About this episode

Greg La Blanc interviews Aaron Brown about the persistence of quantitatively flawed studies and the impact of tribalism on disinformation.

Aaron Brown is an author and risk management professional, formerly the Chief Risk Officer at the hedge fund AQR. Aaron’s recent works are titled Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation and The Poker Face of Wall Street. Greg and Aaron discuss why quantitatively flawed studies still persist today. Aaron argues that the central problem is not just incompetence or conspiracy but a macro phenomenon he calls tribalism, combined with the diffusion of responsibility across authors, reviewers, journals, and journalists. He discusses examples, including an NTSB “Chinatown bus” study, a USAID mortality claim, a Chunnel fire-risk study, an observational marijuana/heart-attack paper, and a study claiming 40% of COVID deaths were caused by evictions and later cited in courts and legislation. They contrast academia’s weak incentives with finance and gambling, where betting forces accountability, and Aaron describes the empirical Bayesian approach he prefers using base rates and evidence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

People in this episode

Host: Greg La Blanc

Guest: Aaron Brown

Topics covered

• disinformation
• quantitative analysis
• tribalism
• risk management
• accountability
• academic studies

Keywords

• disinformation
• quantitative studies
• tribalism
• risk management
• accountability
• COVID deaths
• empirical Bayesian

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AQR, NTSB, USAID, Chunnel, COVID

Books & works: Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation, The Poker Face of Wall Street

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