I believe Ben is distinguishing between tests-that-are-useful-because-of-what-the-test-administrators-can-give-you, vs honest assessments of the value of something.
For example, as a VC you could genuinely not care about what clothes people wear, or you could loudly announce that you don’t care while actually assessing applicants based on their visual resemblance to the ideal founder in your head. Ability to guess your clothing password is associated with ability to guess passwords in general, which is associated with success in general, so even an arbitrary clothing test is somewhat predictive of success. What it’s not predictive of is the value a product will create or the marginal difference this funding will make, or success in a world that’s based on these things instead of password guessing.
I believe Ben is distinguishing between tests-that-are-useful-because-of-what-the-test-administrators-can-give-you, vs honest assessments of the value of something.
For example, as a VC you could genuinely not care about what clothes people wear, or you could loudly announce that you don’t care while actually assessing applicants based on their visual resemblance to the ideal founder in your head. Ability to guess your clothing password is associated with ability to guess passwords in general, which is associated with success in general, so even an arbitrary clothing test is somewhat predictive of success. What it’s not predictive of is the value a product will create or the marginal difference this funding will make, or success in a world that’s based on these things instead of password guessing.