666. Decoding Disinformation in Numbers and Narratives with Aaron Brown

About this episode

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…