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.
Torej, dolgo časa sem bil v bolnišnici. In nekaj let po odhodu sem se vrnil tja in vodja oddelka za opekline me je bil zelo vesel -- rekel je: "Dan, fantastično novo zdravljenje imam zate". Zelo sem bil vznemirjen. Šel sem z njim v ordinacijo. In razložil mi je, da imam, ko se obrijem, majhne črne pikice po levi strani obraza, kjer imam brado, ampak na desni strani obraza pa sem bil hudo opečen in zato nimam dlak, kar povzroča nesimetričnost. In kakšno brilijantno idejo je imel? Hotel je tetovirati majhne črne pikice po desni strani mojega obraza da bi izgledal bolj 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."
Zvenelo je zanimivo. Naročil mi je, naj se obrijem. Naj vam povem, da je bil to čuden način britja, ker sem o njem razmišljal in spoznal, da bi se, tako kot sem se takrat obril, bril do konca svojega življenja -- ker sem moral ohraniti enako širino. Ko sem se vrnil v ordinacijo, nisem bil prav prepričan. Dejal sem: "Lahko vidim kak dokaz za to?" Pokazal mi je nekaj fotografij majhnih lic z majhnimi črnimi pikami -- ni bilo zelo informativno. Vprašal sem ga: "Kaj se bo zgodilo, ko ostarim in bodo dlake postale bele? Kaj bo takrat?" "O, ne skrbi," je odvrnil. "Imamo laserje; lahko ti stvar pobelimo". A še vedno me je skrbelo, zato sem rekel: "Veš kaj, tega ne bom naredil".
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.
In potem se je začel eden največjih občutkov krivde v mojem življenju. Tole govorim kot Žid, torej to veliko pomeni. (Smeh) In dejal je: "Dan, kaj je narobe s teboj? Ti je všeč, da si nesimetričen? Je v tem nekakšen perverzni užitek? Se smiliš ženskam in zato pogosteje spijo s tabo?" Nič od tega. In to me je zelo presenetilo, saj sem imel že mnoga zdravljenja -- za mnoga od njih se nisem odločil -- in nikoli nisem imel takega občutka krivde. Ampak odločil sem se proti temu posegu. Šel sem do njegovega namestnika in ga vprašal: "Kaj se dogaja? Od kod ta občutek krivde?" Pojasnil mi je, da so poseg že opravili na dveh pacientih, potrebovali pa so še tretjega, da bi lahko dokončali znanstveni članek.
(Laughter)
(Smeh)
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.
Verjetno sedaj mislite, da je ta tip šušmar. Ja, tak vtis daje. Ampak naj vam ponudim drug pogled na isto zgodbo. Pred nekaj leti sem sam izvajal nekaj laboratorijskih poskusov. In ko jih izvajamo, ponavadi upamo, da se bo ena skupina obnašala drugače od druge. Imeli smo skupino, za katero sem upal, da bo zelo uspešna, in drugo, za katero sem mislil, da bo zelo neuspešna. In ko sem dobil rezultate, so bili prav taki -- bil sem zelo vesel -- razen za eno osebo. V skupini, ki naj bi bila uspešna, je bil človek, ki je pravzaprav imel zelo slab rezultat. In znižal je celotno povprečje ter uničil statistično pomembnost 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?"
Natančno sem si ogledal tega tipa. Star je bil kakih dvajset let več od drugih v vzorcu. In spomnim se, da je nekega dne v laboratorij prišel pijan moški, ki je hotel na lahko zaslužiti nekaj denarja, in to je bil on. "Fantastično!" sem si mislil. "Izločimo ga. Kdo bi sploh vključil pijanca v vzorec?"
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.
Čez nekaj dni pa smo o tem razmislili s študenti in se vprašali: "Kaj bi bilo, če ta pijanec ne bi bil v takem stanju? Kaj bi se zgodilo, če bi bil v drugi skupini? Bi ga v tem primeru izločili?" Verjetno sploh ne bi pogledali podatkov in če bi jih, bi verjetno rekli: "Fantastično! Kako pameten tip, ki dosega tako slab rezultat", saj bi povprečje skupine potisnil navzdol in nam dal še močnejše statistične rezultate. Tako smo se odločili, da ga ne izločimo in da ponovimo poskus.
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.
Ampak, veste, te zgodbe in veliko drugih poskusov, ki smo jih naredili o konfliktu interesov, v osnovi kažejo na dve zadevi. Prva je, da v življenju srečamo veliko ljudi, ki tako ali drugače poskušajo tetovirati naše obraze. Zaradi svojih lastnih interesov postanejo slepi za resnično življenje in nam dajejo v temelju pristranske nasvete. In prepričan sem, da to vsi prepoznamo in vidimo, da se dogaja. Morda tega ne prepoznamo vedno, razumemo pa, da se dogaja.
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.
Najtežje, seveda, je prepoznati, da smo včasih mi sami slepi zaradi svojih interesov. In to je lekcija, ki jo je veliko, veliko težje upoštevati. Kajti ne vidimo, kako konflikt interesov deluje na nas. Ko sem izvajal te poskuse, sem v svoji glavi pomagal znanosti. Odstranjeval sem podatke, da bi osvetlil njihov pravi vzorec. Nič slabega nisem počel. V svoji glavi sem bil pravzaprav vitez, ki je pripomogel k razvoju znanosti. A to ni bilo res. V bistvu sem se vmešaval v proces, čeprav z dobrimi nameni. In mislim, da je pravi izziv ugotoviti, v katerih primerih v življenju konflikt interesov deluje na nas in poskusiti ne zaupati intuiciji, ko ga hočemo premagati, temveč skušati početi stvari, ki preprečujejo, da bi postali žrtve takega obnašanja, saj lahko ustvarimo veliko neželenih okoliščin.
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.
Končati želim s pozitivno mislijo. Hočem reči, vse to je precej depresivno, ne -- ljudje imajo konflikt interesov, ne prepoznamo ga, itd. Pozitivni vidik vsega tega je, vsaj mislim, da če razumemo, ko naredimo napako, če razumemo globoke mehanizme zakaj in kje nam ne uspe, potem lahko upamo, da bomo stvari popravili. In v tem mislim, da je upanje. Hvala vam.
(Applause)
(Aplavz)