This morning I had someone from a pharmaceutical company call me with questions about conducting a CRM dose-finding trial and I mentioned it to my wife.
Then this afternoon she was reading a book in which there was a dialog between husband and wife including this sentence:
He launched into a technical explanation of his current consulting gig—something about a CRM implementation.
You can’t make this kind of thing up. A few hours before reading this line, my wife had exactly this conversation. However, I doubt the author and I had the same thing in mind.
In my mind, CRM stands for Continual Reassessment Method, a Bayesian method for Phase I clinical trials, especially in oncology. We ran a lot of CRM trials while I worked in biostatistics at MD Anderson Cancer Center.
For most people, presumably including the author of the book quoted above, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management software.
Like my fictional counterpart, I know a few things about CRM implementation, but it’s a different kind of CRM.
I saw “CRM consulting gig” and I was excited that we would be working together. Alas.
I am reminded of the beginning of the movie True Lies, where exactly that happens. Spy husband gushes over details of some CRM software he’s supposedly peddling so that housewife does not become suspicious.
Now, Dr. Cook, how’s your tango skillz?
So how likely is it that two three-letter acronyms coincide? Of course there are many three-letter acronyms that coincide, which can partially be attributed to the birthday paradox, but what are the chances that it happens with two specific acronyms as in this post?
It’s certainly more than 1/(26^3) since letters are not equally likely to be the first letters of words. Based on the frequencies of first letters of words found in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequencies_of_the_first_letters_of_a_word_in_the_English_language), it should be something like 1/2500, but that’s probably still inaccurate because the words used in acronyms aren’t representative of the English language overall. (For example, “the”, which I suspect accounts for a lot of T’s high frequency, is usually left out of acronyms.)
To further complicate matters, the words in an acronym aren’t independent or identically distributed. Is M an especially common third letter in an acronym? It might be.