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Comment by cjf101 | Hacker News Reader

While there may be overvaluation of appearance/social ability, it's likely exaggerated in this particular example.

Appearance and social ability in surgical teams are important because surgeons are also leaders and caregivers. These attributes will matter to the members of their team and their patients. Team members who believe in their leadership tend to be more effective. Patients who believe in their care have better recovery rates.

If you did find such an example, it would be worth finding out what they are doing in other areas to compensate for the lack of this attribute.

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> Team members who believe in their leadership tend to be more effective. Patients who believe in their care have better recovery rates.

There may be other factors regarding recovery rates perhaps counter-intuitive with respect to the presence of leadership (or appearance of leadership). Somewhat related:

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/startling-benefit-cardiology-me...

"High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists are away from their regular practices."

That is blackly humourous to me. Wow. Thanks for the link.

"The researchers found that certain intensive procedures were performed less often on the high-risk patients in the study during meeting dates than outside meeting dates.

One explanation for these findings, the researchers said, is that physicians who don’t attend the conferences take a more conservative approach for high-risk patients; another is that the physicians who stayed behind were reluctant to perform intensive procedures on another physician’s patients while that doctor was out of town. Survival rates might be higher because, for high-risk patients with cardiovascular disease, the harms of intensive procedures may unexpectedly outweigh the benefits."

This sounds a little like the programming conference effect. Where someone comes home excited about a new way of doing things, and applies it without first proving it out in isolation. Except people die.

I haven't heard about the programming conference effect. That makes sense. Proving it out involves exposing the theory to a wide range of adversarial inputs to demonstrate robustness.

There seems to be a similar trend in mortality with respect to getting treated in a teaching hospital vs nonteaching hospital:

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles...

At teaching hospitals treatments, may be very conservative as well (perhaps even more so than at non-teaching hospitals) with residents whose teaching is freshly learned.

Yes, this is a paradox that applies in business.

A VC may very well believe that you are brilliant, and doing great work, and can make all the right decisions.

But it matters to his investment that he believes that others will buy into your agenda.

Investors are incentivized to prefer a 'fast talker' over someone who is not, if only because they believe that the 'fast talk' will benefit their future investment.

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