Academic Ego 

 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.  鈥淣o kidding,鈥? you might say.  OK.  If it鈥檚 that obvious, how come none of us is able to do it? 

 Here鈥檚 an exercise, again, something that鈥檚 come out of my experience in teaching a class on statistical expert witnesses in litigation.  Next time you think you鈥檝e 鈥済ot it,鈥? that you鈥檝e done the right thing with a dataset and have drawn some solid inferences, step back and ask:  鈥淪uppose I was paid $____/hour to convince people that the work I鈥檝e just done is not worthy of credence.  What would I say?鈥?.  If all you can come up with are criticisms that make you laugh (because they鈥檙e 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鈥檙e 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鈥檛 know if all academics suffer from AE.  Perhaps I鈥檝e been unlucky in meeting a great many who suffer from especially severe cases.  Who knows?  Perhaps I鈥檓 a carrier myself?  (Nah . . .)