456 PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - 
+} 
cause if you say that, everybody would have understood that you 
are Just using the term in a technical sense. But if you say « un- 
biased » people can not become aware that you are fooling with 
words. It is probably hopeless to suggest a change of terminology, 
but I feel it would have been better if you had used these words 
«not immoral » instead of « unbiased ». Next with regard to « con- 
sistency ». Take a person who is not able to carry on a « consistent » 
discussion and a consistent way of using his logic. You would not 
respect him very much. About his conclusions you would probably 
say « This is a fallacy » I would rather have preferred that you use 
the terminology « not fallacious » instead of « consistent » because 
then again people would have understood that you are really just 
playing with words. I would seriously suggest that we change ter- 
minology to something which is neutral and just say precisely what 
we mean. Instead of « unbiased » I would prefer to say « expec- 
tationally hitting » because what is involved, is simply that the 
expectation of the estimate is equal to the thing which we estimate. 
Instead of « consistent », I would say « targetly converging » in the 
stochastic sense, because that’s what we mean. It may be « con- 
verging asymptotically » i.e. it may be « targetly converging » in 
the limit when the number of observations becomes great. 
« Unbiasedness » or, as I would like to call it, « expectationally 
hittingness » may not really be the property in which we are inte- 
rested. Take a firm that is selling shoes: women’s shoes and men’s 
shoes. The owner of the firm will want very much that a random 
customer can be satisfied. Now, there are two types of shoes: men’s 
shoes and women’s shoes. The « univers » has probably a bimodal 
distribution. If the owner were to make a guess about what shoe the 
next customer would ask for, he would be off the mark if he focussed 
his attention on the mathematical expectation as derived from that 
bimodal distribution. 
I would say that in this case « unbiassedness » is purposefully 
irrelevant. I don’t think that this discussion about terminology is 
aseless because many people are not able to protect themselves 
against risk of being dragged into false understanding and false va- 
16] Fisher - pag. 72