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.
Dugo sam bio u bolnici. Nekoliko godina pošto sam izašao, vratio sam se i predsednik odeljenja za opekotine je bio uzbuđen što me vidi - rekao je, "Den, imam fantastičnu novu terapiju za tebe." Bio sam veoma uzbuđen. Odšetali smo do njegove kancelarije. Objasnio mi je, kad se obrijem, imam male crne tačke na levoj strani lica gde imam malje, ali na desnoj strani lica sam gadno opečen pa ih nemam, a to stvara asimetriju. A kakvu je to sjajnu ideju imao? Želeo je da istetovira sitne crne tačke na desnoj strani moga lica i učini da izgleda veoma 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 je da odem i obrijem se. Kažem vam, bio je to čudan način da se obrijem, jer sam razmišljao o tome i shvatio da će način na koji se tada brijem biti način na koji ću se brijati do kraja života - jer je trebalo da održim istu širinu. Kada sam se vratio u njegovu kancelariju, nisam bio baš siguran. Pitao sam, "Mogu li da vidim neke dokaze ovoga?" Pokazao mi je neke fotografije malih obraza sa crnim tačkicama - nije bilo baš od koristi. Pitao sam, "Šta se dešava kad ostarim i osedim? Šta se onda dešava?" "O, ne brini o tome", rekao je "Imamo lasere; možemo izbeliti". I dalje sam bio zabrinut, pa sam rekao, "Znaš šta, neću ovo da uradim."
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 onda sam imao jedan od najjačih osećaja krivice u životu. Ja sam Jevrejin, pa je to mnogo značajno. (smeh) Pitao je, "Den, šta je s tobom? Voliš da izgledaš asimetrično? Na neki perverzni način uživaš u tome? Da li te žene žale i češće imaju seks sa tobom?" Ništa od toga nije u pitanju. To mi je bilo iznenađujuće jer sam prošao kroz toliko terapija - mnogo njih sam odlučio da ne radim - i nikada nisam osećao ovakvu krivicu. Ali sam odlučio da to ne radim. Pitao sam njegovog zamenika, "Šta se događa? Odakle mi ovo osećanje krivice?" Objasnio je da su tu proceduru već uradili na dva pacijenta i bio im je potreban treći za naučni rad koji su pisali.
(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.
Verovatno mislite da je ovaj tip kreten. Tako izgleda, zar ne? Ali nudim vam drugačiju perspektivu iste priče. Pre nekoliko godina sam i sam izvodio neke eksperimente u laboratoriji. A kada radimo eksperimente, obično se nadamo da će se jedna grupa ponašati drugačije od druge. Imali smo jednu grupu za koju sam se nadao da će biti uspešna i drugu, za koju sam mislio da će biti neuspešna. I dobili smo upravo takve rezultate - bio sam vrlo srećan - osim jedne osobe. Bila jedna osoba u grupi koja je trebalo da ima veoma dobre rezultate, a učinak je zapravo bio jako loš. Smanjio je srednji rezultat, uništivši mi statističku značajnost 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?"
Pažljivo sam proučio tog tipa. Bio je nekih dvadesetak godina stariji od svih u uzorku. Setio sam se da je pijani starac jednog dana došao u laboratoriju i želeo brzo da zaradi i to je bio taj tip. "Fantastično!", pomislio sam. "Hajde da ga izbacimo. Ko bi ikada uključio pijanca 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 nakon par dana, promislio sam o tome sa studentima i rekli smo, "Šta bi se desilo da pijanac nije bio u tom stanju? Šta bi se desilo da je bio u drugoj grupi? Da li bismo ga onda izbacili?" Tada verovatno ne bismo ni gledali podatke, i ako bismo ih i gledali verovatno bismo rekli, "Fantastično! Super što ima loše rezultate", jer bi onda još više snizio srednji rezultat grupe dajući nam značajnije statističke rezultate. Odlučili smo da ga ne izbacimo i da ponovimo eksperiment.
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, ove priče i mnogo drugih eksperimenata koje smo uradili o sukobu interesa zapravo, po meni, iznose dve stvari u prvi plan. Prva je ta da u životu srećemo mnogo ljudi koji, na neki način, pokušavaju da nam istetoviraju lica. Imaju motive koji ih navode da budu slepi za stvarnost i daju nam savete koji su u osnovi pristrasni. Siguran sam da to svi prepoznajemo, i vidimo da se dešava. Možda ne prepoznamo svaki put, ali znamo da se dešava.
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.
Naravno, najteže je da prepoznamo da smo i sami nekada zaslepljeni sopstvenim motivima. To je mnogo, mnogo teža lekcija za naučiti. Jer ne vidimo kako sukob interesa utiče na nas. Kada sam sprovodio te eksperimente, mislio sam da pomažem nauci. Uklanjao sam neke podatke kako bi pravi rezultati došli do izražaja. Nisam radio nešto loše. U svojim očima sam bio vitez koji pomaže napredak nauke. Ali to nije bilo tako. Zapravo sam se mešao u proces sa veoma dobrom namerom. Mislim da je pravi izazov shvatiti koji su to slučajevi u našem životu gde imamo sukob interesa i da pokušamo da ne verujemo intuiciji u njegovom prevazilaženju, ali da pokušamo da radimo ono što nas sprečava da postanemo žrtve takvog ponašanja jer možemo stvoriti mnogo neželjenih okolnosti.
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.
Želim da vas ostavim sa jednom pozitivnom mišlju. Mislim, ovo je veoma depresivno - ljudi imaju sukobe interesa koje ne vidimo i tako dalje. Mislim da je pozitivna perspektiva svega ta da ako shvatimo da smo pogrešili, ako razumemo duboke razloge zašto i gde grešimo, možemo se nadati da to i popravimo. Mislim da je u tome nada. Mnogo vam hvala.
(Applause)
(aplauz)