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.
所以,我曾經在醫院過了一段很長的時間。 而在我離開幾年後,我再回去, 而燒傷部的主席非常高興地見到我-- 他說:「Dan,我有一個奇妙的新治療給你。」 我感到非常興奮。我跟他走到他的辦公室。 他向我解釋說,當我刮鬍子時, 我在左邊臉有毛髮的部位有黑點 但在右邊 被嚴重燒傷的臉沒有毛髮, 這造成缺乏對稱。 而他有什麼高招? 他打算在我的右臉 紋一些小黑點 使我看起來非常對稱。
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."
聽起來很有意思。他叫我去刮鬍子。 讓我告訴你,這是一種奇怪刮鬍子的方式, 因為我想過這個問題, 我當時意識到,我刻下剃須的方法, 便將會是我今後剃須的方法-- 因為我必須保持寬度相同。 當我回到他的辦公室, 我真的決定不穩。 我說,「我能否看到一些證據呢?」 於是,他給我看了一些 小臉頰有小黑點照片 -- 不是很有建設性。 我說:「如果當我老年時我的頭髮變成白色, 那會怎樣呢?」 他說:「哦,不用擔心」, 「我們有激光,我們可以改變成白色。」 但我仍然擔心, 所以我說,「算了,我不打算這樣做。」
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.
然後, 我聽到我一生中最大的令我感到内疚的話。 這個猶太傢伙都這樣說,這就表示很問題很嚴重。 (笑聲) 他說:「Dan,你是否有什麼問題? 你喜歡看起來非不對稱嗎? 你是否由此有某種變態的快感呢? 是否有女人覺得可憐你 而和你更頻繁發生性關係呢?」 當然沒有這些事。 而令我非常驚訝的是, 因為我已經經歷了許多治療方法 -- 亦有許多我決定不做的治療方法-- 我從來沒有到過這種令我感到内疚的程度。 但我決定不要這種療法。 當我去問他的副手 :「究竟發生什麼事? 為什麼要令人感到内疚呢?」 他解釋說,他們這樣的療法已經在兩名病人身上做過, 而他們需要第三個病人來寫他們的論文。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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.
現在你可能認為這傢伙非常糟糕。 當然,似乎他就是非常糟糕。 但是讓我給你一個不同的角度看同一個故事。 幾年前,在實驗室裡我正進行一些我自己的實驗。 而當我們進行實驗, 我們通常希望一組和另一組有不同的表現。 因此,我們有一個希望他們表現會非常高個的一組, 而有另一個希望他們表現會非常低的一組。 而當我得到的結果-- -- 我很高興 -- 除了對一個人。 在小組有一個人 應該是有非常高的表現, 但是實際執行時卻糟透。 他將整個平均拉下來, 摧毀了我實驗的統計意義。
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?"
是以我仔細研究過這傢伙。 他是一個比其他人老20歲以上的的樣本。 而我記得,那醉酒傢伙 來過實驗室 想要找賺一些快錢, 這就是那傢伙。 我想: 「太棒了! 就讓我們扔掉他。 誰會用一個喝醉酒的傢伙做實驗呢 ?」
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.
但兩天後, 我們與學生想想, 我們說,「如果這傢伙是不是在醉酒的狀態會怎樣呢? 如果他在另一組會怎樣呢? 請問我們會不會扔掉他呢?」 我們也許就根本不會看數據, 但如果我們看一下數據, 我們可能會說,「神奇!一個多麼聰明的傢伙竟然得到這個低的結果」, 因為他會拉低該組的平均数, 讓我們有更強勁的統計結果 因此,我們決定不扔掉那傢伙出來,並重新運行實驗。
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.
但是你要知道,這些故事, 以及很多其他我們做過的關於利益衝突的實驗, 基本上為我 提出兩點。 第一個是,在生活中我們遇到很多人, 以一些某種方式, 嘗試在我們的臉上紋身。 他們被有激勵的動機蒙蔽了現實, 而給我們本質上是有偏見的建議。 而且我敢肯定這是我們都能看到的事情, 我們都承認它發生的事情。 也許我們不能每一次都認出, 但我們知道這會發生。
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.
最困難的事情,當然是要認識到 有時我們也被 激勵的機制蒙蔽了我們自己。 而這是一個非常,非常困難考慮的教訓。 因為我們看不清楚對我們個人的利益衝突。 當我在做這些實驗, 在我心中,我是助長科學。 我是在消除了某些數據 來獲取真實模式的數據彪炳。 我沒有做壞事。 在我心目中,我其實是一個 想幫科學向前看的騎士。 但這種情況並非如此。 我其實是以大量的好意圖來干擾過程。 我認為,真正的挑戰是要弄清楚 在我們生活中 利益衝突在何處影響了我們, 並盡量不信任自己的直覺去克服它, 而是試圖做一些事情 來防止我們墮入這些行為, 因為我們因此可以創造大量的不良情況。
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.
我想給你留下一個積極的意念。 我的意思是,這是非常令人沮喪的,對不對? -- 人的利益衝突,我們看不到它,等等。 在積極的角度來看,我認為, 如果我們能理解我們何時錯了, 如果我們能了解為什麼 我們失敗以及在哪裡失敗的深層機制, 我們可以真正有希望解決事情。 而我認為,這是希望。非常感謝你。
(Applause)
(掌聲)