(2008-12-31) Graham End Credentials

Paul Graham on how the Network Economy makes Credentialism obsolete. Let's think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them. So why did they even evolve? Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance? Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations (BigCo). Individual performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the harder performance is to measure, the more important it is to predict it. If an organization could immediately and cheaply measure the performance of recruits, they wouldn't need to examine their credentials. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones. Large organizations can't do this. But a bunch of small organizations in a Market can come close. (Publish Then Filter)