The Kobayashi Maru scenario is a famous fictional test given to cadets at Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy. The situation is designed to be unwinnable and the real test is to evaluate how the candidate thinks and performs under stress.
Are there, or have there been real life equivalents to this test? For example, are there any (real) military academies, boot camps, civilian universities, job training programs, trade schools, job interviews, etc. that do something like this? E.g. university instructor requires students in his class to find three peer-reviewed articles on transhemispherical exodynamic theory, knowing that only two have actually been published since the theory was invented earlier that year. Instructor watches the students squirm for a bit before deciding which student to select as a research assistant based on how hard they tried and to what extent they tried to research smarter, not harder.
I’m not talking about stress tests in general where a person is being evaluated as to whether or not they can succeed under high pressure, but tests where the person is being evaluated as to their grace, composure, and strategy when faced with impending failure that is not their fault.
What you’re thinking of is what’s usually called a “lose-lose” situation and it’s a common business school lesson. Here’s an example:
Your specific goal is to maximize both unit sales (X) and per unit profit (Y). You’re offered a deal which would result in sales of many units (X+) but a somewhat smaller per unit profit (Y-).
Do you a) accept the deal and hope your boss agrees that volume overrides per unit profit, or b) insist that the customer pay the higher per unit price and risk losing the entire sale?
Interesting, but this isn’t exactly what I was envisioning. In your case, the student knows that it’s a lose-lose situation and realizes that they will be graded on the quality of their justification for the option they choose. A Kobayashi Maru business school assignment might have the students placed into a virtual market simulator and told that their grade depends on how much money they can rack up in 50 game turns. In reality, it’s a bluff and the student is evaluated on whether they utilized any strategies that were taught to the class, etc… The simulator is rigged - if you outsource your manufacturing to Outer Ruritania there will be a coup and industry will be nationalized, if you scale back manufacturing and invest your revenue in the stock market there will be a crash, if you become a market speculator and short the S&P 500 there will be a huge market rally, if you buy out Delta Airlines then there will be a big air disaster, if you sign a marketing deal with Disney World then your CEO will be mugged and all your IT passwords will be stolen and you will be hacked and your corporate bank accounts drained, etc… Maybe the result isn’t graded at all but students are debriefed with the “truth” and then told that the real, graded assignment is to write an essay on their simulator experience, what they tried, why, and why they might have went broke even though they tried.
I should have said working in retail. I was being a little silly, but that is the first thing that came to mind. Lots of times in retail a store is very understaffed and the sales people try to make sure they can help everyone, and then someone wants to take up all sorts of time who is not very serious about buying something while a whole lot of other people are getting irritated, and no matter what you need to find a way to stay smiley and not let anyone walk out the door in a huff.
About post # 20 & again on post 39 here, I mentioned my youngster had been put through a Kobayashi Maru equivalent in the sim training for a Airline Transport rating. This was done by the training company, not his airline. They twice subjected him (as pilot-in-command) to a sudden unrecoverable wind-shear immediately after takeoff. I got to witness this as a “passenger” in the simulator. I never really understood the reason for it.
Apologies, as I haven’t yet figured how to link to a single post in a thread.
Back in the day there was a medical school interviewer who was notorious for this. One of his standard ploys (according to the rumor mill) was to ask a prospective student to open the window, which was nailed shut.
Was this an admissions exam or was this administered to med students? Was there a specific “think like a doctor” approach that they expected you to use (e.g. smash the window, call a supervisor, immediately file a Form 10-G before touching anything, proceed to the library to do research, etc.) or was it more of a personality icebreaker, etc.?
Every day I go to work it seems there is a kobiyashi maru test.
Need information to do the job, but can’t get information to do the job unless I harass my supervisors. Can’t harass my supervisors if I want to do the job. I’m sure there is more of this in the military, cause I was there!
It doesn’t make any sense though. The “Kobayashi Maru” simulation wasn’t a hard, thankless job. It was an experiment (fictionally) designed to see how the student reacted to complete, total, unmitigated failure. It’s not that you cannot achieve everything your boss asks you to do, it’s that you and your entire crew are doomed to die a horrible death no matter what you do.
It should be noted that the Kobayashi Maru simulation does not make a great deal of sense if you look at it very closely, it’s just a way to introduce themes and foreshadow some events in the film “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
pullin’s example would be a more accurate example. I am sure there are examples from the field of psychology where people are subjected to similarly unfair, unwinnable simulations.
Actually retail does work, there are plenty of dickish customers who aren’t going to be happy no matter what you do. I’ve litrrally had customers ignore mr ehrn I greeted them in my checkout linr and attempted to make dmall talk, then complain about how unfriendly I was ehen I stopped talking to thrm and just rang up their order since they apparently didnt want to speak to me.
I’m fine making small talk, or ringing up in silence, but you cant treat people like that…it was six years ago and I still get mad thinking about those jerks. Thank goodness I dont work retail anymore.
Christ almighty, retail is clearly not an answer to the question.
The stakes are not the same, but one interview technique is to ask the impossible question: how many pianos are there in New York? How many rivets on a 747? How many gas stations in the United States? The whole point isn’t to get the answer but listen to the candidate reason through how they would attack the problem.
Not a real-life example (except as a metaphor for M.A.D. and the Cold War) but the plot of the movie WarGames was essentially one big Kobayashi Maru scenario.
When I went through Marine Corps Officers Candidate School (OCS) back in 1987 there was a Reaction Course. The exercise was your fire team or squad would do a tactical exercise way up on top of a hill, being graded on it, then your group had X minutes to get down the hill to the reaction course where there were physical barriers and material you could use to get across, or get the wounded guy across, or some semblance of getting something from Point A to Point B. Not all the problems were solvable given the material and conditions, but the leader was graded on how they approached the problems and handled themselves as leaders. Then you humped back up that damnable hill and did the whole thing over again with a new leader, all friggin day long, up and down, up and down, up and down.
It was an interview you had to pass to be selected for medical school. Fortunately, I wasn’t interviewed by this guy, and I decided not to attend this school, so I cannot add any more detail.
I’ve always felt that the “Kobayashi Maru” test was an overall test of character. Character meaning how well the cadet emotionally handled the death of his/her crew because of something they themselves had ordered, emotionally delt with the destruction of their own vessel or the destruction of the Kobayashi Maru and it’s crew, or the ridicule from the Klingons, or fellow cadets, for not attempting the rescue.
In other words, a test to see who is suseptable to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As well as a test to see if the cadet would be better suited to another field (Engineering, Navigation, Red-shirted Sacrificial Crewman for away-missions).
While many people can get back on a horse if they fell off, how many can get back on another horse if the first, and second horse were shot out from under them? And the bullets are still flying? Future Starship Captains would be expected to accept the results of the no-win situation, put it behind them, and be expected to carry on.
Improvise, Adapt and Overcome or stay home where it’s safe.
We had something sort of similar in a geography course I took as an undergraduate. There was a park lake in town that was notorious for flooding the surrounding neighborhoods when it rained heavily. We were divided into groups and tasked with determining how to prevent the lake from flooding. What the instructor didn’t tell us was there was nothing that could be done, that was the correct answer. He said afterward that many if not most groups came up with “Make the lake deeper,” which wouldn’t matter if the water surface was still at the same level. My group finally came up with the correct answer, that shit happens and nothing could be done to prevent that particular lake from flooding. It’s going to flood as long as you have a lake right there due to a number of factors that would not have been practical to change.