The Economist Cover Story “How Science Goes Wrong” and NY Times “Risk Calculator for Cholesterol Appears Flawed”; Connected?

Both of these stories focus on what could be a failure of professionals to understand and utilize quantitative data and methods.  In the case of the cholesterol test, I have no way of knowing exactly how the failure occured.  But I am worried that it is symptomatic of our problems in higher education.  I posted a comment where I describe another “make students happy” teaching incident that occurred at Washington University (with the same math chairperson as in the Tale Out of School piece).  I will post my comment below but I want to reiteriate that I don’t think the behavior I saw is at all peculiar to Washington University.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing so much of a failure in higher education.

I highly recommend the article in The Economist.  It actually describes some statistics and how it is used or misused.  It’s a great article.  Here is the link http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

Here is the link to the New York Times article that appeared today http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/health/risk-calculator-for-cholesterol-appears-flawed.html?hp&_r=0#commentsContainer

Finally, here is my comment.

“As someone who taught statistics to undergraduates at a university that has a top med school, I find this article intriguing, but not surprising. The Economist recently ran a cover story “How Science Goes Wrong”. They did a great job explaining the importance of statistics to medical science. It explained that many statisticians feel that many scientists use inappropriate methods – because they are the only ones they understand – or, appropriate methods inappropriately because they don’t understand them. This is dangerous, and maybe even showing up here, but it is not surprising.

Why is this not surprising? It is not surprising because too many universities pander to student wants, not student needs; and, as David Riesman noted in 1980, “…[student] “wants” … to which competing institutions, departments, and individual faculty members cater are quite different from [student] “needs”…” I have seen this at my own “elite” school. Some of these students go on to be doctors, even researchers.

All the technical failures we are seeing in America should be a wakeup call. Only public attention can lead to change. Why should universities change when the lack of education shows up much later and in subtle ways, and the satisfaction of student “wants” (or “don’t wants”, liking learning math) is immediate, leads to happier consumers, and more revenue and higher rankings?

(To learn more, you can go to my blog inside-higher-ed.com)”