Building the People-Signal System and Its Failure Modes
A signal you cannot reproduce is an anecdote; a signal you can reproduce is a system. Run the loop, collect consistently, normalize to a common vocabulary, require convergence across hiring, flow, and network before you act, then state a falsifiable read with a timeframe and grade yourself. One signal is a question, two a hypothesis, three converging a conclusion. But hold the method honestly: baseline before you call a spike, include the failures in your sample, remember that people will spoof a signal once it is worth spoofing, and never confuse early intent with imminent timing. Read carelessly, these signals give you confident nonsense.
Knowledge check
Why is survivorship bias a particular danger when validating people-signals, and how do you guard against it?
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If you only study companies that succeeded and reverse-engineer the signals that preceded them, you will find patterns without checking how often the same signals preceded failures, which overstates their predictive power. You guard against it by evaluating every pattern across the full set of cases, including the firms that hired aggressively or lifted out teams and then failed anyway.