Right Answer, Wrong Question

Incentivising sustainable living: the wrong answer to the right question?

The Right Answer to the Wrong Question: Identifying Superior Active Portfolio Management

The debate over the value of active portfolio management has often centered on whether the average active manager is capable of producing returns that exceed expectations. We argue that a more useful way to frame this issue is to focus on identifying those managers who are the most likely to generate superior risk-adjusted returns (i.e., alpha) in the future. Using a style-classified sample of ...

The right answer for the wrong question: consequences of type III error for public health research.

OBJECTIVES This study examined the impact of assessing the causes of interindividual variation within a population when the research question of interest is about causes of differences between populations or time periods. This discrepancy between the research focus and the research question is referred to as a type III error, one that provides the right answer for the wrong question. METHODS ...

Right answer, wrong question: on the clinical relevance of the cardiovascular history.

According to Samuel Johnson, “It is as foolish to make experiments on the constancy of a friend as on the chastity of a wife.” Despite this sage admonition, Cheng et al challenge the fidelity of traditional algorithms for estimation of cardiovascular risk based on the quality of symptoms suspicious of angina, asserting that they seriously overstate the actual prevalence of disease.1 They base t...

The artful dodger: answering the wrong question the right way.

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected be...