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Why Hot Guys are Jerks and Cute Girls Are Dumb? Berkson's Paradox

9,292 views Wait, is this logic right? • Nov 10, 2023
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Do you think good-looking people are always the worst? If yes, you need to watch this video. Learn if all hot guys are rude and all beautiful women are not smart or it's just a mental construct. Understand why we think this or why this exists in a nuanced fashion in this episode of FutureIQ.

We covered Berkson's Paradox; aka collider bias, the dumbness of politicians, the lack of social abilities of geeks and much more in this. Don't miss it.

More videos for you:
System 1 vs System 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIVTMooO7o4
Power Law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2YrICwDR5g
Dunbar's Numbers: https://youtu.be/ekAtODyfkyw

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

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you must have heard someone say that all hot guys are jerks or all pretty women are dumb right yeah nobody's called me a jerk but I know what you mean in fact many of you probably have actual experiences which cause you to believe this but what if I told you that you are falling for a classic bias called burkson Paradox and if you are not careful it can impact you choosing the wrong surgeon for your surgery or you you're getting depressed because you're not thinking about the world right oh no so please go on this is actually quite interesting I didn't realize that the bias had a name B Paradox so let's start with all hot guys are jerks right yeah
why are is that really true why this is actually the lived experience of a lot of people and I'll tell you why it happens right imagine a girl on a dating app okay right she's looking at guys right and there are two categories of guys okay there are good-looking guys and not good-look guys swipe right and swipe left no the not goodlooking ones also if they have an interesting personality something that really stands out she's going to swipe okay right the good-looking guys have lower standards obviously okay but here is the thing okay does it necessarily mean that there are no good-look guys who also have good personality and things that stand out there must be right yeah EX there are
two issues right one is that they probably don't even show up in her uh app because you know they're all taken so quickly or they're out of her League okay uh give us reality checks we can cash please so now the situation is that there are four kinds of guys right goodlooking and good personality out of your league not even showing up in your app now you know imagine this as a 2X two on one axis I have bad looking versus goodlooking guys and on the other axis I have good personality versus not so good right the top right corner which is good looks and good personality are probably out of her League they don't
even show up on her app true right true true then top left is good-looking jerks yes she's swiping on those the top right bottom right is is the not good not so good-looking people but excellent personality which she's swiping on and the bottom left which is neither good-looking nor good personality everybody swipes left on those right so the only people she's comparing are the good-look jerks and the okayl looking smart people right now tell me what is she going to think yeah because this is a classic selection bias bias right this is the problem because the selection made it so that the statement is true but in the real life the statement is not really true huh you mentioned pretty
women also along with good-looking guys yes so there are in fact two explanations to that okay one of them is burson's paradox that we already talked about and the other is a more complex one right okay but let's assume no longer we are not dating right just in the wide world okay uh in various roles some uh let's take the job market for example market right now it is easy to imagine right that if somebody has reached a particular position a woman you're saying a woman she's either there because because she's extremely good at her job right and plain looking or pretty women get promoted there even though they're not that good-look this sounds sexist but it's not well no it is
sexist but the world is sexist and we'll do an entire episode on the this sound sexist and it is but we'll do an episode on it we'll explain yeah okay but yeah so that's the thing right there are pretty women who are also smart and they have probably gone way ahead they not at the same position right on this position are only the pretty Dum women and the smart plain looking ones I can hear keyboards being furiously typed away at but please continue no no there is a bigger nastier explanation okay um I once remember hearing a famous Indian TV personality saying that the producers forced her to appear dumb on TV yeah because that's what the audience
wants yeah okay even if there isn't a producer breathing down your neck I know women who believe that if they behave extra intelligently it is threatening for the men around and so they play dump so unfortunately life sort of pushes you in that direction boxes you into boxes you in there yeah scary uh and I can't speak for the woman who was told by her producer to act in a certain way but uh in in media you're generally told to speak uh to a level that your audience can understand and when you take in consideration George khin's statement that 50% of the world population has below average IQ because average IQ is basically 50% of the world uh then you
do realize that there is some sense in what the producer was telling I'm not trying to defend the producer I'm not trying to um accuse the woman but that's the way media works the two reasons why we see this Paradox is one is the selection effects and second is that there are people who are smart but they're pretending to not be smart because that's what the world is looking for okay so that basically means that uh not all hot guys are jokes not all pretty women are dumb and what does this say about various stereotypes actually a lot of interesting stereotypes are explained by burson's Paradox right okay so politicians are dumb my favorite because dumb things
politicians say are all over the news why the smart things they say are not quotable right yeah when you put it like that it certainly makes sense correct movie stars have horrible personal lives you know why because the ones that have good personal lives are not in the media so it's either movie stars with horrible personal lives or people around you who are good personal Liv but not movie stars right any movie star whose personal life you don't know about is probably the good one correct exactly Tech Geeks lack social skills right they don't they absolutely don't the problem is that you know probably Tech Geeks with social skills are probably at a level where they don't hang out with you
right yeah or you don't know realize that they are Tech gigs what does this say about you na what does this say about you why are you hanging out with me let's move on or what does that say about me there we go Elevate yourself people Elevate yourself yeah so H restaurants with good food have bad service right again I mean it is kind of true because the restaurants with good food and good service soon become expensive and you can't afford to go there right somebody just watch the Netflix special or that Netflix series or whatever it is the anyway this is all good light-hearted banter and good stereotype jokes no this affects real life
important things really okay let's take healthare healthare that's serious imagine you go to a hospital and you look at the Patients there there are the ones with heart attacks and there are smokers and you try to figure out the correlation between them what do you think you will discover uh smokers have a higher percentage of of heart attacks no if you do an analysis in the hospital you will see that the ones with the heart attacks huh there are fewer smokers and amongst the population without heart attacks there are more smokers what yes because again there is a selection you didn't take the whole population you just took the ones who are in hospital right now oh right right
because what has happened is one is that of course both smokers and heart attack there is a small fraction amongst the nonheart attack people smoking makes you much more at risk for all other conditions right like diabetes and obesity and this and that and lung cancer and whatnot which means that in the nonheart attack population you will see a much higher percentage of smoking ah okay right so this is and in fact really this happens I mean somebody uh publish a statistics without realizing that buron Paradox is happening it happened during Co I thinking because there was a statistic saying that healthcare workers were at a lower risk for coid lower risk okay yes again similar problem because healthcare
workers all of them were forced to take tests correct whereas in general population only those with symptoms were taking tests oh the risk in terms of the percentages that were calculated as a result of the data but yeah if they had done their null hypothesis correctly they would again null hypothesis is we' done on this channel you should definitely check out if they had done their null hypothesis correctly the results would be a lot different is what you're trying to say or in simpler terms if they had taken the entire population not just the ones who have appeared for tests right similarly people with booster dose were at higher risk of Micron reinfection this was an actual
thing that was floating around well the one with higher infection risk are the ones taking the third dose and the ones yeah who aren't were not taking the third so there's a correlation but it's in the opposite direction from what by the if you are like the statistics type and you're going to dig deeper into this it is called collider bias okay so you look up that term collider bias fine so Buren's Paradox has a huge impact on Healthcare and we should be uh well not just healthare other important areas simpler basic areas of life okay let me take another example okay I have quite regular ly heard in my career in the software industry that Ians are lazy
jerks okay and so that you shouldn't hire Ians I may have contributed to that a little bit I know companies who refuse to hire Ians because really because Ians are lazy jerks I thought that was just a rumor no no lots of I know personally people right okay again those people are falling for burkson Paradox right I mean they might be right in not hiring Ians but that doesn't mean that Ian are jerks or lazy at a higher percentage than the rest of the population what is happening is that the Ians who are not Laz are not even applying for jobs to this company right so they either get lazy Ians or hardworking people from other company
colleges right yes another one that you might have heard is that you know college dropouts make really successful CEOs right Bill Gates Mark Zuckerberg right Steve Jobs Steve Jobs the CEO of CEOs again there is a selection bias here related to berkson's Paradox which is that when a CEO has completed college and has good grades and all that nobody writes stories about them yeah if if the CEO is well educated has a good degree then you don't really think of mentioning it there's another very interesting one related to what we earlier talked about right we said that U uh pretty women get uh promoted right doesn't apply only to pretty women and some men get promoted
and there now the buron Paradox applies very interestingly in Reverse mutual fund managers okay okay you get to be a mutual fund manager either because you're extremely good at picking stocks or you're good-look there is research proving this okay of course the good-looking guys also have to be good at picking stocks but they don't have to be as good as the play ones okay as a result there is actual research showing that if you look at mutual funds and if you look at performance the good-looking guys have worse returns all right the next time you're pick the next time you're picking a mutual fund look for the manager and search for what they look like on
images I feel so stupid actually recommending this these these seem like um you know Corner cases yeah but think of the following that AI is now going to make more and more decisions in your life oh wow and the data that has been provided to the AI the training data is very likely to have similar selection effects so the AI is probably going to suffer from Buren's Paradox okay this episode just went from a light-hearted banter to a very serious dis future we haven't gotten to the serious yet okay go on you are on Instagram you are a teenager on Instagram right okay what do you notice goodlooking people everywhere well and happy people and happy
everywhere right so everyone on your insty is happy yes why is that happening because again similar kind of selection effect they don't put their sad moments on Insta exactly yeah right and there is again way too much data showing that since 2012 depression and mental health issues have gone up do you know what happened in 2012 uh Ina a insta I I was thinking of the Mayan calendar generally social media smartphones they Rose and along with this uh insecurity Rose amongst teenagers and a lot of it can be attributed to berkson's Paradox right them not realizing that that what they are seeing is a selected incorrect sample you know what bothers me it is such an innocuous thing it is such a
simple thing about stereotypes and once you start digging into it is when you realize the kind of massive effects it has well no you don't realize okay the problem is that your system to brain realizes this system one Brain still sees the pretty pictures on Instagram and gets unhappy okay it's very difficult for you to logically and rationally convince yourself to not get unhappy right but you should try because you are comparing your behind the scenes to their highlights real of Life naen the Bollywood director producer actor whatever you want to call him no but see same thing if you look at couples right it will seem that other couples are happier than you because you
are seeing your inside and they're only the outside story right yeah the Friendship Paradox right what is a friendship Paradox if if you count take a list of all your friends and how many friends they have H and do an average you will find that you have fewer friends than average okay this is true no matter what you do you do it in your Facebook friends you do it in your real life friends you do it in anything you'll find that your friends on an average have more friends than you and I can say this without even knowing you it is true for all of these people sitting here do you know why why because there in your
set of friends there will be a few who have lots of friends yeah and that's and they mess up the average yeah right so now in your set of friends everybody is below average because of those few people by the way this is a power law check out our episode on power law so many episodes we are referencing here give them a break man tell okay now tell me how do I deal with bugson Paradox in my life because you've depressed me some simple rules please right this is uh this example comes from En Talib Nim Nicholas Talib yes it's called Talib surgeon right okay surgeon so when you are going for surgery and you have the
choice between two surgeons who roughly have the same reputation right they're so considered to be equally good but one of them is good looking well-dressed sharp well spoken looks like a successful surgeon yeah and the other guy so basically one of them looks like George Clooney from ER yes and the other guy looks like a butcher right which which one should guy looks like me everyone instinctively is going to pick the George Clooney right but you should pick the butcher do you know why because if their reputations are equal that means that the butcher had to work harder to reach the same reputation he's a better surgeon same as the fund manager that you were
explaining a little while ago TB surgeon interesting Whenever there are two equal choices right that look equal but in terms of Charisma one is lower pick the uncharismatic one this can't be right every time right because the the good no the good-looking ones might argue that they have had to work despite their good looks that's [ __ ] okay we'll do an entire episode on that okay but this is wrong in a different way okay okay now again imagine going back to the dating app right it is possible that there is an actual causal connection between them in that you know hot guy being a jerk is actually caused by him why because he can get away being a
jerk right so in that case then Bon's Paradox doesn't apply because if the attribute a is causing attribute B then Bon's Paradox is about correlation not coration the moment to bring in cation ceases to exist correct right so no C bias there remember that yeah but keep in mind these two things and make use this to make decisions if there is no causal connection H then you know how to choose all right so the thing to remember here is check for causality and stuff like that and don't be fooled by stuff that could be random yes in fact the more General principle here is that we can get fooled by statistics We Can Get Fooled by Randomness you should
check out our episode on Luck versus survivorship bias Shri Kant naen future IQ