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Notification
« A Unified Theory of Statistical Inference? | Main | Open Season on the Messenger »
4 April 2006
Academic Ego
Jim Greiner
In a previous post, I brought up the subject of how we quantitative analysts can abuse the trust decision makers (judges, government officials, members of the public) put in us, when they are inclined to trust us at all. Decision makers should be able to depend on us to give them not just a (clearly and understandably stated) summary of inferences we believe are plausible, but also a (clearly and understandably stated) statement of the weak points of those inferences. “No kidding,� you might say. OK. If it’s that obvious, how come none of us is able to do it?
Here’s an exercise, again, something that’s come out of my experience in teaching a class on statistical expert witnesses in litigation. Next time you think you’ve “got it,� that you’ve done the right thing with a dataset and have drawn some solid inferences, step back and ask: “Suppose I was paid $____/hour to convince people that the work I’ve just done is not worthy of credence. What would I say?�. If all you can come up with are criticisms that make you laugh (because they’re so silly) or ideas that you can dismiss as unscrupulous babbling motivated by a desire for fees, then you might suffer from a mutilating and disfiguring disease: AE.
In the litigation and expert witnesses class, we’re giving students datasets and assigning them positions (plaintiffs or defendants). One of the refreshing things about this exercise has been that it is forcing the student-experts to think about where attacks on their reports will come from. Perhaps even more importantly, because the sources of those attacks are their friends and peers (i.e., people they respect), students begin to remember something they knew before the academic environment tried to make them forget it: there are weaknesses in everything they do.
I don’t know if all academics suffer from AE. Perhaps I’ve been unlucky in meeting a great many who suffer from especially severe cases. Who knows? Perhaps I’m a carrier myself? (Nah . . .)
Posted by James Greiner at April 4, 2006 6:00 AM