A proposal for the Ingram Olkin Forum on Statistics Serving Society

This email came in from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences:

Ingram Olkin (S3) Forums: Call for Proposals

The Statistics Serving Society (S3) is a series of forums to honor the memory of Professor Ingram Olkin. Each forum focuses on a current societal issue that might benefit from new or renewed attention from the statistical community. The S3 Forums aim to bring the latest innovations in statistical methodology and data science into new research and public policy collaborations, working to accelerate the development of innovative approaches that impact societal problems. As the Forum will be the first time a particular group of experts will be gathered together to consider an issue, new energy and synergy is expected to produce a flurry of new ideas and approaches.

S3 Forums aim to develop an agenda of statistical action items that are needed to better inform public policy and to generate reliable evidence that can be used to mitigate the problem.

Upcoming Forum

Advancing Demographic Equity with Privacy Preserving Methodologies

Previous Forums Included

Police Use of Force
COVID and the Schools: Modeling Openings, Closings and Learning Loss
Algorithmic Fairness and Social Justice
Unplanned Clinical Trial Disruptions
Gun Violence – The Statistical Issues

Here’s my proposal. A forum on the use of academic researchers to confuse people about societal harms. The canonical example is the cigarette industry hiring statisticians and medical researchers to muddy the waters regarding the smoking-cancer link.

Doing this for the Ingram Olkin Forum is perfect, because . . . well, here’s the story from historian Robert Proctor about an episode from the 1970s:

Ingram Olkin, chairman of Stanford’s Department of Statistics, received $12,000 to do a similar job (SP-82) on the Framingham Heart Study . . . Lorillard’s chief of research okayed Olkin’s contract, commenting that he was to be funded using “considerations other than practical scientific merit.”

The National Institute of Statistical Sciences is located at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, in the heart of cigarette country, so it would be a perfect venue for such a discussion, especially with this connection to Olkin.

I’m not much of a conference organizer myself, so I’m putting this out there so that maybe one of you can propose this for an Ingram Olkin Forum. Could be a joint Olkin/Fisher/Zellner/Rubin forum. Lots of statistical heavyweights were involved in this one.

A forum on the use of academic researchers to confuse people about societal harms. What better way for statistics to serve society, no?

7 thoughts on “A proposal for the Ingram Olkin Forum on Statistics Serving Society

    • Both Fisher and Lakatos warned NHST could very well be what destroys western civilization.

      When the most highly educated members of society are spending their time generating massive amounts of misinformation and teaching it to each other, progress will slow to a halt and then even reverse into a dark age.

      We’ve gone from new miracle cures about once a decade pre-1950 to FDA panelists resigning over Alzhiemers drugs that dont even seem to benefit anyone.

      • Interesting, but I was also thinking about analogies to the Hot Hand Fallacy Fallacy – the idea that science has to save humans from their perceptual shortcomings that in reality aren’t shortcomings at all.

        A good example would be the research into how people perceive statistical data, which seems to be forever trying to discover new ways to attack political viewpoints and assert “rule by expert” points of view. Hardly surprising given that most academics are the “experts”.

    • chipmunk –

      > Wonder if anyone’s every thought about how much the misuse of stats has impaired society.

      How would you propose disaggregating the impairment from misuse from the positive effects of proper use (and even less then perfect use), in order to measure?

      Are you one of those “medical error is the third-leading cause of death in US” fellas?

  1. Incidentally, I was recently trying to find Ingram Olkin’s actual work that was paid for by the tobacco industry. Many tobacco documents are now public because of the Master Settlement Agreement and collected in the UCSF library’s online archive, including reams of research they funded.

    But all I could find was his proposal for the work: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/xfjl0128

    I’ve been unable to find a final report, only various industry documents indicating how much he was paid or when the work was completed. Some of them indicated he was working on papers for publication. If anyone could find the work in the UCSF archive, or link it to peer-reviewed publications by Olkin, that may be of some historical interest for statistics.

  2. I am not sure if Andrew is trying to be funny or irreverent. However, having had the opportunity to go to many meetings at NISS I can categorically say that no tobacco money is influencing them. It is true that RTP was born in played-out tobacco fields, but that is pretty far removed from influence.

    • Rodney:

      In my post I’m kinda joking and kinda serious.

      On one hand, it’s a joke, because obviously the “Ingram Olkin Forum on Statistics Serving Society” is all about honoring Olkin, not bringing up embarrassing episodes from his past such as when he got paid by cigarette companies based on “considerations other than practical scientific merit.”

      On the other hand, I’m serious that a location formerly associated with cigarette companies really would be a perfect venue for such a discussion, especially with this connection to Olkin. So, even though I don’t think this is so likely to happen, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *