I was reading something today and something triggered my memory and I looked up this pearl of wisdom from St. Thomas Aquinas that I had forgotten. It is going to be added to my decision analysis course syllabus:
Never deny, seldom affirm, always distinguish
Lawrence Summers has an op-ed column in the NY Times about curriculum issues
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html?pagewanted=all
Here’s my favorite part:
6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).
As the “Moneyball” story aptly displays in the world of baseball, the marshalling of data to test presumptions and locate paths to success is transforming almost every aspect of human life. It is not possible to make judgments about one’s own medical care without some understanding of probability, and certainly the financial crisis speaks to the consequences of the failure to appreciate “black swan events” and their significance. In an earlier era, when many people were involved in surveying land, it made sense to require that almost every student entering a top college know something of trigonometry. Today, a basic grounding in probability statistics and decision analysis makes far more sense.
Emory gets some good press. The undergraduate business school program is doing well, too.
Polling is a tricky business, and trying to understand issues and the public’s view requires a certain amount of art. When I teach my classes, I try to emphasize with them that they will see lots of “results” that come from “research” that may or may not line up.
Here’s an example from the NYTimes. The article begins by recognizing that there is some ambivalence about unions:
Labor unions are not exactly popular, though: A third of those surveyed viewed them favorably, a quarter viewed them unfavorably, and the rest said they were either undecided or had not heard enough about them.
Here is the result the article trumpets in the headline:
Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent.
Strong evidence, apparently. But, here is the actual question that leads to the result:
Collective bargaining refers to negotiations between an employer and a labor union’s members to determine the conditions of employment. Some states are trying to take away some collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Do you favor or oppose taking away some collective bargaining rights of the unions?
I added the emphasis here – employer. Who exactly is the employer? Who does the public employee union negotiate with? Those answers are clear if we’re talking about a private company. But who is the employer of a public employee?
The question introduces a premise in the question, and does it affect the choices of those asked this particular question? Would an alternate premise change the results? Suppose the question mentioned that taxpayers are responsible for the result of the negotiations, but are not necessarily represented during the negotiations?
(btw, I think it is great that we regularly get to see the exact question, so that we can think more carefully about what we just “learned.”)
We do quite a bit of spreadsheet analysis and case discussions in my class, and sometimes I have students make presentations of their analysis in a way that they are “selling” their analysis to the managers with the decision rights. They spend time fine tuning their presentations to be more convincing than other groups.
But sometimes they fall into bad habits, using stale jargon and omitting crucial assumptions. Here’s an example from the WSJ of our friends at Goldman Sachs, making a pitch that is very similar to a famous pitch that everyone with an email account has probably seen.
Made me smile.
Some nice press for the undergraduate program here from the Fiske Guide to Colleges.
I could never get a good distribution this way, so I just read them one page at a time.
This blog will post links to readings and information for the classes I teach. Labels will be used to allow you to look for posts for the class you are in. Comments are on, but will be moderated.