Being that someone appears to be my regular job :) It's absolutely true that, if all you know about an individual is membership of one of these populations, th

Being that someone appears to be my regular job :) It's absolutely true that, if all you know about an individual is membership of one of these populations, then you know very little. Any new information about the actual person will quickly swamp this signal. If you've actually met A & B (or seen their work) then group membership is irrelevant. This is the situation in hiring people. But it's also true that these distributions lead you to make predictions about the tails. While any one individual is vanishingly unlikely to win a Nobel prize, you can predict that (if they are fairly awarded) there should be a huge slant in how many go to each group. And I really mean huge, this ratio (if things are Gaussian, etc) grows exponentially in how far along the tail you go. Seeing such a skew is thus no evidence that hiring/prize-awarding is biased.