Thread by @daniela_witten

The Fisher Lecture: an epilogue.

I am delighted that COPSS decided to retire the name of the Fisher Award and Lecture, and to create a new COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lecture.

A lot has happened during the past 3 weeks since I posted this original thread.

1/

https://twitter.com/daniela_witten/status/1268392721275744256

In the world . . . well, read the news, I can’t give you a recap.

But in case you've been living under a rock . . it’s been a lot.

I’ll focus on just two news items.

2/

In academia specifically, we have seen the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag on Twitter. So many Black academics have described, in heartbreaking detail, the many ways in which the academic system makes them feel unwelcome or sets up concrete barriers to their success.

3/

I am curious: of the people who feel that changing the name of the Fisher Lecture is an unmitigated disaster for statistics, how many have taken the time to read the #BlackInTheIvory posts? How many even know about this hashtag?

4/

Outside of academia, a number of major brands have decided that the time is right to rethink some of their racist branding (and not a moment too soon!). I’m looking at you, Quaker Oats.

If Quaker Oats can retire Aunt Jemima, then statistics can retire the Fisher lecture.

5/

On a personal level, I (naively, in retrospect) did not expect my original thread to get nearly as much attention as it did.

6/

I got an outpouring of support from a huge # of people, for which I am hugely grateful. I don’t want to risk missing anyone — and I don’t want to continue this (false, in my opinion) narrative of a battle between two sets of statisticians — and so won't list people here.

7/

A lot of people reached out to me with substantive arguments that were opposed to a name change. I am grateful to those who kept their communication fact-based and polite.

8/

I was surprised, though, by how many throw away arguments I heard.

I saw a lot of this scare tactic: “They're coming for the Fisher lecture today! Will they come for ANOVA tomorrow?”

What??!!

9/

I have not heard of anybody wanting to rename ANOVA or Fisher’s exact test.

People want the Fisher lecture renamed, but we all want to retain Fisher’s contributions to the field of statistics.

10/

There’s a direct analogy here to what's happening outside of academia:

***People want Confederate monuments taken down, but as far as I know, nobody is seriously suggesting that we dismantle the state of Virginia.***

11/

And finally, much of the feedback involved ad hominem attacks.

Some of these attacks were funny (and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that humor was intended): e.g. I got called a hypocrite for having published a paper with “Fisher” in the title in 2011. Really?!

12/

Some of them were not funny, and weren’t intended to be.

13/

But, I come from a place of ****immense**** academic privilege. This means that I can just decide not to let some things get under my skin.

But many (most! almost all!) people don't have so much academic privilege, and attacks like this can be very hard to shake off.

14/

Anyway, to wrap this up. I don’t have much else to say, other than that I’m grateful to the people who made this change happen, and I hope that we can work to change the hearts and minds of the people who are not happy about this change.

15/

And I hope that this tiny little gesture of a name change can be just the beginning of a much larger conversation in our field about how we can work to create a statistical community that is committed to our shared goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

/end