How should we evaluate someone who is trying something they haven’t done before? If it’s by looking at how often they seem to succeed in general, that seems hard to distinguish from a “holistic character judgment.”
It seems to me that these are specific purposes, and we can make specific predictions for each of them. Even if we combine them into some sort of holistic judgment (which I think is worth trying to avoid, when possible, but may be unavoidable in some cases), we ought nonetheless to do that only after we have, at our disposal, the cleanly separate evaluations of a person’s work (with which we have properly credited them).
How should we evaluate someone who is trying something they haven’t done before? If it’s by looking at how often they seem to succeed in general, that seems hard to distinguish from a “holistic character judgment.”
Why do we need to evaluate them?
Allocation of resources, attention, affiliation, and so on.
It seems to me that these are specific purposes, and we can make specific predictions for each of them. Even if we combine them into some sort of holistic judgment (which I think is worth trying to avoid, when possible, but may be unavoidable in some cases), we ought nonetheless to do that only after we have, at our disposal, the cleanly separate evaluations of a person’s work (with which we have properly credited them).