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.
Dakle, dugo sam bio u bolnici. I nekoliko godina nakon izlaska, vratio sam se, i predstojnik odjela za opekline bio je vrlo uzbuđen što me vidi -- rekao je: "Dan, imam fantastičnu novu terapiju za tebe". Bio sam vrlo uzbuđen. Otišao sam s njim do njegovog ureda. Objasnio mi je da, kad se obrijem, imam male crne točkice na lijevoj strani lica gdje se nalazi dlaka, ali na desnoj strani lica jako sam opečen pa nemam dlaka, i to rezultira manjkom simetrije. A koja je briljantna ideja koju je on imao? Htio mi je istetovirati male crne točkice na desnu stranu lica kako bih izgledao vrlo simetrično.
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."
Zvučalo je zanimljivo. Zamolio me da se odem obrijati. Znate, to je bio čudan način brijanja, jer sam razmišljao o tome i shvatio kako će način na koji sam se tada brijao biti način na koji ću se brijati do kraja života -- jer je širina trebala ostati ista. Kad sam se vratio u njegov ured, nisam bio potpuno siguran. Rekao sam: "Mogu li vidjeti neki primjer toga?" Stoga mi je pokazao neke slike malih obraza s malim crnim točkama -- ne naročito informativno. Rekao sam: "Što će biti kad ostarim i moje dlake postanu bijele? Što će se tada dogoditi?" "Oh, ne brini se za to," rekao je. "Imamo lasere; možemo to izbijeliti". Ali još uvijek sam bio zabrinut, pa sam rekao: "Znate što, neću to učiniti".
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.
A tada sam sad dobio jedan od najgorih osjećaja krivnje u životu. To govori jedan židov, tako da je to velika stvar. (Smijeh) A on je rekao, "Dan, što je s tobom? Voliš izgledati nesimetrično? Pričinjava li ti to neko perverzno zadovoljstvo? Sažale li se žene nad tobom i češće spavaju s tobom?" Ništa od toga nije se dogodilo. A to je bilo veliko iznenađenje za mene, jer isprobao sam mnogo terapija -- bilo je mnogo terapija na koje sam odlučio ne ići -- i nikad nisam imao toliki osjećaj krivnje. Ali odlučio sam ne ići na tu terapiju. Otišao sam do njegovog zamjenika i pitao ga, "Što se događa? Odakle dolazi ta krivnja?" Objasnio mi je kako su već proveli tu terapiju na dva pacijenta, i trebali su trećeg pacijenta za rad koji su pisali.
(Laughter)
(Smijeh)
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.
Sad vjerojatno mislite kako je taj tip budala. Dobro, tako se i čini. Ali pružio bih vam drugi pogled na istu priču. Prije nekoliko godina, izvodio sam nekoliko vlastitih pokusa u laboratoriju. A kad izvodimo pokuse, obično se nadamo da će se jedna grupa ponašati drukčije od druge. Dakle, imali smo jednu grupu za koju sam se nadao da će imati vrlo visok učinak, i drugu grupu za koju sam mislio da će njihov učinak biti vrlo nizak. A kad sam dobio rezultate, dobili smo ovo -- bio sam vrlo sretan -- osim jedne osobe. U grupi je postojala jedna osoba koja je trebala imati vrlo visok učinak a čiji je učinak zapravo bio katastrofalan. Snizio je ukupni prosjek i uništio statističku vrijednost testa.
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?"
Stoga sam pažljivo promatrao tog čovjeka. Bio je 20-ak godina stariji od svih ostalih u uzorku. Sjetio sam se kako je neki star i pijan muškarac jedan dan došao u laboratorij kako bi zaradio neku laku lovu i to je bio taj čovjek. "Fantastično!", pomislio sam. "Izbacimo ga van. Tko bi ikad uključio pijanog čovjeka u uzorak?"
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.
Ali nekoliko dana kasnije, razmišljali smo o tome s mojim studentima, i rekli smo: "Što bi se dogodilo kad taj pijani čovjek ne bi bio u tom stanju? Što bi se dogodilo kad bi bio u drugoj grupi? Bismo li ga i tada izbacili van?" Vjerojatno ne bismo ni pogledali podatake, a ako bismo i pogledali podatke, vjerojatno bismo rekli, "Fantastično! Kako pametan čovjek koji ima tako nizak učinak", jer bi snizio prosjek grupe i dao nam čak i jače statističke rezultate od onih koje smo dobili. Stoga smo odlučili ne izbaciti tog čovjeka i odlučili smo ponoviti pokus.
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.
Ali znate, te priče, i mnogi drugi pokusi o sukobu interesa koje smo napravili, u osnovi ističu dvije stvari. Prva je da u životu sretnemo mnogo ljudi koji, na ovaj ili onaj način, pokušavaju tetovirati naša lica. Oni jednostavno imaju poticaje zbog kojih ne vide stvarnost i daju nam savjete koji su, po prirodi stvari, pristrani. Siguran sam kako je to svima nama poznato, i vidimo da se to događa. Možda to ne prepoznajemo svaki put, ali shvaćamo da se to događa.
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.
Ali najteže je, naravno, prepoznati da smo ponekad i mi sami zaslijepljeni svojim poticajima. A to je mnogo, mnogo teža pouka koju moramo uzeti u obzir. Jer ne vidimo kako sukobi interesa utječu na nas. Kada sam provodio te pokuse, po svojem mišljenju, pomagao sam znanosti. Eliminirao sam podatke kako bih dobio pravi uzorak podataka koji će se istaknuti. Nisam radio nešto loše. U svojim mislima, ja sam zapravo bio vitez koji pomaže znanosti da napreduje. Ali to nije bio slučaj. Zapravo sam se s mnogo dobrih namjera miješao u proces. I mislim kako je pravi izazov dokučiti koji su slučajevi u našim životima gdje sukobi interesa utječu na nas, i pokušati ne vjerovati svojoj intuiciji da ih savladamo, već pokušati činiti ono što nas sprečava da padnemo u zamku takvog ponašanja jer možemo stvoriti mnogo neželjenih posljedica.
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.
Htio bih završiti s jednom pozitivnom misli. Mislim, u redu, sve je ovo vrlo depresivno -- ljudi imaju sukob interesa, mi to ne vidimo i tako dalje. Ono što je pozitivno u svemu tome, rekao bih, jest da, ako razumijemo kad griješimo, ako razumijemo duboke mehanizme iza razloga zbog kojih doživimo neuspjeh i gdje ga doživimo, stvarno se možemo nadati kako ćemo popraviti stvari. A tome se, mislim, nadamo. Puno vam hvala.
(Applause)
(Pljesak)