Ultimately it boils down to what a given surgeon practiced in their career.

Is this a concept that exists? I thought "thin tailed" and "fat tailed" were defined by contrast to a normal distribution.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtosis

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(mathematics)

> Excess kurtosis, typically compared to a value of 0, characterizes the “tailedness” of a distribution. A univariate normal distribution has an excess kurtosis of 0. Negative excess kurtosis indicates a platykurtic distribution, which doesn’t necessarily have a flat top but produces fewer or less extreme outliers than the normal distribution. For instance, the uniform distribution (ie one that is uniformly finite over some bound and zero elsewhere) is platykurtic. On the other hand, positive excess kurtosis signifies a leptokurtic distribution. The Laplace distribution, for example, has tails that decay more slowly than a Gaussian, resulting in more outliers.

(Emphasis added.)

You can't have a bell curve with thin tails, because a bell curve has standard tails by definition.

even if hand skills is orthogonal to test scores, test scores could still be highly correlated with outcomes