Yoav Goldberg on Rankings: Everyone Qualified, Yet Choices Change Lives
yoavgo · x · 2026-09-25
AI researcher Yoav Goldberg (yoavgo) reflected on the reality of "pick the most excellent" decisions: in practice all candidates are sufficiently qualified, none is exceptionally good, each differs from the others, and the scales don't match. He added that behind every item being decided on stands a person whose life the choice significantly affects.
A concise observation on the inherent difficulty of ranking incomparable-but-qualified candidates in reviewing, hiring, and admissions.
Related event: Yoav Goldberg Slams Academic Review: Ranking the Unrankable(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Pedro Domingos: ML moves a million times faster than evolution, so AGI is millennia away — pmddomingos · 2026-09-25
- Would Apple have won the AI race if Jobs were still alive? — TheMrCurious · 2026-09-25
- Alignment debate: SGD's inductive biases may not generalize to human values — akbirthko · 2026-09-25
- Sam Altman Warns AI Could Advance So Fast That People Can No Longer Follow — mariolefebvre · 2026-09-25
- A long Claude conversation on AI instance ethics, persistence, and model welfare — The_Ten_Thousand · 2026-09-25
- Pedro Domingos: three reasons we're still far from AGI, no robotics ChatGPT moment in sight — pmddomingos · 2026-09-25