced, the one who argued that the graduated income tax was like redistributing GPA points? He found students who supported a graduated income tax and programs for the poor but who wouldn’t sign his petition to redistribute GPA points from the A students to those with lower GPAs. None of the students could articulate, on the spot, their reasons for not signing the GPA petition (assuming that he didn’t edit out any who did offer a reasonable explanation). (My earlier post on it is here.)

He’s baaaack. This time he’s asking students to sign a petition for affirmative action in sports – specifically to give preference to whites trying out for the team. Get it? If you support affirmative action in college admissions but not in sports, you’re a hypocrite. As before, students support one use of race preference but not the other, and as before none can give a convincing reason. The students all say, “It’s different,” but they can’t explain why.*

(To save time, I’ve set the video to start near the end – most students say the same thing. To see the whole thing, just drag the slider back to 0:00.)



Nyahh, nyahh – you’re for preferences for blacks where they’re a minority but against racial preferences for whites where they are the minority. You’re a hypocrite.** Either that, or your thinking has been muddled by liberal ideas, which is pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?

The video concludes with the dictum that college admissions and sports should be the same. “Race-based preferences are wrong.” Ah, moral clarity.

Is college really the same as a sports team? They are certainly different in their consequences. If you’re a student now, in the coming years when you apply for a job, will HR ask you if you played varsity? Maybe. But unless the job you’re applying for is power forward, your answer won’t matter very much. But HR will absolutely want to know if you have a college degree. And your answer will matter. A lot.

Sports and school are different in another important way. Schools seek out minorities more for the sake of campus diversity than for the benefit of individuals. Yale probably gives preference to applicants from Montana or Mauritania over those form Manhattan. (Yale also might give preference to a power forward if the team this year is short of guys who can work the low post.) The purpose of this admissions policy is not to benefit Montanans (or power forwards) but to provide other students with the experience of living with a diversity of people (and to provide the basketball team with the right diversity of skills).

That same goal of demographic diversity does not apply to the competitive teams or the glee club or orchestra for that matter because those groups have a much more narrowly defined task. It’s that difference in purpose, rather than the difference in which race gets helped, that underlies the responses in the video. Take those same liberal students who support admissions policies that bring more blacks to campus; ask then if they would also support race-based preferences to get more blacks into crew, the glee club, or the chess team. I’m sure they would say no. As in the actual video, they would probably be unable to explain why giving preference to African Americans is acceptable in admissions but not acceptable in activities.

They’ll say that the two are different, even though they can’t immediately explain why. Does that make them hypocrites, natural or un-?

The next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks for a justification for some distinction you make, smile at the camera and say, “As Michael Polanyi wrote in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we know more than we can tell,’ an insight that Richard Nisbett later developed with much social science evidence in his book Knowing More than We Can Tell.” See if you make it into the YouTube clip, or into Robin Hanson’s blog.**


*I had assumed that the petitioner and his camera people were students at Merced. But in this new video, he’s at UCR.

** As with the previous video, Robin Hanson, on whose blog Overcoming Bias I found both, files the students’ attitudes in the folder marked “natural hypocrisy.”

Fooled Again

June 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a 40-year-old married American man living in Edinburgh.

Six weeks ago, I posted something about values as legitimations. The post was an analysis of an incident recounted by “Amina Arraf” who blogged as A Gay Girl in Damascus. Thuggish government agents come to arrest her. Her father intervenes and persuades them to leave.

A week ago Gay Girl was exposed as a hoax.* The blog was the creation of one Tom MacMaster, who quite possibly has never set foot inside Syria and who was blogging from Scotland. (Gawker’s report of the story is here.)

I take some comfort in knowing that many others were taken in. And sociologists much wiser and more distinguished than I have analyzed scenes from fiction and used them to illustrate sociological ideas. Of course, they knew that their source material was fiction.

I should get on my knees and pray that I don’t get fooled again. But I probably will.

*I missed the exposing of the hoax and would have remained ignorant of the truth were it not for Dan Ryan’s post in his blog Sociology of Information.