Name: 【TED】Dan Ariely: Beware conflicts of interest (Beware conflicts of interest | Dan Ariely)
Uploaded: 2016-12-06T05:52:03.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So, I was in the hospital for a long time.

Past simple

And a few years after I left, I went back,

To-infinitive

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,

It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave.

Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave,

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.

I said, "Can I see some evidence for this?"

of little cheeks with little black dots --

I said, "What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white?

so I said, "You know what, I'm not going to do it."

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.

And he said, "Dan, what's wrong with you?

Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this?

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?

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.

Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck.

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.

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.

that was supposed to have very high performance

destroying my statistical significance of the test.

He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample.

And I remembered that the old and drunken guy

"Fantastic!" I thought. "Let's throw him out.

Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?"

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?

We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all,

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.

and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest,

The first one is that in life we encounter many people

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,

The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Dan Ariely: Beware conflicts of interest (Beware conflicts of interest | Dan Ariely)

perspective

recognize

pattern

evidence