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I think this has the best explaining power behind OP's heuristic unless the businessmen OP is referring to are the baseball scouts from Moneyball.
I wish there was a guide for retards like me that listed out all the translations of "When they say X social/personal attributes is bad/good because of set(Y), they actually mean set(Z)". These are not groundbreaking revelations by any means intellectually, but they still catch me off guard because they don't come naturally to me.
I live in Dubai and recently I attended a talk by a woman from PWC about how the MENA region is the next Silicon Valley because tech startups secured 4B USD in funding. That is a pittance FYI. It was immediately obvious to me that this lady with a big-name accounting degree from the UK is committing the base rate fallacy in a very data visualization filled presentation, she did not justify her next silicon valley statement with "the MENA region has more funding than the past" or the "MENA region has more funding than other regions". Just that it has a "big" number digit of funding. Not only that her data analysis and visualizations lacked the most successful tech country in the MENA Region, Israel!
Then it hit me.. Her job isn't to speak the truth, the data are just there for decorations/pretense of credibility/deniability, it's to speak what people want to hear with plausible deniability (fancy UK masters degree), while not offending anyone as well (Excluding Israel because Arabs regardless of normalization of relationtions wouldn't like hearing Jews are doing better, even smart and rich Arabs). Her job is to Euler an audience on a decision predetermined by someone else already regardless of the data, it's a dog and pony show.
This lady had 100x the social sense that I had. Because my presentation would have spoken the truth about the tech sector of the MENA region (it sucks donkey dick) and included Israel. I would have lamented "oh but they told me to analyze the data and present on it, I did that! why did I get fired??".
I did think I could embarrass her by pointing those things out, but I would just mark myself as a troublemaker.
Her job is to land fat consultancy fees for PWC contracting for the MENA governments hoping to turn the oil money (before it runs out) into something high-value that will replace it. Hence the dream of being Silicon Valley (and they're not alone, a lot of European governments - including my own - are trying to get their own Silicon Whatever off the ground).
PWC know there's a snowball in hell's chance of that happening. But do they care? No, they care about "can we get a multi-million contract out of these pigeons to waste a couple of years pretending to build their toy tech start-up centre". That's what she was there for, and it's good that you eventually realised that. You wouldn't have embarrassed her, you would have embarrassed yourself as not being clued-in enough to realise the game being played.
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