My guess is that most intellectuals underestimate just how dysfunctional most firms are. Firms often have big obvious misallocations of resources, where lots of folks in the firm know about the problems and workable solutions. The main issue is that many highest status folks in the firm resist such changes, as they correctly see that their status will be lowered if they embrace such solutions.
The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant.
To serve this function, management consulting firms need to have the strongest prestige money can buy. They also need to be able to quickly walk around a firm, hear the different arguments, and judge where the weight of reason lies. And they need to be relatively immune to accusations of bias – that their advice follows from interests, affiliations, or commitments.
All three of these functions seem to be achieved at a low cost by hiring good-looking kids from our most prestigious schools. These are the cheapest folks you can buy with our most prestigious affiliations, they are smart enough to judge where reason lies, and they have few prior affiliations to taint them with bias. They can not only “borrow your watch to tell you the time,” but can also cow you into submission in accepting that time.
Some experts have argued that children with A.D.D. wouldn’t develop such tolerance because their brains were somehow different. But in fact, the loss of appetite and sleeplessness in children first prescribed attention-deficit drugs do fade, and, as we now know, so do the effects on behavior. They apparently develop a tolerance to the drug, and thus its efficacy disappears. Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behavior worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work. But the behavior worsens because the children’s bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking.
Over the past three weeks, as I’ve written a series of columns about the abuses of the N.C.A.A., one question keeps reverberating in my head: How can this be happening in America?
Here’s the gotcha. Keep in mind that this really happened. Suppose you divide patients in the trial up into those with large kidney stones, and those with small kidney stones. Then even though treatment A was effective for a higher overall percentage of patients than treatment B, treatment B was effective for a higher percentage of patients in both groups, i.e., for both large and small kidney stones. So your Doctor could just as honestly have said “Well, you have large [or small] kidney stones, and treatment B worked for a higher percentage of patients with large [or small] kidney stones than treatment A”. If your Doctor had made either one of these statements, then if you’re like most people you’d have decided to go with treatment B, i.e., the exact opposite treatment.
Now, I’ll confess that before learning about Simpson’s paradox, I would have unhesitatingly done just as I suggested a naive person would. Indeed, even though I’ve now spent quite a bit of time pondering Simpson’s paradox, I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t still sometimes make the same kind of mistake. I find it more than a little mind-bending that my heuristics about how to behave on the basis of statistical evidence are obviously not just a little wrong, but utterly, horribly wrong.
If you think that 1965 is ancient history, and that you are thus free from the burden of responsibility, I would remind you that the Clinton administration backed the Indonesian government in its atrocities against East Timor, where perhaps a third of the population was murdered; that Dennis Blair, former Obama intelligence official, had direct authority in our support of those war crimes…
I hardly need to tell you that our support of Indonesia and its military is ongoing. We are up to our elbows in the current regime, just like we were with the Suharto regime. (A Clinton apparatchik called him “our kind of guy.”) And in a democracy that makes it our responsibility. A foreign army that takes our money and our training and applies them to the harassment, oppression, and murder of its own people— that’s our responsibility. Yours and mine.
This article is a candidate for “blog of the year”. Also:
End the CIA.
Finally, I’ll included his update II to the post, which speaks for me as well as him, just to be clear:
Update II: I want to stress again, as this has been a source of consistent confusion in this debate, that I don’t and couldn’t support Ron Paul’s bid for the presidency, on any number of disqualifying issues.
Who could possibly support such a bill? Not the scientists, that’s for sure; and definitely not the public, unless we keep them as ignorant as possible. The corporations who love this bill are the commercial publishers who profit mightily from scientists’ work. And first among these is Elsevier, the gouging publisher scientists love to hate.