Abstract
My comment concerns the paper by Dr. Igor Mandel (Mandel, 2020) which critically reviews recent renaming of the R. A. Fisher Award Lecture – a presentation given by a honored statistician in recognition of her/his achievements in statistics at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) of the American Statistical Association – a major statistical forum in the North America.
I should start by saying that I was not dismayed by renaming of the Fisher Award lecture, and if it left any psychological scars, they have not yet been revealed by a psychoanalyst. However, I found reading both Dr. Witten’s tweets (Witten, 2020) with her justification for renaming the Fisher lecture and Dr. Mandel’s learned response (Mandel, 2020) to the subsequent ASA decision highly entertaining and thought provoking.
To provide a minimal background, I am a Ph.D. statistician, a frequent participant of the ASA annual meetings and an ASA Fellow (2018). The first thing I have been checking about every JSM meeting I attended was who is delivering the Fisher lecture this year. Several lectures that I heard or read after they have been published in the Statistical Science magazine have left a lasting impression on me and influenced my perception of statistics at large. Among my favorites are the “R. A. Fisher in the 21st Century” by Brad Efron and “Could Fisher, Jeffreys and Neyman Have Agreed on Testing?” by Jim Berger, who are among the most influential statisticians of modern times. Whether they might have written exactly the same papers without a $1000 allowance remains an open question. However, it is clear that the fact that the award bears Fisher’s name has shaped selection of their topics, all to our benefit.
Enough statistics. Let us get to the arguments. One of the strongest ones (in my opinion) of Dr. Witten’s tweet is given in response to someone’s point that the lecture “is not celebrating Fisher the man but Fisher the scientist.” To this Dr. Witten rightfully responded that no, according to Wikipedia, it is the entire persona of Sir Ronald Fisher that is being honored, with all the giblets, hoofs and horns included. Strangely, she did not consider a possibility of modifying the verbiage of the reward definition that would limit it to honoring, say, outstanding and lasting contributions of Sir Ronald Fisher to theory and practice of statistics. Would this be satisfactory? I leave aside a more general philosophical question: what it exactly means to celebrate the “entire man” and why should we ever celebrate a man as a “whole thing,” which sounds like a small burp of paganism in the face of our modern culture (at least the religions I am aware of do not encourage idolatry).
I envision people saying: wait a moment, how can only a part of a man be celebrated? Does not a man make a whole piece? Indeed, how can we cope with the fact that while working during day hours on statistical problems, at night Sir Ronald Fisher would take his 45-millimeter to the streets of London and randomly shoot people whom he considering worth removing from the gene pool? Or perhaps he was collaborating with the Nazis administering surgery with no anesthesia at a local London hospital? Well, the good news is that he did not. And if he did, he would have been arrested and prosecuted in his own time. However, as one can infer from the Wikipedia article on Sir Ronald Fisher, he was capable of making public statements revealing poor judgment when he in fact should have refrained from judgment and declared ignorance. For example, how could he possibly know the details of von Verschuer work under Nazis? Did he review the detailed protocols of his studies? So why did not he acknowledge his lack of competence on the subject at the moment? And why he died remorseless on July 29 of 1962 not admitting he may have been making wrong judgment? I do not know and frankly I do not care to know. However, I know that saying something is not the same as doing something. People say a lot of stupid things throughout their lives provided they are allowed to live long enough and that is precisely why we should be careful not to celebrate the stupidities that they (and we ourselves) say but carefully select what exactly makes us excited about a certain character (again, homicidal maniacs excluded).
An important feature of the Western (and perhaps any other culture) is that it established lines separating things unacceptable from things within the “norm.” Redefining them retroactively is a risky business that may result in substantial losses of our cultural heritage which needs to be at least preserved if not always celebrated. I found the article of Dr. Mandel very useful in that it provides a reader with information that would allow him or her to understand which side of the line Sir Ronald Fisher stands now, then, and hopefully forever.