High Price

filled me with pride. Now, however, I don’t think that this shows that I was especially smart: the college-bound kids didn’t take the ASVAB and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who’d simply taken it to get out of class. The scores would have been much higher if the whole class had been required to take it—or if only the college-bound students did so. It didn’t represent a true picture of the smartest kids in the school.

    Despite receiving all-county basketball recognition, I didn’t receive a basketball scholarship. As a result, the military became a more likely option.
    Today, I’d call that a sampling bias. For example, in my research, I have to think about not just the drug I might be studying but also the kinds of people who would be available for study participation and whether they fairly represent the people I’m trying to understand. While I explore their subjective experiences with them, I also study their behavior on different days and with different doses of drugs. These contextual factors matter a lot: under one condition, I might find one effect but under another, I might find the opposite outcome or no effect at all.
    I often explain it this way: Imagine if the only experience you had of driving was being plunked down behind the wheel for the first time in your life in a raging thunderstorm or blizzard on a busy highway. You’d probably think driving was seriously dangerous and that most people couldn’t handle it. You might generalize from your own single experience, under those awful conditions, to that of everyone and see driving a car as something that should be highly restricted.
    Of course, your sample of driving in that kind of situation is limited to one sample of an extreme situation. It doesn’t include driving on a bright sunny day, driving once you’ve had years of experience, or driving on a quiet country road. Similarly, using a drug once or twice or seeing a friend become really paranoid as a result of that drug does not provide an adequate sample of the range of possible drug experiences. Likewise, sampling only the non-college-bound students’ results on a test of intelligence does not provide a representative sample of possible test scores for a particular high school class.
    But learning to think about ways to really isolate the causes and effects of things was one result of that rather random choice I made to take that test. It eventually opened up a whole new world to me. If I hadn’t made that one, seemingly irrelevant decision to take the ASVAB, it’s unlikely that I would now be a scientist and college professor.
    Once those results were in, however, both the army and the air force did a full-court press to try to recruit me. At first, I didn’t really take it seriously. My guidance counselor nonetheless insisted I meet with both recruiters. She set up the meetings in her office and got me out of class for them, once again successfully ensuring my attendance by understanding what motivated me. Although I either acted like a clown or literally slept through many of my classes, Ms. Robinson found me charming and didn’t give up on me, knowing that the military was one of the few options that could make a real difference in my life. Her exceptional dedication to trying to secure a future for me really mattered.
    I continued to be quite resistant at first. One of the most depressing experiences I’d had as a child was listening to our family friend Paul talk about Vietnam. He was invariably drunk, reeking of alcohol. His memories seemed overwhelming: he’d suddenly start regaling us with stories of seeing men’s heads exploding, their faces blown to bits. His expression of horror and the physical manifestations of fear like flop sweat illustrated much more than his words how the experience of war had broken and devastated him. He’d talk about friends who were crippled or dead, and other brothers who came home physically whole but were no longer all there mentally. He warned us over and over not to sign up, that black men were even less valued by America when we were sent to war. I wanted no part of it.
    Of course, as recruiters do, the army and air force representatives painted a very different picture. Emphasizing basketball and college study, stressing that the country was at peace, they glossed over the main job of the military. No mention was made at all of war or combat. I didn’t have to worry about that. They implied that all I’d have to do was