Events

CDS Colloquium: A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics

Speaker: Ben Recht

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 150

Date: Friday, October 31, 2025

This talk proposes a framework for understanding statistics as a calculus of bureaucracy, providing numerical foundations for governance in the face of uncertainty through clear, transparent rules. I will first outline how statistical prediction can leverage collected data to make decisions that comply with bureaucratic regulations and standards. I will lean on the 70-year legacy of Paul Meehl’s 1954 monograph Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, which provided early evidence of the superiority of statistical methods for predicting the consequences of actions and motivated decades of research proving this case. The talk will examine Meehl’s argument in the context of contemporary machine learning systems and provide theoretical arguments for why and when statistical methods outperform human judgment. I will then highlight the complementary bureaucratic role of randomized experiments, especially in medicine, which serve to inform decision-making by generating data. I will also describe how randomized trials establish "ex ante policies”—statistical rules and procedures designed before data collection. I will conclude by suggesting new directions for research in policy-oriented statistical methodology.