The savant effect

You meet some strange people in online games. Modern matchmaking systems are quite sophisticated, almost universally being based around Bayesian predictive models of player skill. There are flaws with that approach, but as far as anyone can tell the fairness of the matches isn't one of them. And yet somehow you still get people who are short-tempered, mean, rude, and dumb. In team games, someone like this has an enormous negative effect, often singlehandedly losing the game for their team. But just when you're ready to write them off, those very same neanderthals often pull out some surprisingly skillful play.

A friend was recently telling me about a fairly well known designer in the fashion industry who is a total, utter nightmare to work with. He's bad with money, bad with business, bad at management, bad at organisation, bad – as far as I could make out – at everything. Apparently the continued survival of his label is a miracle that constantly surprises everyone around him. So, hearing this, I assumed that mister bad-at-everything must be a pretty average designer as well. I had the chance to check out one of his pieces and it was... incredible. It was really, really good. I couldn't have been more wrong.

In psychology, there's a phenomenon called the halo effect. When you learn about a positive quality in someone, you tend to generalise that to their entire personality and everything about them. You assume a successful person is also happy, or a beautiful person is also kind. My aunt once said, completely straight-faced, "Michael Jackson can't be a pedophile; he's such a talented musician!" It's a fairly pervasive bias, and it also works negatively: once you get the impression someone is no good, they must be bad at everything.

Okay, so I unfairly halo-effected this designer's artistic ability from his business skills, and the toxic teammate's in-game skill from their attitude. But there's something more there: it's not merely that I shouldn't have inferred one bad quality from another, it's that I should have inferred the exact opposite! The existence of all those negative qualities all but guaranteed a positive quality, in the situations where I encountered them.

The reason why is this: in both cases, there was a filtering function (the matchmaking system or the continued operation of the design business) that was at least partly linear (by which I mean that some degree of in-game skill can make up for some degree of being a huge douche). It's another variant of the anthropic principle; in this case, the fact that the person still has the matchmaking ranking that they do, or can still hold on to a business despite being so incapable, strongly suggests that there is some very large compensatory factor. There are surely people without that factor, but they're not still in business so the question would never come up.

I call this the savant effect, after the fascinating phenomenon of savant syndrome, where some people with severe mental disabilities have surprisingly exceptional abilities in specific areas. Presumably there are a great many people who have severe mental disabilities without any superpowers to compensate for them, but they don't pass the filtering function for being newsworthy or interesting enough to make into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman.

It's sometimes quite tempting, when you see someone or something who appears vastly unfit for the position they're in, to assume that they must have somehow cheated, or that the system is otherwise broken. I hear it in software all the time: "oh, this piece of software is objectively better, but everyone likes the other one for no reason". "How'd that guy get promoted when he's not as good a developer as me?". I mean, for sure, sometimes the system is broken, and people do cheat, but before you jump to that conclusion it's worth considering that maybe the system is fine, you just have a limited view of the candidates and the criteria in question.

And perhaps it's worth considering how much benefit there can be in knowing savants. Someone who manages to be so good at something that it can make up for them being bad at nearly everything else has got to be worth learning from.