Should companies send rejection letters?

The author of the linked article wonders whether companies should notify the potential job seekers when/if their application has been rejected.

I am surprised that the question is even being asked! But I can understand the human resources point of view: per every successful applicant there are dozens or hundreds of those who are rejected, and writing to each of them means a lot of work. Besides, clumsy rejection letters have been known to generate waves on social networks. Still, I believe that a rejection letter (even a standard or automated one) is better then no answer at all. Below are my reasons:

As a potential job applicant I prefer to know where I stand. From the practical point of view, it helps me to adjust my immediate job-seeking strategy: Should I seek jobs more intensively? Should I broaden my search or adjust my criteria? Should I lower/raise my expectations? Knowing that I failed with a particular company also helps to avoid unreasonable expectations – emotional factor that may be important for many people.

Note, that outright rejection is not the only case where a company should interact with the job seeker. I equally appreciate a simple acknowledgement that my application has been received. The lack of such response is one of the reasons why I am suspicious of employers who ask for the recommendation letters to be sent along with the application. Currently, unless such a position is of special interest to me, I either do not apply or send an application without recommendation letters, assuming that, if my application is of interest, the potential employer would specifically request them. Some do.

From the point of view of the company, interacting with unsuccessful applicants also makes a lot of sense. First of all, some valuable applicants may slip away, just because the company didn’t respond for too long and they interpreted it as a sign of rejection. It happened to me to get an invitation for a coveted job interview long after I accepted another offer.

Secondly, it works both ways: while companies receive many job applications, each applicant applies for many jobs. The social climate in the company and how a company treats its employees is among the criteria by which it is judged by applicants, particularly given existence of alternative job offers. A job seeker that is rejected today could be tomorrow a successful applicant for another position in the same company. Moreover, s/he is likely to belong to a professional network that includes other potential candidates for the same position: rejected job seekers may damage company’s reputation without any deliberate intention on their side – simply because they share their experience with their colleagues and classmates.

Has physics become a “classical science”?

Has physics become a “classical” science?

I was prompted to write this post by reading Leo Breiman’s article “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures” (http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726). The XXth century physics has developed as a consequence of appreciating the limits of what we could learn about nature, imposed by the finite speed of interactions, small size of objects such as atoms and molecules, and the limited amount of information that we can store and operate. The respective fields of relativity theory, quantum mechanics and statistical physics all owe their existence to acknowledging that these limitations were of fundamental nature rather than merely due to the imperfection of the available technology.

The physics, that had existed before the three above-mentioned fields came to life, is conventionally referred to (with some condescension) as “classical physics”. I am going to suggest below that physics itself has become a “classical” science in the sense that its very basic paradigm of building models of natural phenomena – the paradigm which for many of us has been defining the very concept of what science is – may have become outdated. That physics has become a “classical” science, as opposed to modern “data sciences”.

Let us first review the three paradigm shifts that ushered in the age of modern physics.

Relativity

Relativity, as paradoxical as the conventional wisdom holds it, is anything but paradoxical to a physicist. Once you accept the Einstein’s postulate that the interactions propagate with a finite speed (the speed of light), all the conclusions of relativity immediately follow by simple logical reasoning (or math), including shrinking of length, the distortion of time, etc. These conclusions, of course, contradict to our conventional understanding of time and space. This is why, although many of these conclusions were derived well before Einstein appeared on the stage, the transformations of relativity were thought of as convenient calculation tools, reflecting our inability to measure faster than light. If only we could measure faster, the conventional classical mechanics would be recovered.

Einstein’s courage was in declaring that, if we couldn’t measure faster than light, we shouldn’t base our world-view on the idea of instantaneous measurement. That the limitation was fundamental and required a philosophical shift of mind, rather than the sophisticated efforts to bring reality in agreement with conventional thinking.

Quantum mechanics

Just like relativity arose from acknowledging the limit on how fast we could measure, the quantum mechanics came from acknowledging the objective limitations on our ability to study small objects. It was not because we didn’t have a good enough microscope that the atoms behaved so strangely, but because, in order to study such a small object as an atom, we had to bring it in contact with a much larger one, such as the microscope (more precisely, the stream of photons or electrons), and this larger object inevitably affected the small one in unpredictable ways.

If we couldn’t directly study small objects, there was no reason to assume that they behaved according to our everyday expectations. And, indeed, they were found to be described by the laws of quantum rather than classical mechanics. The main point here is not the particular strange form that the quantum theory has taken – this can be debated and perfected – but that, once we accepted that we could not directly observe something very small, there was very little reason to expect that it would behave in the way fitting our previous experience.

It is worth noting that this philosophical shift was not immediate either: Schroedinger’s wave mechanics and Bohr’s quantization rules first appeared as attempts to reconcile the behavior of atoms with classical ideas.Statistical physics, decoherence, phase transitions

Statistical physics deals with the fact that, in order to describe an object with 10^23 or more degrees of freedom, we need a computer with at least as many (or likely many more) degrees of freedom. This puts a limit on how precisely we can describe things and ushers in the uncontrollable: the “noise.” In the extreme limit, to describe the Universe we would need to have an alternative Universe or even something bigger. One can elaborate more on the details of how the information is stored, transferred and how the computation is performed, but the limitation will always exist – because this limitation is conceptual, it nothing to do with our current level of technology.

Surprisingly, my experience shows that many of my colleagues do not appreciate the fundamental nature of this limitation. And who can blame them? – statistical physics books provide us with smooth derivation of statistical distributions from very basic mechanics, and it is easy to continue to think that the whole of statistical physics is just an approximate way to do calculations. That we do it because we don’t have a powerful enough computer. That we could, at least in principle, have such a computer…

We fall here in the same trap of trying to extend our conventional thinking in the realm, where we could not possibly verify that this thinking is correct or not. In other words, we are committing the same mistakes as those who searched hopelessly for the universal reference system in order not to acknowledge relativity, and those who tried to save the determinism of Newtonian mechanics from making it quantum.

The reality is that the noise will always exist. And this is why no powerful computer will ever be able to predict the future. This is why the free will exists – because of our fundamental inability to take all the influences into account.

Data science

The one thing that the physicists have never questioned is whether we could create models of the natural phenomena. Models such as: relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical physics etc. Indeed, creating models is what we mean when we talk about discovering the laws of nature. Creating models is something that we associate intimately with the scientific method, of which physics is the most successful example. If we study a phenomenon without creating a model, can we really say that we understand this phenomenon? Can we really call it science?

At this point I would like to direct you again to the Leo Breiman’s article that I mentioned in the beginning: describing a complex phenomenon, dependent on many parameters and resulting in a wealth of data, requires a complex model. But, as the number of the parameters and the amount of data increase, can we plausibly claim that there is a unique model relating the data and the parameters? And, if we can never have enough data and computational power to resolve between several models producing similar results, can we really claim that resolving them is possible in principle? Is it scientific to make such a claim?

I am not talking here about the data science as applied to analyzing financial markets or social behavior, but rather about something as physical as biological systems. My short experience in biology has taught me that we simply don’t know enough to model biological processes with the same level of rigor that we use to construct models in physics. This is why biophysicists and bioinformaticians make a heavy use of modern statistical techniques, such as hidden Markov models, machine learning, neural networks etc. But is this just a matter of convenience? Will we ever be able to model gene transcription as unambiguously as a movement of a particle in a magnetic field? Are we better off thinking that such modeling is possible in principle?

I am not claiming to have a definite answer to these questions. But I am asking for your intellectual courage to contemplate the very possibility that some things cannot be modeled. That physics, the field that has reached perfection in modeling phenomena, may not be anymore at the forefront of our knowledge. That it has become a “classical science” in the same sense as classical physics, which still forms the basis of modern engineering when it comes to launching satellites or developing micro-fluidic devices, but which is no more the place where the mysteries of the Nature are being uncovered.

On self-discipline

Here is a link to an article that I saw on LinkedIn and was tempted to comment upon. However, since my comment turned out to be too long to be posted there, I share my ideas here, perhaps for the benefit of a greater audience. You will need to read the linked article first, to know the points that my comments refer to.
Needless to say, I do not claim to be an authority on the subject – the opinions expressed below reflect my personal views.

1. “Stop looking at it all the time.”
Constantly checking your email, facebook messenger, sms etc. is usually not the problem but a symptom of a different problem – lack of focus on the task you are doing. Addressing the real problem rather than its consequences is a better way forward.

2. “Filter your inbox.”
Using email filtering features is indeed a very good advice! E.g., Gmail allows to create multiple labels and the filters that attach these labels to incoming emails, depending on the sender’s address or keywords. The rule of thumb is to have only 10-15 emails in your Inbox – indeed, some correspondence, such as credit card statements, can be automatically archived bypassing the Inbox; whereas the communication from the family and friends gets to Inbox, read once, and then archived by one click.

3. “Once you open an email, do something with it.”
Whether to take an immediate action or postpone it is perhaps the most difficult problem of self-discipline, which is rarely addressed in depth. The correct course of action is really to postpone the task till the moment when it can be addressed most effectively.

From the point of view of psychology, postponing the action indefinitely and acting right away are both neurotic responses, intended top avoid giving the task the attention that it really requires. (The former approach completely avoids dealing with the task, whereas the latter either results in a rush action or itsels serves as a distraction tool to avoid focusing on more important tasks). While psychologists in the last hundred of years have done quite an impressive job explaining how our early childhood contributes to falling into one of the two traps (procrastinating indefinitely or trying to act immediately), they have not given a definite answer regarding how to fix the problem. This is why teh self-management advice should be always taken with a great deal of skepticism.

4. “Stop treating your emails like instant messages.”
In my experience, offering several options is likely to generate the very series of ambiguous emails which are the problem here. And it risks making you pass for an indecisive person (whereas in reality you might be simply intelligent enough to see more than one option where others see only one). A better method is to give your preferable option, but in a way that allows for objections. People will either follow along or express their opinion, if they do have constraints.