Advice, for what it's worth

Not the bunch most usually asked to give this kind of advice. Would be interesting if Roissy were to score it.

Moral panics of days past: D&D edition

One of the serious disadvantages of growing up in a very rural area was a paucity of D&D players. So, somewhere around age 10 or 11, when I went up to Winnipeg to spend a week at my second cousin's place and attend the University of Manitoba's MiniUniversity for kids, I brought my Original Dungeons and Dragons set with me (the old Red Box). Finally! Some potential players! My cousin's father freaked out when he saw it and banned it from the house.

Cory Doctorow points to a potential reason why: a documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that meets every expectation I have of CBC quality. Apparently, Doctorow is one of the kids pictured playing if you watch the second follow-up part! Note that Peter Mannsbridge once had hair.



I wonder whether it's possible to quantify just how much stupider the CBC has made Canada over time.

Vitas

We're not hiring this year, but if we were, and if I were on the committee, and if I saw a vita that were the Econ equivalent of the one below, I would move heaven and earth to get the applicant an interview at the AEAs.I'd put high odds that one or two folks round the traps would see this kind of vita as being a reason to rule a candidate out. It would be highly interesting if some job market candidate next year were to do a randomized trial on whether this kind of vita or the generic sort landed more AEA interviews. Highly interesting 'cause the costs don't fall on me and I'd want to know the results. If there weren't so many veto players in hiring processes, the strategy would induce a nice separating equilibrium.

As a side note, I can imagine how I'd come up with scores on strength, dex, con, intelligence: get measures of strength, dexterity, stamina and IQ, get some population averages, then map them to the 3d6 distribution. I have no clue how wisdom could be measured in the real world; charisma would similarly be tough.

I don't buy the guy' scores if he's using a standard early edition set of D&D rules. 3d6 gives an average of 10.5 and sd is 3. So he's claiming to be >4sd above average - IQ 162.5 - in a part of the distribution you can't get by standard rolls. Of course, I'd expect any PhD-bearing candidate in Econ to score at least a 19 INT; I'd also expect to see some GRE scores to back that up. My GRE scores gave me a D&D INT score that rounds to 21, if 1998 GREs are still a reliable predictor. The rest of my scores would be much much worse.

Could be fun over Christmas...the D&D Vita. Publications and such as Inventory...