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Friday, December 16, 2011
Ken Dryden, head injuries, and Grantland, part 2
Dryden takes to task Gary Bettman role. As usual, Dryden is brilliant.
Gary Bettman has arrived at Stage 2 in the NHL’s response to fighting and violence.
Stage 1, as embodied by Colin Campbell and former Boston Bruins coach and immensely popular TV commentator Don Cherry, was aggressive, belligerent, and dismissive. Look, this is hockey. This is how the game’s played. Always has been. If you don’t like it, don’t play it.
Stage 2, as embodied in Bettman’s interview, is more modulated, more thoughtful-sounding, and more reasonable-sounding (aided by the interview’s setting, a room lighted dark and warm, almost cozy; there’s a reason 60 Minutes’ interviews and congressional committee hearings are done in the glare of bright lights).
Occasionally he strays into a lawyer’s gentle, prickly combativeness, but mostly he stays on his message: It is Boston University’s scientific work on the brain samples of former players that helped bring head injuries to a focus, he is saying. It’s science that I’m going to argue back. Science isn’t impressed with anecdote and story. Science demands proof. Four brain samples are merely four anecdotes, and that’s out of the thousands who have played this game. Mine is the reasonable, responsible position. Mine is based on science. Science demands proof, and I demand proof, too. And when science gives me what science insists upon for itself, I will go where science takes me. In the meantime, even with science on my side, I will continue cooperating with doctors and researchers and generate rule changes where appropriate. That’s how reasonable I am.
By waiting for science, thousands of asbestos workers and millions of smokers died. The fact is, as a society we rarely have the luxury of waiting for science on big, difficult, potentially dangerous questions to meet its standard of proof. We need to take the best science we have, generate more and better information, then apply to it our best intuition and common sense — and decide.
Scientists are always disparaging of politicians and other decision-makers for being so influenced by anecdote. But an anecdote, well observed, thorough, rigorous, and truth-seeking (not ax-grinding), can tell a lot. At any moment, it may also be the best information we have. It is only by tragic fluke — his early death — that we have the Derek Boogaard “anecdote.”
Normally, we’d have to wait many more years to know what had happened many years before. But now we have this gift from Derek Boogaard.
The “anecdotal evidence” argument, as a rhetorical strategy that’s almost totally divorced from its proper context and meaning, is approaching the level of misuse that we see with “theory”. (As used, for example, in “Evolution is only a theory”.)
I used to be onside with the people who would say that the NHL won’t budge until they lose Crosby or Ovechkin to a concussion. But now I’m starting to think that even that kind of catastrophe isn’t enough. Geez.