A life-and-death problem in statistics

Drugs are accepted or denied by the FDA on the basis of their efficacy. Efficacy is defined as the excess of "success" over what might occur by chance. A drug which, for instance, resulted in no change in the average outcome for the disorder at which it was aimed could never be passed because it appears to be no better than a placebo.

However, basing success or failure on averages is a flawed procedure, as it assumes that the results lie on the normal, "bell-shaped" curve. Sometimes, however, they don't. Here's an example: Bill is dying of cancer, with a relatively short and painful time-span ahead of him. But suppose there is a drug which, in X percent of the cases, results in death immediately, but in the remaining percentage the patient is cured. Let us suppose that the drug, on average, does not change the average outcome, so it is not and will not be approved.

But for Bill, if he takes the drug, he will either die immediately or be greatly improved or cured. For Bill, taking the drug is a no-brainer. Of course he will chance dying, since he's dying painfully anyway and there is no escape. But if he takes the drug, he may be improved or cured. The flaw in FDA thinking is that there may be bi-modal or even trimodal results, and "averages" do not reflect the importance of this distribution of data.

I would appreciate any comments by someone knowledgeable about statistical analysis.

War Economics

I'm puzzled about comments I've read from discussions on the topic of the costs of war. The implication is usually that war is expensive, that the money is "thrown away" in bullets and planes and materiel in general.

What puzzles me is this question: Where is the money spent? Is it not spent mostly in the US in factories that make the equipment soldiers use? The money doesn't leave the country. The products do, but they're paid for in the US, paid to workers and companies that produce things. When a bomb drops on Afghanistan, it doesn't cost us anything. It's already cost us the price of production, but that money went to US citizens for the most part.

So is it possible that one of the things that keeps our economy going at all is the artificial market caused by warfare? If we stopped buying munitions from our factories and planes and tanks and .. our economy would probably slump much further. A lot of people would be out of work. When we don't have a war to consume goods we can produce, the economy does poorly. I'm wondering if it's possible that wars are at times manufactured by our government to keep our economy going.

I recall reading, for instance, that the war with Japan in 1941 was deliberately provoked by our cutting their ocean supply lines for oil and gasoline. It appears we put them in an unsurvivable position and waited for them to take action against us, so that they were identified as the aggressors, even though we gave them no choices. Our economy at the time was terrible; we had just recovered from a depression caused by stock market gambling. WW II ramped us up big time, severely damaged our asian competition, and gave us control of the Pacific as well as a huge demand for military products, built in the US, of course.

I would appreciate comments or arguments. I wonder if my view is too simplistic or even naive.

Photographs as art

I've been reading a book about entering photos in contests. While it is useful for that topic, it has increased my awareness of the difference between pictures that can win contests and those that are "wall-hangers", genuinely artistically interesting. (For the moment I'm setting entirely aside the category of photos that are "newsworthy".)

Some years ago I was browsing through a very large rental/sale art gallery, considering art I might want to own. The manager of the gallery gave me a piece of advice that was excellent at the time, but over the years has come to carry a deeper meaning. He said that I should not buy a picture that I found immediately attractive or interesting; those pictures, he said, don't always "wear well". He strongly suggested that I rent a picture I was considering purchasing, hang it in a prominent place in my house, and keep it for one or more months. His final comment was that the most satisfactory pictures were not necessarily those that grabbed you, but those that somehow got your interest and increased it over time.

It has been said that an "art" photograph takes an everyday object or view and makes us see, as if for the first time, how interesting/beautiful it is. Changing the scale to a larger size, as in Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, is an effective way to accomplish this. Or a dozen other "darkroom tricks" such as changing the color, can have the same effect. I recently saw a painting of a pear, easily 4 feet tall, which was quite good. Every subtle gradation of color and shape were brought out. I stayed interested in that painting for several days, but it falls short of the ideal in that it failed to draw me into it more deeply over time.

That really sums up my thoughts about photos as genuine art. They have to be more than pretty, more than interest grabbers. Somehow they must pull you deeper into the image and sustain your interest. Now, however, we get into the question of what it is that constitutes real art. Of course, there's no answer to that other than the cliche about knowing what we like. We want to make people like our photos, but more than that, we want their interest to continue and deepen. Just being able to win a contest isn't even in the ball park.

I would welcome any comments on this topic.