Statistics professors do NOT have True Grit …
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in those emergency faculty meetings where college professors were brainstorming about the correct response to Covid.
(UPDATE/QUICK EDIT: In the article that follows, I should have mentioned the authors (and signers) of the Great Barrington Declaration, who did exhibit admirable courage (and were pilloried for doing so). I think those faculty members were in the medical and epidemiology fields though. In this column, I'm talking about the statistics professors who are usually a part of the School of Commerce. And, as a poster reminds me, Canada's Denis Rancourt has of course used statistical analysis to debunk the all-important Covid Fear Factor. Transcriber B identified other brave academics who spoke out. I should have said 99.9 percent of statistics professors were conspicuously silent. None of the professors who spoke up were promoted or supported by their colleges.)
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The Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker recently published another provocative essay. In this piece, Tucker points out the insights of insurance actuaries are often ignored.
As Tucker notes, actuaries are supposed to identify relevant health risks so their bosses can then “price” different risks. In Covid times, actuaries could have told the public that the vast majority of the population had nothing to worry about from dying from Covid.
In reading this article, I thought about another profession - a sibling of the actuaries - that let us all down in Covid - college statistics professors.
Every college employs professors who could have passed along valuable information on our alleged “once-in-a-century” pandemic. These academic disciplines, of course, include the medical and science faculty members, but also social science, business and even history and literature professors.
However, the faculty members who could have nipped the pandemic Fear Factor in the bud were the statistics professors. That is, if these professors simply did their job - and applied the tenets of their field to the situation at hand.
As I understand it, statistics professors are supposed to compile relevant (hopefully credible and accurate) statistics and come up with probabilities based on these statistics.
By the second month of the official pandemic, any legitimate statistics professor should have known that the mortality risks of Covid were infinitesimal for all groups under the age of, say, 60.
For example, the probability a healthy child would die from Covid is roughly 1-in-2 million. The probability a healthy college student would die from the same disease is similar. Certainly, the country’s stats professors could have told us that a healthy college student had a greater risk of being struck by lightning than he or she did of dying from Covid.
I don’t know how many people teach statistics at America’s thousands of colleges, but I do know virtually every one of these learned professionals decided to NOT tell the world this virus was nothing to worry about for large swaths of the population.
This should be a known-knowable …
Institutions of higher education are, of course, one of the most captured “truth-seeking” institutions on the planet. Still, for some bizarre reason, most citizens think the halls of academia are over-flowing with wise experts who should be consulted on every important policy issue.
I’ve never taught at a college, but I understand those who do attend faculty meetings on a regular basis. Professors even elect their own senates and presumably have the ear of the colleges’ presidents and trustees.
When news of a new respiratory virus swept the world, I imagine every college in the land held numerous emergency meetings to brainstorm over Covid Response.
First, faculty members had to devise policies for the student body and faculty. Many faculty members also served as key advisors for politicians, corporations and sports leagues.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at some of these emergency faculty conclaves.
Here was the great chance for these professors to apply lessons from their academic discipline to a real-life, potentially world-changing emergency.
But this was also a great chance for the same people to say, “Wait a dang minute. This might be the biggest scam in world history.”
That is, the college professor/expert community actually had a chance to earn their tax-payer salaries and save the world from mega grief. Instead, they did the opposite and worked overtime to inflate the misery index.
Did any professors say anything like this?
The group which should have had the most influence in these meeting was the statistics professors, who could have spoke up and told their colleagues and bosses something like:
“I’ve carefully reviewed all the relevant data, which tells me the probability any of our students or faculty will die or be hospitalized if they contract this virus is extremely remote. Therefore, the greater risk is over-reacting and stoking irrational fear in the public. As the most-trusted minds in the country, we should lead by example and encourage our constituents to continue daily life as normal.”
Here, skeptics might quickly reply, “Bill, these professors didn’t know the risks were that small in the first months of the official pandemic.”
To which I reply, “well, they should have” … that is, if they’re really as intelligent as their phD certificates say they are.
For example, the dean of the School of Journalism should have piped up and said something like …
“Listen, I know what Fauci and our governor are saying. But these are bureaucrats and politicians with immense power and power can corrupt. To give themselves more control and inflate their egos, these people sometimes embellish threats. That is, we shouldn’t automatically trust every pronouncement these people make. We need to do our own research…”
My guess is it was the psychology and sociology professors who knew what was really going on … and why …. and how these psy-ops were being rolled out.
Since these experts would have known how important it was to pandemic producers to capture all the experts in higher education, they were were probably laughing to themselves as they listened to colleague after colleague repeat the fear mantras.
“Damn, this stuff actually works,” they were probably thinking to themselves.
They also knew the extreme ego boost certain people get when the world starts to look at them as saviors.
Surely a couple of deans of Schools of Commerce - and a few bright political scientists - would have understood that nefarious economic motivations might be propelling this run-away train.
The journalism dean could have gone out on a ledge again and said, “Maybe this is one of those situations where we should follow the money.”
But in all the colleges in all the land (apparently) no professor made any speeches like this.
Clone Universities - Group Think 101
If Faculty Senates had passed any resolutions on Covid response, they all would have said the same thing:
“We, the Faculty Senate of (Insert College Name) therefore resolve that every citizen in our state and country should do exactly what the CDC says we should do.”
The colleges’ public information staffers must have also been incredibly busy producing press releases for the media. Those releases covered essentially the same talking points:
“In the opinion of faculty experts, everyone could soon die from this respiratory virus. School is cancelled until further notice; masks are mandatory even for distance learning … most importantly, every citizen should get the Covid vaccines when they’re ready. According to campus experts, the vaccines will be safe and effective …”
I’m probably the only person who’s thought about the press release no one in the world ever saw:
“State U statistics expert says Covid risk is massively inflated.”
My question is why didn’t this happen? I mean, statistically, shouldn’t there have been one stats professor somewhere in America who went against the group think?”
There should have been, but there wasn’t (at least, that any of us heard about when such comments might have mattered).
Again, the former hippies in the psychology and sociology departments could tell us why. Basically, no faculty member was ever going to risk being cast out of the faculty lounge (or the herd) by going against the authorized narrative.
I didn’t need to blow my parents’ tuition money to pick up the operative lesson; Bob Dylan had already educated me: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Those stats professors who remained silent in those Covid meetings knew one thing for sure. They knew the probability they’d face career ruin if they went against the Fauci narrative was (+/- 1 percent) …100 percent.
As it turns out, in college faculty rooms - just like every organization - people want to keep their jobs, climb the career ladder and not be labelled a science denier or grandma killer.
Jeffrey Tucker shares a key anecdote …
As he shared with our Brownstone Writers Group, Jeffrey Tucker received an email from a reader who passed along a letter about an actual insurance actuary who did blow the whistle on what was happening with Covid issues.
“Dear Mr. Tucker,
“ … attached (is) a letter from the director of a German healthcare insurer to the German national Healthcare Institute in which he flagged them back in February 2022 about the underreporting of vax injuries, based on his company’s insurance data.
“Also FYI, the director was fired over his letter.”
In one sentence, we glean our key anecdotal data. Sure, you can go against the Current Thing … if you don’t mind being fired.
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Because it was required of business majors at the University of Alabama, I once took a statistics class. Today, I don’t understand why I had to take that class. What’s the point in learning about probabilities if I’m not allowed to apply this knowledge to important issues?
And I can’t figure out why so many professors devoted their lives to an academic discipline they’re afraid to use. One of the few times the citizens of the world really needed the expertise of statistics professors … and they all ran for the hills.
If I’m ever a college professor …
If I ever became a college professor, I’d teach a class on the History of Film and make my students watch one film - 1969’s classic True Grit.
I’d tell my students, you either have true grit or you don’t. I’d then tell them, per my observations, virtually no statistics professors in the world (maybe 1 in 1000) have it.
Per my understanding, it takes a couple of years to qualify for tenure so my stint as a college professor would last perhaps two or three classes.
After I was fired, I’d return to writing essays on Substack, where you can still find a few Rooster Cogburn emulators.
The world’s full of outlaws like Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. But not many people will face them down with lines like, “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”
UPDATE: I should have mentioned the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who did exhibit great courage. I think those faculty members were in the medical and epidemiology fields though. In this column, I'm talking about the statistics professors who are usually a part of the School of Commerce. And as a poster reminds me, Canada's Denis Rancourt has of course used statistical analysis to debunk the all-important Covid Fear Factor. As Transcriber B points out, there are other heroic exceptions. Let's say maybe 99.9 percent of statistic professors were conspicuously silent.
Great points. The silence of those who know better is appalling. My degree is in Math. SInce I didn't become an engineer, statistician, or similar, I never used all the calculus, differential equations, and spherical geometry I learned. I don't regret taking the courses, not sure why, but I don't. My favorite was "Probability and Statistics". THIS ONE has had real-world applications over my whole life, I've used it professionally and personally, regularly. As you point out, knowing how to figure probabilities is immensely useful. And frustrating as well when you see how the influencers of the world have no ability to make remotely sensible risk/benefit assessments. Journalists are the worst, they universally (almost) don't seem to understand basic math, let alone probability theory. Of course the manipulators at the very top understand a lot more, but their motivations don't coincide with our interests.