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Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

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Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#51
post #6

> Get unlimited access to data science stories from industry leaders on Medium. cant read this article without "upgrading". no i dont want to "upgrade". can we downrank Medium until they stop doing bullshit like this? (yes towardsdatascience is a well known data publication, would love to push them gently into moving off medium)

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Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#52

Regarding hot/crazy: if you try dating in a heavily fished (heavily sorted) environment like online dating, a person of modest looks (me) is likely to meet highly attractive persons only if they have some flaw that keeps them ‘in circulation’ On the other hand, meeting more attractive persons in real life proved much less biased. YMMV All that said, very attractive persons can go a little crazy from the stares and cl…

> So don’t do those things its not nice Advice like this makes the situation worse, because nice people will take your advice and not approach extremely attractive women, because they understand it is the nice thing to do, but assholes will approach extremely attractive women, because they don't care about being nice. So these women end up only being approached by bad actors.

Step 1 is to really understand the persons you’re trying to meet. For starters, to avoid being the worst annoyance. Advanced mode is to be who they want to meet. Starts with knowledge like anything else we learn. Everyone wants to be understood and appreciated, nobody likes to be a target

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#54
post #46
post #3

The phenomenon described in the article is well known as "Berkson's paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

Seems to be what's affecting women most of the time. "You can't be hot and a security specialist!" Just because the average women takes more care of herself than the average man.

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Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#55

I wonder if very beautiful people are more prone to diseases, or to some other evolutionarily negative trait that compensates for its beauty. Otherwise, why isn’t everyone beautiful?

I don't know about beauty but I think in males there is a trade off like that between testosterone and the immune system.

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#56
post #15

An example I like is in basketball. A lot of tall players aren't good shooters. People wonder why, like are they launching the ball too high and messing up the angle? Are their hands too big to precisely control the ball? Are they lazy and not practicing? Seems more likely to be this same paradox - if you're short and can't shoot, you never make it to the NBA.

I think your example is closer to a survivor bias, while the article describes more of a collider bias. Survivor bias arises when you study what you think is a full population, while in fact you're looking at a selected sample that did survive the very thing you're studying. A classical example in finance happens when you want to study, say, the performance of tech companies over the last 10 years. If you just pick c…

You are both correct.

"Survivorship" is the collider being conditioned on.

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#57
> as exercise is a nootropic and smart people are healthier.

Not great examples. Source #1 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/well/move/how-exercise-ma...) says "And of course, mice are not people, and it is impossible to know if the same changes occur in our synapses when we exercise." and source #2 (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-do-smart-pe...) says that smart people tend to live longer and they list several reasons for that including a lower accident and homicide rates. One contributing factor was that smart people are less likely to have certain health problems like high blood pressure and cholesterol that can kill people later in life. It's a big leap from that to smart people are healthier.

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#58
Part of me wonders if these ideas are pushed by people because it's more convenient for them to push them. Like, if you're a 'brilliant' jerk, it's probably easier to stay employed if people think technical skills and people skills are something of a trade off. And if you're not some sort of genius, it can be comforting to think "well, at least I'm not a jerk/crazy/an awful person".

Same with the dating situation. Must be more comforting to think "I'm not the most attractive person ever, but at least I'm sane and many of the more attractive people aren't" rather than "There are probably people out there who are both more attractive and with a nicer personality".

I also suspect people tend to think everything in life must have tradeoffs, D&D character points style. Like, you have X points to go around in total and if a percentage of that goes to intelligence/skill, there must be very little left over to put into charisma.

You can see that a lot in films and TV shows, where being popular or attractive is often treated as if it's incompatible with being intelligent or a nice person. But that's not reality, and some intelligent/attractive people are also perfectly nice, sane people.

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#59

> as exercise is a nootropic and smart people are healthier. Not great examples. Source #1 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/well/move/how-exercise-ma... ) says "And of course, mice are not people, and it is impossible to know if the same changes occur in our synapses when we exercise." and source #2 ( https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-do-smart-pe... ) says that smart people tend to live longer and…

The correlation goes the other way as there is a very long list of health problems that lower cognitive performance.

The population of everyone without Down syndrome is both smarter and healthier than the total population. That extends to things we don’t think of as lowering intelligence like high blood pressure: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/high-blood-pressure-linked-cogn...

Re: Brilliant jerks, crazy hotties, and other artifacts of range restriction (2019)

#60
post #3

The phenomenon described in the article is well known as "Berkson's paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

Thanks - I gave up on the posted article after several paragraphs. From looking at just the first illustration of this Wikipedia article, it all became clear. Maybe I will go back to the posted article to see if it has further insights, but not right now.
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