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So, I was in the hospital for a long time. And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me -- said, "Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you." I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. And what's the brilliant idea he had? He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric.
It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life -- because I had to keep the width the same. When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure. I said, "Can I see some evidence for this?" So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots -- not very informative. I said, "What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? What would happen then?" "Oh, don't worry about it," he said. "We have lasers; we can whiten it out." But I was still concerned, so I said, "You know what, I'm not going to do it."
And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. (Laughter) And he said, "Dan, what's wrong with you? Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently?" None of those happened. And this was very surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments -- there were many treatments I decided not to do -- and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. But I decided not to have this treatment. And I went to his deputy and asked him, "What was going on? Where was this guilt trip coming from?" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing.
(Laughter)
Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. Right, that's what he seems like. But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got -- I was very happy -- aside from one person. There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test.
So I looked carefully at this guy. He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. "Fantastic!" I thought. "Let's throw him out. Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?"
But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? What would have happened if he was in the other group? Would we have thrown him out then?" We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low," because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment.
But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens.
The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I wasn't doing something bad. In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances.
I do want to leave you with one positive thought. I mean, this is all very depressing, right -- people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on. The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
我之前很长一段时间都在住院 出院的几年后,我故地重游 烧伤部门的主任激动的接见了我-- 说到 ''丹,我为你准备了一种新型神奇的治疗方法" 我怀着激动的心情随他走进了他的办公室 当我刮胡子的时候,他给我做了具体解释 我在左边发髻旁边有些小黑点 而我的脸右侧 我曾严重烧伤过 所以几乎没有须发 这就缺乏对称 而他的天才之处在哪儿呢? 他打算在我脸右边 纹上一些小黑点 来让我看起来有对称的美感
这主意听着很有意思 他让我去把胡子剃了 告诉我 这是一种奇怪的剃须方式 因为我曾想过 而且觉得我的剃须方法 会定型成后半辈子的剃须方法-- 因为我必须要保证两边宽度相同 当我回到他办公司的时候 我还不是很确定 我就问到 "能给我看些样本吗?" 他给我看了些 脸上带些小黑点的照片-- 消息不是很充分 我问道 "我老了之后头发变白了 那怎么办?" "到时候 会怎么样?" "哦 不用担心这点" 他回答道 "沃恩能用激光把它变成白色" 但我还是有点担心 说到 "你猜怎么着 我不打算做了"
接着 这成为了我生命中最大的罪恶感 这个对于一个犹太教徒来说 意义重大啊 (笑声) 他说 "丹,你怎么了?" 你喜欢这样不对称的样子? 你有这种畸形的爱好? 有女人感觉你很可怜 用频繁的性爱来安慰你? 所有这些都没有发生 这点让我很惊讶 因为我接受过很多治疗-- 也有很多我决定不接受的治疗-- 我从来没有这么后悔过 但是我决定还是不接受这个治疗 我找到他的助手问到 "发生了什么?" 这种罪恶感从何而来 他解释到 他们已经在两名患者上进行了治疗 他们需要第三个患者 来完成他们的报告
(笑声)
现在你可能觉得这个人是个白痴 就是 他就是这样个人 但是我来给大家一个不同的视角来看待相同的故事 几年前 我在实验室里进行一系列我自己的实验 当我们做实验的时候 我们经常希望实验组会表现的和对照组截然不同 所以我们对实验组的表现有着很高的期待 对对照组的表现 我们的期望则会比较低 当我们得到结果的时候 所得到的是-- 我是非常开心-- 除了一个人之外 团队中有个人 本来表现应该很优秀的 但是实际上却表现的很糟糕 他拉下了总体的平均成绩 毁了我试验中统计学的作用
我仔细的看这个人 他比组内其他人都要大差不多20岁左右 我还记得那个老迈的醉汉 走进实验室的那天 想赚些简单的钱 就是那个人 "不会吧!" 我想 "把他给我扔出去 谁同意这种醉鬼参加实验的?"
但是几天后 我和我学生考虑了这点 我们说到 "如果这醉汉不在组内的话 会发生什么? 如果他去了另外一个组的话 会发生什么? 那如果我们把他扔出去呢?" 我们甚至无法看到这类数据 而且如果我们看到这类数据 我们可能会说 "怎么可能! 这么聪明的人怎么会表现的这么糟糕" 因为他把组里的平均分拉下一大截 让我们统计的结果变的更加有根据 所以我们决定不把这人排除出去 重新进行了实验
但是 这些故事 还有很多其他我们完成的实验有着利益冲突 摆在我面前的 主要是两方面 第一点 我们一生中会遇见很多人 用着各种方式 来试着粉饰自己的面部 他们刺激自己逃避现实 展示给我们很多固有的偏见 而且我确定有些事情我们都有所了解 我们目睹它的发生 或许我们不能每次都辨识 但是我们知道它的确发生过
当然 最困难的事 是去认清 那些有时我们自己 都被自己的定式所遮蔽 这是个非常非常艰难的的课程 因为我们无法看清自身的利益冲突 当我在做实验的时候 我觉得 我是在为科学做贡献 我在处理数据 让真实的数据模式得以闪现 我不是在做坏事 我觉得 我是像个骑士 试着帮助科学前进 但是事实却不是如此 我实际上被很多正面的意识所左右 我觉得真正的挑战是去认清 那些我们生活中 和我们有利益冲突的地方 并试着不去相信自己的直觉来克服这个挑战 试着做些事 来防止自己陷入不自觉的行为中 因为我们能处于一些不愉快的环境下
我真的想留给大家一个正面的想法 我指 这的确很压抑 是的-- 人们有利益冲突 我们看不见 摸不着 这些积极的观点 我觉得 是一种 如果我们清楚我们做错了 如果我们了解到 我们失败的原因和位置的根本原因 我们就能真正的弥补这些 而且 我想 这就是希望之所在 谢谢大家
(掌声)
来自: kevingiao > 《Ted》
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