Advice for interpolation or extrapolation

There are two types of advice, advice for interpolation and advice for extrapolation. Mathematically extrapolation is an estimation of a value based on extending a known sequence of values or facts beyond the area that is certainly known. Interpolation is an estimation of a value within two known values in a sequence of values.

An example of advice for extrapolation is “hire great people”. While this generic first principle is easy to agree with, it is hard to extrapolate into specific actions. On the other end of the spectrum is advice for interpolation such as “we always interview each candidate 3 times” or “we ask about social life and look for those that do interesting things in their free time”. Advice by examples rarely fits perfectly with your situation (maybe you don’t have resources to do 3 interviews with each candidate) and can seem too simplistic.

The thing is; it is much harder to extrapolate from generic rules than to interpolate from specific examples. With enough decent examples to interpolate from, you can be creative and combine these examples to form new rules: “Let’s do 3 interviews unless we have already worked with them at least 50 hours” or “Let’s ask about their hobby projects since that is more important to us”.

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