The tyranny of height

There I was, in the hospital and minding my own business.

There is not much privacy in the hospital. Consequently, the tiny bit of privacy and dignity that is available is much appreciated.

Mom's bowels needed to move. Aides came with a bedpan. I stood in the hallway as events unfolded. There are some indignities that are best avoided if possible. Dropping a mega-deuce in front of your son (even if he is in his sixties) is one of those.

Sparrow Hospital has a system where very specialty has their own color of scrubs. A doctor was striding down the hall, clearly the Alpha male on the floor. He was a young man and clearly quite fit. 

He was short. At 5'-9" I towered over him.

A passing thought flitted through my mind, "I bet this guy has a hard time getting dates."

I am not in the market for a mate so I don't pay much attention to the technology. But I recall some study where the profiles of millions of clients at a huge dating service were evaluated. The study concluded that the service was flawed because the profiles were flawed. There was zero discrimination in the profiles of what the clients offered and what they were looking for. Based solely on the profiles, they were clones looking for clones.

Tversky and Kahneman wrote this in 1974:

Insensitivity to predictability. People are sometimes called upon to make such...predictions as the future value of a stock, the demand for a commodity, or the outcome of a football game. Such predictions are often made by representativeness. 

Hence, if people predict solely in terms of the favorableness of the description, their predictions will be insensitive to the reliability of the evidence and to the expected accuracy of the prediction. This mode of judgment violates the normative statistical theory in which the extremeness and the range of predictions are controlled by considerations of predictability. When predictability is nil, the same prediction should be made in all cases.

.AND.

The illusion of validity. As we have seen, people often predict by selecting the outcome (for example, an occupation) that is most representative of the input (for example, the description of a person). The confidence they have in their prediction depends primarily on the degree of representativeness (that is, on the quality of the match between the selected outcome and the input) with little or no regard for the factors that limit predictive accuracy. 

Thus, people express great confidence in the prediction that a person is a librarian when given a description of his personality which matches the stereotype of librarians, even if the description is scanty, unreliable, or outdated. The unwarranted confidence which is produced by a good fit between the predicted outcome and the input information may be called the illusion of validity. 

And that doctor striding like Colossus down the Ward on the 9th floor? He would have been rejected out-of-hand as a desirable date because he was not four-to-ten inches taller than most of the women looking for Mr. Right.

He would not be rejected because there is any correlation between height and suitability for a life-mate. He would be rejected because height is easy to measure and because Ken is 4% taller than Barbie and because the cool and worldly kids in middle-school were the ones who had been "held back", and consequently were a year older than their peers.

Bargains abound if you look in places where others walked by without slowing their pace.