This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.
Every spring, my friend Sam and I work on a consulting project together. The project is a program evaluation: the State of California requires the company (our client) to hire a disinterested firm (that’s us) to evaluate the effectiveness of one of the company’s programs.
In previous years, the program has been a big part of the client’s revenue and they’ve cared a lot about the answers. But the client has expanded nationwide over the past year, they’ve got contracts with a lot more companies in a lot of states, and this particular program is suddenly (really suddenly!) only a small part of their business… so small, as a percentage, that they pretty much don’t care about the numbers we get this year, as they said (politely) in a phone call. The analysis has a lot of required elements that are kind of a hassle for the client and it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t participate in this program at all next year.
Still, we were on the hook for the report so Sam and I worked on it just as we always do.
With a couple of days to go before our deadline for submitting the report, we were on Slack on a Saturday afternoon hashing out a few things. We had this exchange:
Me: I get it that they don’t want or need to mess with this nonsense anymore, I’m happy for them and that’s good news for the industry in general. But it’s not a great feeling that the client doesn’t care about our work! There’s a moderately famous John Updike piece about the retirement of Ted Williams, in which he says “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.”
Sam: So you are Ted Williams in this scenario?
Me: You and me both. I mean, why are we both doing our best (or something approximating our best) when nobody else cares?
Sam: Gotta have standards and as an independent consultant, standards/reputation are about all that matters. I think it comes from internal compass, but that in turn means we can do this type of work successfully. To answer your question, like Ted Williams, I think we are both worried about personally being associated with deficient work.
There’s no particular message here, I just have the impression that there are a few people who follow this blog who appreciate hearing stories from the world of statistical consulting every now and then.
This post is by Phil
Keep up the good work. Even if it isn’t for this client. Doing things right is alwayss better than not doing things right.
Just to maintain self-respect you have to care about what you’re doing much more than the client does. And there were a lot of cases where the client didn’t really have a huge interest in what you did, so long as you did something that looked like it was advancing the ball. That’s where your own integrity is all you have as a lodestar.
Yeah, it reminds me of a creepy colleague I once had who was plagiarizing from me. It got me so mad that he was grabbing credit like that and facing no professional consequences, the smug bastard.
What got me over it was the reflection that every morning this guy has to face himself in the mirror, knowing what he did. That’s gotta be horrible. No amount of professional success could compensate.
Hes probably a psychopath and incapable of feeling that shame… people who score high on psychopathy metrics are enriched in various areas of society… Politicians, Judges and lawyers, surgeons, C level executives and upper management, and yes professors.
the fact this person did this repeatedly suggests something different from a person who wakes up a d has trouble looking at himself in a mirror.
Perfect counterpoint to the Ariely comment in Andrew’s article today:
“Let’s be honest. We all lie. . . .
We’re not awful, immoral people, yet almost all of us want to gain from cheating. . . .”
Tom:
Yeah, what’s amazing is that two major research universities hired someone with those views. On the other hand, I teach at a major research university whose leadership seems to have been just fine with lying about their statistics–even after being caught, they don’t seem to have shown any interest in tracking down what happened–so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as Phil might say.
I’m aphantasic, like most people with this condition, it took me about 18 years to realize that others weren’t just talking in metaphors when they said “close your eyes and picture a goat”
My guess is psychopaths have the same issue, they can’t really understand that others aren’t just out to screw everyone else for their own benefit until perhaps many years of introspection, something many of them dont ever do. My guess is Ariely is a psychopath and talking out of this ignorance.
(incidentally, on online tests of psychopathy I test at about 5 percentile. of course its easy to lie about your answers and generate a low score but if youre actually interested in the outcome and dont lie, and assume similar motives for the other participants, you can find out where in the spectrum you sit… its similarly interesting to finding out where in the aphantasia spectrum you sit)
“…But the client has expanded nationwide over the past year, they’ve got contracts with a lot more companies in a lot of states, and this particular program is suddenly (really suddenly!) only a small part of their business… so small, as a percentage, that they pretty much don’t care about the numbers we get this year, as they said (politely) in a phone call…”
In this case they at least have a reason (nationwide expansion with a lot of companies). It’s a lot worse at many other places. There is a whole industry of ‘market research’ companies that exists only because the big boys (their clients) have some cash at the end of the year to burn to improve the tax book looks. Many times there wouldn’t be a clear research question, but they need to spend the money and let the market research company invent one for them. It all ends up with a lot of people working on a non-existent problem nobody cares about. Some data get reported, filed and everyone moves on.
Man, that seems crazy. That’s similar to “use it or lose it” situations that come up with government agencies and I guess some big companies, where there’s a certain budget and if they don’t spend it by the end of the fiscal year the money gets taken from them, and what’s worse maybe less will be allocated next year because they clearly don’t need it…so they quickly get it out the door without worrying too much about where it goes. But, in my limited experience with these situations, there is at least -some- effort to not waste the money completely. As you’ve described it they might as well send the money to a scammer.
Count me in as one of those who enjoy stories from the world of statistical consulting.