Freaks And "Parameter" 

 In a  previous post , I briefly described the joint Law School/Department of Statistics course I’m currently co-teaching in which law students act as lawyers and quantitative students act as experts in simulated litigation.  I’ll be writing about some of the lessons learned from this course in blog entries, especially lessons about what is quickly becoming the course’s central challenge for the students:  communication between those with quantitative training and those without.  Here’s my first lesson for the quantitatively adept:  avoid the word “parameter.? 
 


 Of course it isn’t the word “parameter? so much as is it is any of the jargon that we in the quantitative social science business use every day.  And everyone knows that if you’re speaking to persons from another field, you have to speak in regular English (if that’s what you’re speaking).  The hard part is remembering what regular English sounds like.  We in quantitative social science don’t realize what freaks we become. 

 Here’s the vignette.  In a recent session of the class, a student sought to explain to some lawyers how simulation can be used to test whether a model is doing what it’s supposed to do.  She got as far as explaining how one could use a computer to simulate data, but when she began to explain checking to see whether an interval produced by the model covered the known truth, she used the word “parameter.?  The change in expression on the law students’ faces resembled air going out of a balloon. 

 Of course, every first year statistics undergraduate knows what a “parameter? is, and as far as jargon goes, “parameter? is a lot less threatening than some other terms.  But it was enough to cause the lawyers in the room to give up on following her.  It the recovery period was longer than it might otherwise have been because this episode occurred early in the class, when the lawyers and experts were still getting a feel for each other.  The lesson for us is, when communicating with the rest of the world, even the most seemingly innocuous words can make a difference.  We have to recognize that we’ve become freaks.