👮‍♂️ D.A.R.E. to Be Honest 👮‍♀️

🍻 We're All Going to Bentley's! 🍻

Apr 17, 2023

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” -Peter Drucker

I am a lifelong teetotaler.

At 39 years old, I have never intentionally consumed alcohol, nor do I plan to. Everyone who knows me well knows this. To be honest, I have no particular reason why I do not drink; plenty of my family members drink without incident, no religious prohibition exists against it in any current flavor of Judaism I am aware of, and I live in New York City, the bar capital of the known universe.

That said, if forced to give a reason for my alcohol abstinence, I would focus on a single factor:

D.A.R.E.

In middle school, I participated in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program, where a police officer came to school for a few weeks to teach about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. Our officer’s name was, I kid you not, Officer Copsy.

For decades, people have known that D.A.R.E. does not work (we will come back to this later), but somehow D.A.R.E. totally freaked me out, and since I never started drinking, I guess you could say it “worked” on me. Many people I know who drink started consuming alcohol before they were legally permitted to at 21, or smoked pot in high school (back when it was illegal at any age). Frankly, I always assumed that the first time I would try alcohol or pot would obviously be the time the cops would show up and arrest me, and I wouldn’t be able to graduate high school like Donna Martin,

so I figured why take the risk? However, while I know plenty of people who drank booze underage and are completely safe drinkers to this day, somehow Officer Copsy sufficiently scared at least one student at Franklin Middle School.

All that said, this is not a defense of D.A.R.E.

In fact, a close reader might argue that this entire opening is ridiculous. In essence, I just made the following argument:

Joshua Rabin took D.A.R.E. in middle school
Joshua Rabin has never drunk alcohol or used drugs
1. (Although he does have a weird love of Diet Dr. Pepper)
Therefore: D.A.R.E. was the reason that Joshua Rabin is a teetotaler

We’ve already gone through a number of reasons why this is a ridiculous argument, so you can add this to the list of reasons why I’m not too bright. But going deeper, after many nights in my 20s at the Gin Mill or George Keeley’s with friends asking me, “Wait..why don’t you drink?,” the answer appears to be that I want an easy answer that explains my life choices in hindsight.

And this brings us to this week’s heuristic.

Hindsight Bias

Sadly, I know too many people who suffered from an addiction to drugs or alcohol, most of whom sat through the same after-school specials as I did. So giving myself credit because of a program all of us did is ridiculous; that said, it makes sense that I might look for a piece of information that shows that, looking back on it, I had the foresight that none of them possessed.

This is hindsight bias.

Baruch Fischhoff, a student of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, was the first person to take a closer look at the role hindsight bias plays in what he calls “outcome knowledge,” the knowledge of how things will turn out in the end.

We want to reward people who have foresight, the people who saw a problem before anyone else did. If we are correct and see a problem no one else sees, maybe will we be featured in a book by Michael Lewis that is eventually made into a movie, like Billy Beane in Moneyball, Michael Burry in The Big Short, or Charity Dean in The Premonition.

. And to be clear, these people did see something before anyone else did, and we should reward and praise them for their foresight. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who did not see it were all stupid, either.

All of us have been the recipient of someone sitting on the sidelines, waiting for something to fail, and claiming that they knew it was a bad idea all along. Moreover, when something bad happens to us, we often search our memories for a moment where we could claim that “we knew it all along.” In either case, Fischhoff argues that “we systematically underestimate the surprises which the past held and holds for us,” leading to “subjecting those hypotheses to inordinately weak tests.”

Instead, we need to focus more on process and probability and get a sense of whether or not we should expect a particular outcome.

In particular, Fischhoff argues that “It is both unfair and self-defeating to castigate decision makers who have erred in fallible systems, without admitting to that fallibility and doing something to improve that system.”

The most tragic case studies of leadership I know are ones where people repeat the same mistakes of the past, without doing anything different to change it this time around.

But I could be biased…

With Charity For All

But back to why D.A.R.E. doesn’t work.

Before I became obsessed with Moneyball, and was merely obsessed with why people fund things that do not work (don’t judge me), I read With Charity For All, a sad but important analysis of nonprofit organizations in the United States by Ken Stern, former C.E.O. of National Public Radio. Stern argues that in spite of evidence that their programs do not work, many non-profit organizations continue offering the same products in the same way while making knowingly false claims about their effectiveness. He writes:

“There is little credible evidence that many charitable organizations produce lasting social value. Study after study tells the opposite story: of organizations that fail to achieve meaningful impact yet press on with their strategies and services despite significant, at times overwhelming, evidence that they don’t work. These failures are often well known within the nonprofit community but are not more generally discussed because the studies either are buried or tend to be so organization- and issue-specific that broader sector-wide conclusions are easy to avoid.”
7

Ouch. And Stern is particularly sanguine in his hatred of D.A.R.E.

While D.A.R.E was the largest drug abuse education program in the United States by a magnitude, Stern points out that almost all independent scholarly research concludes that not only is there no correlation between participation in D.A.R.E. and decreasing one’s likelihood to use drugs, but there is also the potential for a “boomerang effect,” where students might become more likely to use drugs by participating in D.A.R.E., as the program makes them knowledgeable about drugs which they previously knew nothing about.

In fairness, the people who created D.A.R.E. should not be criticized for attempting to create something that would address drug addiction, as addiction remains a public health crisis to this day. However, today we have an obligation to criticize anyone who continues to promote a worthless program that only exists because key supporters defend the organization against those who wish to defund it, creating the illusion that a mammoth organization reflects a mammoth degree of effectiveness, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.

Does the Jewish Community fund an equivalent of D.A.R.E.?

That’s a difficult question to answer, especially without the kind of rigorous peer-reviewed analysis and meta-analysis that created the ironclad conclusion that D.A.R.E. does not work. But it’s reasonable to assume that there are well-funded and well-publicized projects in the Jewish Community that are notable, but completely ineffective, simply because the same phenomenon exists in the nonprofit world, writ-large.

As of this week, we have around three-dozen CEOs of major Jewish organizations who subscribe to Moneyball Judaism, plus leaders from the funding community, researchers, and synagogue leaders including rabbis, executive directors, and presidents. I’m not sharing this information (only) to brag (wink wink), but only to point that out it takes a special kind of courage to admit that something does not work. We can show that collective courage.

Officer Copsy would be proud.

Let’s Trash on D.A.R.E. More…

Weekly Links

Professor Cancels Final Exam After Viral TikTok Video:
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Here’s a fun one- a professor of marketing told his students that he would cancel their final exam if someone created a TikTok video that got at least 1 million views. And then one of them actually did it.
Unionization and TikTok Influencers: I’ve never loved the term “gig economy”; it always seemed to be a thinly veiled way to provide workers less protection and lower salaries. Here is an article from The Atlantic on the trials of social media influencers advocating for their rights as workers.
Rewiring Your Organization for Behavioral Science: I am not a behavioral scientist; I’m just a guy who is super interested in all of it and halfway decent at explaining some of it. But here’s an amazing analysis from an actual expert on how you might apply what you are learning to your organization.
The American Smile: Do you hate smiling for photos? I don’t, but I do hate having my picture taken. Here is a thought-provoking essay on how AI is changing the nature of the human smile.
The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried: If you are interested in the recent trends in artificial intelligence, you need to know the name Sam Altman. Here is a profile of Altman in The New York Times.

Danny Jacobs would have totally protested to allow me to graduate.

I wrote a paper in ninth-grade social studies arguing that all drugs should be legalized, so I’m not a fan, but if you want more on that subject, read Michael Pollan or Carl Hart. My late uncle, Professor Jack Rabin, convinced me to join the legalization “movement” long before I knew it existed.

Baruch Fischhoff, “Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty,” in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 1, Issue 3 (1975), 288–299.

If a movie were made about me, a younger Steve Carrell would play me. People used to tell me that I looked like him.

See Footnote 3, 298.

Ibid.

Ken Stern, With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2013), 258-261.

Ibid., 528.

Photo Credit: Ben Pier of The New York Times.