Unattractive funds managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2%
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
So now if you have to choose between an Asian doctor and an African American one, you'd have to be pretty foolish to pick the African American one. In the 80s, I would have totally believed the African American doctor must be amazing to make it through. Now we know he was possibly let into medschool with scores that would have gotten an Asian doctor rejected.
>The magnitude of Systemic Antiracism in medical school admissions: A black applicant with a 3.2–3.39 GPA and a 24–26 MCAT had almost a ten times greater chance of admission than an Asian-American with the same scores.
I don't know about studies on actual patient outcomes, but there are good data WRT admissions, which I think is relevant to OP's point about overcoming obstacles.
The story is exactly the opposite of the one that you're telling!
We first found out that GPA and GRE scores mean nothing. Neither GPA nor GRE scores are predictive of grad school performance!
Same with LSAT. It has no predictive validity for your quality as a lawyer. Just about 0.5% of your abilities as a lawyer are related to your LAST score. (not 50%, less than 1%) https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
MCAT scores are a bit more predictive, but only in the stupidest way. Very low MCAT scores are very predictive that you will be terrible and fail out. MCAT is only predictive at the bottom, above the lowest 25% of scores, all MCAT scores are the same.
We don't have a good way of scoring people to get them into these positions. So instead of blindly following a score that we know is meaningless, we try to have some equity of opportunity in society. And, we try to make sure that people have doctors, scientists, etc. that they feel comfortable with and that represent their communities too.
And anyway, since when does someone have to be the same race as you to be part of the same community?
And how many Asians do you think are in that quartile? So they were right, given that choice go with the Asian, thanks to affirmative action we know they are less likely to be in the bottom and therefore less likely to be terrible.
I’m skeptical of these claims because I’ve heard similar things about the SATs, but: https://news.mit.edu/2022/stuart-schmill-sat-act-requirement...
This is a very poor source - an article from a company with no explanation of their method of determining "success" for lawyers.
When you select a population by a criteria the selection itself eliminates the correlation.
So for example if you only accept high LSAT scores to be lawyers you should expect to find LSAT scores to be largely uncorrelated-- the correlation has already been removed. In fact, you may find it be be _inversely_ correlated because the parties with weaker scores that still made it through had other things going for them that made them successful. And this is true even if the test performance is HIGHLY predictive considering the whole population.
And this is clearly true: if nothing else LSAT tests the ability to understand written English and the kinds of basic logical reasoning that are absolutely required in the law. There are some people who do poorly at those tasks and would score very poorly at the LSAT, and would be huge liabilities if they became lawyers.
Now, perhaps those low performers would be filtered out by other criteria ultimately (say the bar exam) and so the LSAT may be redundant in that sense (except for saving huge costs and time for people who would ultimately flunk out...).
All that said, it's common for tests to get overweighed because they're the number we have. Would you prefer the lawyer that has the 5pt higher LSAT score but never worked a case like your vs one who successfully handles them all the time? Obviously the latter! but many other predictors are often not available and ones that are available are often not reducible to numbers or are situation specific.
In any case reasoning from post selected statistics has produced some disastrous decisions in business. Sadly, most people are not in the position to conduct a controlled study most of the time and so the stats you get are always tainted by post-selection effects.
I know someone whose work conducted basic coding tests on applicants. They found that scores on the test didn't predict performance (or were even somewhat anti-predictive: the people who nailed the tests were sometimes fakers who had managed to study for the test). So they eliminated it and then suffered disaster after disaster. The newer hires were generally not as good at their jobs, entirely contrary to the expectations from their prior results.
Holding favored minorities to lower standards has permeated every institution, including medical schools, at every level because people are afraid of being called racist.
"Racist medical school fails african americans at higher rate than asians!" would be the headline and there would be no defense the critical race theory mob would accept.
You have the wrong analogy as well, MCAT is extraordinarily thorough, so instead of evaluating on someone's high school GPA, it would be like evaluating them on an all-day entrance interview on which you evaluate them on their knowledge of software engineering, hardware, various programming languages, and their libraries. And many questions from TAoCP.
> The admission to medical school of Patrick Chavis, one of the black doctors admitted under the medical school's affirmative action program instead of Bakke, was widely praised by many notable parties, including Ted Kennedy, the New York Times, and the Nation. As an actual medical doctor, Chavis's many actions of incompetence and negligence were broad and widespread. The large number of patients that he harmed, the amount of pain and suffering that he caused, the video recordings of his many major mistakes, the huge number of malpractice lawsuits against him, and the eventual loss of his medical license, were all reported by the media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of...
First % is from upper income families, second is from lower, Asian has better representation from lower income families than any other racial group among med students.
> Asian: RI, 2.3 [21.7% vs 9.5%];
> Black: RI, 5.3 [9.1% vs 1.7%];
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
It's like trying to find the fastest sprinter using a race but some of kids are wearing heavy backpacks and some aren't. How do you find the actual fastest sprinters?
I don't know if this was necessarily ever true, diversity quotas or not. It's a marketing narrative that "feels" good (which is how they get you) but I've always gotten the impression that minority candidates are more likely to take extreme risks to make a name for themselves. The west has never really valued craftsmanship as much as we value showmanship.
It was Ben Carson's "illustrious" career that put me off the idea of blindly choosing the underdog; he and Josef Mengele must have taken the same ethics class. Nobody can say shit about the black surgeon who fucks up high-risk, experimental surgeries-- after all, he had to work so hard to get to where he is.
Dr. Roxy too. I was disappointed to learn she wasn't actually a cocaine-addicted clown, but she's had her medical license revoked nonetheless.
A 95th percentile scoring black student raised in the projects with no societal or peer pressure to succeed, could be just as successful as a 99th percentile Asian student raised in a distraction-free, parental-pressured and peer-pressured environment.
In fact, maybe the black student could be better suited to handle the stressful study and work period that medical interns go through.
And that's just the medical field. There's plenty of stories of tech companies and technologies being built by people that weren't high academic overachievers.
There are usually plenty other criteria available to base decisions on with available medical practitioners. I find it’s usually a pretty good idea to not get smart with doctors, and I take the one that shows up.
As for medical admissions, I’ve spent a good few years working collaborating with surgeons. And good grades, like looks, are a distant starting point for such people. Not one particularly relevant to one’s ability to navigate the actual decision making in job or the long-winding process of actually getting to that point.
Personally, I find it much more useful to simply look up whether a doctor is recently pursuing medical publications or research in their work. That’s usually a hallmark of someone who is actually up to date about their specialty outside of daily practice. Just like a dev with an active GitHub page or side projects is better than someone who scored well on their SAT’s to get into a CS program because dad told them to.
And sorry but no, flawed institutional policies somewhere out there don’t make a racist reaction any less racist. It is what it is.
Any organization that does zero virtue signalling but still nonetheless have women working in substantial positions strongly suggests they're genuinely an enlightened organization and/or found lots of way above average candidates somehow.
For any organization that does some amount of signalling, no strong inferences can be made on either direction.
For any organization that signals 24/7, a pretty strong inference can be made in the opposite direction.
We do have quite a few women working for us in significant positions but female applicants for developer positions specifically are still extremely rare.
In addition, she is likely to pay fucking attention. It's well documented that female doctors tend to do things like follow checklists and prodcedure instead of just half-assing it.
Every single specialist female surgeon I have dealt with has been way above average. The male surgeons have been a mixed bag. Some good--some not so much.
This makes sense as a consequence of people's tendency to prefer attractive people, and seems related but not identical to the Peter principle. They'd tend to get responsibility unwarranted by their past performance because they're just so damned good looking!
Hmm, if this study has legs, maybe my next resume should highlight how ugly I am. And if I put a bag over my head during the interview, maybe they'll think I'm so hideous that I must truly be a genius.
* 16 years industry experience
* History of delivering blah blah
* Face looks like a mule kicked it
One risk to personal achievement is externally when too little is expected. It is especially tragic there is undiscovered, latent ability or a lack of appropriate confidence. A more ethical course is to refuse some offers and accolades, and never take things that are too easy. After adolescence, excellence must come from within regardless of difficulty level the world presents.
True also for e.g. beer. For a given price point, the one that advertised the most (Stella for example) put the money there instead of quality.
the metric is of a good site or a poor site being a proxy for the quality of the service or product.
As soon as this metric becomes common enough, it gets gamed, and thus fails as a good metric.
Oh, and for all their pretty prints, dbrand doesn’t put the name of what you actually got on the package, so you have no way to confirm if it’s a poor cut or a shipping error (in case of a MacBook skin).
Their subreddit is littered with these complaints.
Website and reviews went back years and had good reviews (which can always be manipulated), but he was so difficult to deal with over the phone. Was polite, but could not give me definitive answers even when it came to payments. i.e. I told him I could pay him cash or credit and it came to this 5-minute back-and-forth where he would not just tell me what he wanted.
Before I hung up on him, I realized if he has been in business this long he's got to be great at what he does because he is a terrible business-man.
I think I was correct. Guy put the car through its paces, checked everything under-the-hood, did the weirdest test drive I've ever experienced, and wrote up a thorough report. Even the sales-guy was like, where the hell did you find this guy (in an impressed way)?!?
7-years later and he was 95% spot on about everything...one thing he thought I would have to replace ended up being an easy fix instead.
Could be. But then, it's still a reasonable heuristic, because you might find that unattractive managers are uniformly pretty good or better, and attractive ones are 50-50. The best manager might be one of the really really good looking ones, but overall there is less selection pressure on attractive managers with respect to performance. (Halo effect?)
2% per annum is a spectacular difference, compounded. Careers and fortunes are made of that.
Do you actually have first hand experience with this because it doesn't match mine.
"I heard they called off the Wall Street Christmas pageant because they couldn’t find three wise men"
The point being that most fund managers do not outperform the index, so 2% more or less isn’t that important.
It is the reason behind the common recommendation to buy only low-load or no-load funds; because a 1% or 2% load vs a zero or 0.1% load is almost impossible to overcome — over time, the no-/low-load funds will win.
Some prior papers linked from the above news article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1659189
More specifically, identify which attributes your peers select against for no good reason and chase those.
The entire point is that if you're successful without these advantages you're probably better than someone perceived to be as good but with the advantages.
We've all worked for and with unattractive people.
these are subcategories of being attractive, or entangled dimensions at the very least
> if you're successful without these advantages you're probably better
marginally better at the specific task at hand, which in most professions can be counterbalanced by being attractive
for example take two engineers, they have equal interpersonal skills but one is more skilled and less attractive than the other. The less skilled engineer may still have higher throughput as a result being better able to manage up, despite having the same interpersonal skills, simply because of their attractiveness bonus. I think you're really underestimating the effect size, I think it's large enough to be significant in most work.
absolutely not true, they're often about being dominant or authoritative. phone work is a perfect example where people trust you more if you have a deeper voice because you're seen as more authoritative.
Men with hair are considered more attractive, balding men are considered more authoritative because most men in positions of authority are older and balding.
Here, let me reply to your made-up situation with my own made-up situation.
What if one engineer was good looking and gay and slept his way to the top and another engineer was ugly but good.
who will continue rising faster? The gay slut, duh. therefore everyone should endeavor to be a gay slut despite _THIS CONVERSATION_ being about engineering skill.
No, your attractive colleagues are gonna make up that 2% and then some, not you. All these attractive fund managers got more funding, more promotions, better salaries etc according to the study, but they did a way worse jobs.
Their super power is that they make others pay for their success, they don't create the success themselves. The unattractive people however do help make other successful, that is what the 2% extra return per annum shows.
If you need people to do sales, then yeah hire an attractive person and give them commission, that way it works for you. But for most other jobs their success comes from manipulating you, and then their attractiveness works against you more than it helps.
this paper also defines good looking and how to measure it with machine learning algorithms. given that look is highly subjective, any findings based on that is not very useful
Is there a non-paywalled copy of this?
https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-fi...
Like, if the attractive fund manager gets a 4% ROI, is the unattractive one getting 6% or 4.08% (0.08 is 2% of 4%).