The Coordinates You Happen to Have

or, Why Four Interviewers Know Less Than One

Eric Garcia

The Coordinates You Happen to Have

I.Thursday

The Coordinates You Happen to Have2

Four people met Ari

Four people. One Thursday. One candidate.

The Coordinates You Happen to Have3
A card headed "Ari," with a mute line beneath the name reading "interviewed Thursday," and four readings listed below in italics, each under its role in mute: "the engineer — careful," "the manager — warm and a little deferential," "the values interviewer — the most curious candidate all quarter," "the founder — seemed fine." A blank grey circle stands where a photo would.
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Friday

The room went looking for the overlap.

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The claim

A debrief doesn't add the views together. It intersects them — and what survives is smaller than what any one person walked in with.

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They weren't looking at the same thing badly. They were looking at different things well.

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II.What a shadow throws away

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A three-dimensional diagram of a cylinder standing upright, labeled "the object," with two projections drawn from it. Below it on a horizontal plane is a filled circle, labeled "shadow on the floor: a circle." Behind it on a vertical plane is a filled rectangle, labeled "shadow on the wall: a rectangle." A caption across the top reads "Both are correct. Neither can be recovered from the other."
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What a projection does

A projection doesn't blur what it loses. It deletes it, and leaves no mark where it was.

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Grant the other side

A trait is a direction enough people varied along that somebody named it.

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A trait is what's left of a person after you remove everything that didn't generalize.

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III.Your axes came from people you already met

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Where a coordinate comes from

Every direction you can read a stranger along was installed by someone you met earlier.

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The manager

Ari had been in the building for forty-five minutes.

The Coordinates You Happen to Have15
A three-dimensional diagram with faint x, y and z axes crossing at a point labeled "origin." Two tinted planes pass through the origin at different angles: a blue one lying flat, labeled "the directions the manager has," and a teal one standing steeply, labeled "the directions the engineer has." A single orange arrow rises from the origin out of both planes, labeled "Ari." From its tip a dashed line drops to a blue dot in the flat plane, labeled "who the manager met," and another dashed line drops to a teal dot in the steep plane, in a different place, labeled "who the engineer met." A caption across the top reads "One person. Two complete pictures. Neither is wrong."
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The projection is not conservative

The projection is never blank. That's exactly why it's never suspected.

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IV.Why the blind men can't pool

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The elephant

Pool the reports, and the elephant comes back. The geometry says it doesn't.

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You don't have your own operator

It isn't written down. It isn't introspectible. It is your history.

The Coordinates You Happen to Have20
The same three-dimensional scene as before, with the arrow taken away: faint axes crossing at a point labeled "origin," the flat blue plane now labeled "what the manager can see," and the steep teal plane labeled "what the engineer can see." Where the two planes cross, their intersection is drawn as a single bold orange line through the origin, labeled "what they can agree on." A caption across the top reads "Two planes meet in a line. Agreement loses a dimension."
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The three-dimensional scene with a single flat blue plane through the origin, labeled "the manager," its outline drawn in bold orange and labeled "what they can agree on." A small corner label reads "1 observer."
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The same scene with two planes through the origin, labeled "the manager" and "the engineer," and a corner label reading "2 observers." Their intersection, a bold orange line, is labeled "what they can agree on."
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The same scene with three planes through the origin, labeled "the manager," "the engineer" and "the values interviewer," and a corner label reading "3 observers." The three planes meet only at the origin, marked as a single bold orange point labeled "what they can agree on."
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The same scene with four planes through the origin, the fourth the palest, labeled "the manager," "the engineer," "the values interviewer" and "the founder," and a corner label reading "4 observers." The shared space is still the single orange point at the origin, labeled "what they can agree on."
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What the room converged on

Four people can converge on a direction none of them observed.

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Four interviewers don't give you a four-times-richer person. They give you the intersection.

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V.Friday

The Coordinates You Happen to Have28
A dark blue book shape beside its details. The cover reads "THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY" and "Iain McGilchrist." To the right: "Iain McGilchrist," "The Master and His Emissary," "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World," "Yale University Press, 2009," and in mute italic, "a psychiatrist who taught literature at Oxford before he trained in medicine."
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The faculty that can file a report

The part of you that met Ari can't file a report. The part of you that files the report never met them.

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What to do on Friday

  • stop converging
  • vary the room
  • ask who taught you the axis
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The fifth conversation

Everyone said afterward that the debrief had worked.

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Four people met Ari on Thursday. The fifth — careful and warm and curious and fine, the one they agreed on — is the only one who was never in the building.