Height is a proxy for basketball ability and the résumé is a proxy for research ability. It is possible that the latter is a worse proxy than the former, but it seems unlikely that it is much worse.
(ETA: Especially given that the latter enables you to go to arXiv and look at the applicant’s actual research output so far, whereas knowing how tall someone is doesn’t enable you to watch all the basketball matches they have played in.)
Height is a proxy for basketball ability and the résumé is a proxy for research ability. It is possible that the latter is a worse proxy than the former, but it seems unlikely that it is much worse.
(ETA: Especially given that the latter enables you to go to arXiv and look at the applicant’s actual research output so far, whereas knowing how tall someone is doesn’t enable you to watch all the basketball matches they have played in.)
The problem is that height is a number, whereas it’s hard to translate résumé into a number without resorting to various gameable metrics.
So what?
It’s a lot easier to measure height then evaluate a résumé.