Taleb's Ugly Surgeon

Taleb's Ugly Surgeon is the heuristic whereby, given a sufficiently selective test for some measure on two factors, where the measure does not depend on one factor, one should select explicitly inversely along the second factor.

The example he provides is of a surgeon who looks like a surgeon vs. a surgeon who looks like a butcher. In the event that you are offered both surgeons (i.e. that both surgeons have reached the same societal level as surgeons) you should choose the butcher, because he has to be more successful to conquer the preconceptions he faces.

Say you had the choice between two surgeons of similar rank in the same department in some hospital. The first is highly refined in appearance; he wears silver-rimmed glasses, has a thin built, delicate hands, a measured speech, and elegant gestures. His hair is silver and well combed. He is the person you would put in a movie if you needed to impersonate a surgeon. His office prominently boasts an Ivy League diploma, both for his undergraduate and medical schools.

The second one looks like a butcher; he is overweight, with large hands, uncouth speech and an unkempt appearance. His shirt is dangling from the back. No known tailor in the East Coast of the U.S. is capable of making his shirt button at the neck. He speaks unapologetically with a strong New Yawk accent, as if he wasn’t aware of it. He even has a gold tooth showing when he opens his mouth. The absence of diploma on the wall hints at the lack of pride in his education: he perhaps went to some local college. In a movie, you would expect him to impersonate a retired bodyguard for a junior congressman, or a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria.

Now if I had to pick, I would overcome my suckerproneness and take the butcher any minute. Even more: I would seek the butcher as a third option if my choice was between two doctors who looked like doctors.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons, Medium.com/incerto

While this seems fairly obvious in this case as the visualization below shows, others are not so. The effect is obviously most visible along the frontier.

Visualization for ▼ taleb-surgeon

Consequences

The thing that is interesting is that this applies to discrete variables as well. Take, for instance, a society that rates people of some specific race lower by default. Perhaps they think that South Indians are morons, for instance. If you were to see a South Indian in a position of eminence, you must assume that they're better than someone else from an undiscriminated race in that same position.

An unusual consequence of this is that for those whose entire experience is with people who have passed the selection filter, they will look around them and find that South Indians (in this example) doing the things that they're doing seem unusually more competent. Given a lack of awareness of the selective filter, they would then conclude that South Indians are particularly well-suited to that position of eminence. The stricter the filter unfairly on South Indians, the stronger this will seem, since the South Indians will be more and more competent.

But this is more a property of the filter than of the South Indians, in this case.