This is Nassim Taleb's “Surgeon Paradox”: “If you're choosing between two surgeons of equal merit, choose the one who DOESN'T look the part, because they had to overcome more to get to where they are.”
> Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.<p>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!<p>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.<p>* 16 years industry experience<p>* History of delivering blah blah<p>* Face looks like a mule kicked it
I have a general philosophy that when outsourcing you should go with the company that has the crappiest web presence and least good branding because obviously, if they're still in business dispute their terrible marketing, they must be good.
Doesn't seem to be mentioned in any other comments or the paper itself, but this is Berkson's paradox.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox</a>
Couldn't this just be statistical noise? 2% isn't a huge difference, and if you partition stock funds into two arbitrary groups it's almost certain that one will on average perform better than the other, but not by a lot. The next question to ask should be how much better are stock managers who have an odd number of hairs on their head, compared to those who have an even number.
Because it’s almost Christmas, a related joke from Warren Buffett:<p>"I heard they called off the Wall Street Christmas pageant because they couldn’t find three wise men"<p>The point being that most fund managers do not outperform the index, so 2% more or less isn’t that important.
link to non paywalled version of this <a href="https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-files/SSRN-id4322134-301bec51-74ff-4c81-9f93-f04d750b901d.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-fi...</a><p>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