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    Think Like A Freak

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    maximus_2000
    1. The document discusses thinking like a "freak" which means using data and experiments to understand problems rather than relying on hunches or ideology. It emphasizes using common sense and focusing on small, solvable problems. 2. It notes that most people don't think very often and are reluctant to admit what they don't know or conduct experiments. Experiments are important to reliably measure cause and effect for complex problems. 3. Defining and redefining problems is important to find the right solutions. Problems are often noisily defined when the root causes may lie further in the past or in different areas than typically considered.

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    Think Like A Freak

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    maximus_2000
    610 views6 pages
    1. The document discusses thinking like a "freak" which means using data and experiments to understand problems rather than relying on hunches or ideology. It emphasizes using common sense and focusing on small, solvable problems. 2. It notes that most people don't think very often and are reluctant to admit what they don't know or conduct experiments. Experiments are important to reliably measure cause and effect for complex problems. 3. Defining and redefining problems is important to find the right solutions. Problems are often noisily defined when the root causes may lie further in the past or in different areas than typically considered.

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    Think Like a Freak

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    Think Like a Freak

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    1. The document discusses thinking like a "freak" which means using data and experiments to understand problems rather than relying on hunches or ideology. It emphasizes using common sense and focusing on small, solvable problems. 2. It notes that most people don't think very often and are reluctant to admit what they don't know or conduct experiments. Experiments are important to reliably measure cause and effect for complex problems. 3. Defining and redefining problems is important to find the right solutions. Problems are often noisily defined when the root causes may lie further in the past or in different areas than typically considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as txt, pdf, or txt
    610 views6 pages

    Think Like A Freak

    Uploaded by

    maximus_2000
    1. The document discusses thinking like a "freak" which means using data and experiments to understand problems rather than relying on hunches or ideology. It emphasizes using common sense and focusing on small, solvable problems. 2. It notes that most people don't think very often and are reluctant to admit what they don't know or conduct experiments. Experiments are important to reliably measure cause and effect for complex problems. 3. Defining and redefining problems is important to find the right solutions. Problems are often noisily defined when the root causes may lie further in the past or in different areas than typically considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as txt, pdf, or txt
    of 6

    1. What Does It Mean to Think Like a Freak?

    If you follow the communal incentive trying to win the game for your nation even t
    hough you risk looking personally foolish you will kick toward the center.
    Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.
    Our thinking is inspired by what is known as the economic approach. That doesn t m
    ean focusing on the economy far from it. The economic approach is both broader and s
    impler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understan
    d how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources
    get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those reso
    urces, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirati
    onal (like education and love).
    There is nothing magical about this way of thinking. It usually traffics in the
    obvious and places a huge premium on common sense. So here s the bad news: if you
    come to this book hoping for the equivalent of a magician spilling his secrets,
    you may be disappointed. But there s good news too: thinking like a Freak is simpl
    e enough that anyone can do it. What s perplexing is that so few people do.
    When was the last time you sat for an hour of pure, unadulterated thinking? you re
    like most people, it s been a while.
    Few people think more than two or three times a year, Shaw reportedly said. I have
    made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

    Fixing a huge problem like runaway health-care costs is about a thousand times h
    arder than, say, figuring out how to take a penalty kick. (That s why, as we argue
    in Chapter 5, you should focus on small problems whenever possible.) We also co
    uld have profited from knowing then what we know now about persuading people who
    don t want to be persuaded (which we cover in Chapter 8).

    2. The Three Hardest Words in the English Language


    The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything witho
    ut it.
    Even with good feedback, it can take a while to learn. (Just imagine how bad som
    e of that early bread was!) But without it, you don t stand a chance; you ll go on m
    aking the same mistakes forever.
    In a simple scenario, it s easy to gather feedback. When you re learning to drive a
    car, it s pretty obvious what happens when you take a sharp mountain curve at 80 m
    iles an hour. (Hello, ravine!) But the more complex a problem is, the harder it
    is to capture good feedback. You can gather a lot of facts, and that may be help
    ful, but in order to reliably measure cause and effect you need to get beneath t
    he facts. You may have to purposefully go out and create feedback through an exp
    eriment.

    They told us about a summer intern who was supposed to call in the Sunday ad buy
    s for the Pittsburgh newspapers. For whatever reason, he botched his assignment
    and failed to make the calls. So for the entire summer, the company ran no newsp
    aper ads in a large chunk of Pittsburgh. Yeah, one executive said, we almost got fi
    red for that one. So what happened, we asked, to the company s Pittsburgh sales tha
    t summer?
    One reason is tradition. In our experience, many institutions are used to making
    decisions based on some murky blend of gut instinct, moral compass, and whateve
    r the previous decision maker did.
    But even if this goes poorly if your boss sneers at your ignorance or you can t figu
    re out the answer no matter how hard you try there is another, more strategic bene
    fit to occasionally saying I don t know. Let s say you ve already done that on a few occ
    asions. The next time you re in a real jam, facing an important question that you
    just can t answer, go ahead and make up something and everyone will believe you, bec
    ause you re the guy who all those other times was crazy enough to admit you didn t k
    now the answer. After all, just because you re at the office is no reason to stop
    thinking.
    A second reason is lack of expertise: while it isn t hard to run a simple experime
    nt, most people have never been taught to do so and may therefore be intimidated
    .
    But there is a third, grimmer explanation for this general reluctance toward exp
    erimentation: it requires someone to say I don t know. Why mess with an experiment w
    hen you think you already know the answer? Rather than waste time, you can just
    rush off and bankroll the project or pass the law without having to worry about
    silly details like whether or not it ll work.
    If, however, you re willing to think like a Freak and admit what you don t know, you
    will see there is practically no limit to the power of a good randomized experi
    ment.
    3. What s Your Problem?
    But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence
    on a student s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, ho
    w much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whe
    ther the parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home-based i
    nputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.
    When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.
    So maybe, when we talk about why American kids aren t doing so well, we should be
    talking less about schools and more about parents.
    Here is the broader point: whatever problem you re trying to solve, make sure you re
    not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your a
    ttention. Before spending all your time and resources, it s incredibly important t
    o properly define the problem or, better yet, redefine the problem.
    What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially:
    How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make

    hot dogs easier to eat?


    Let s say you haven t been exercising and want to get back in the groove. You decide
    to do some push-ups. How many? Well, it s been a while, you tell yourself, let me
    start with 10. Down you go. When do you start getting mentally and physically t
    ired? Probably around push-up number 7 or 8.
    Imagine now that you had decided on 20 push-ups instead of 10. When do you start
    getting tired this time? Go ahead, hit the floor and try it. You probably blast
    ed right past 10 before you even remembered how out of shape you are.
    4. Like a Bad Dye Job, the Truth Is in the Roots
    Interestingly, our argument didn t generate much hate mail. Why? Our best guess is
    that readers were smart enough to understand that we had identified abortion as
    a mechanism for the crime drop but not the actual root cause. So what is the ro
    ot cause? Simply this: too many children were being brought up in bad environmen
    ts that led them to crime. As the first post-abortion generation came of age, it
    included fewer children who d been raised in such environments.
    It may seem daunting to travel backward a generation or two in order to understa
    nd the root cause of a problem. But in some cases, a generation is barely the bl
    ink of an eye. Let s pretend you are a German factory worker. You re sitting in a be
    er hall with friends after a shift, demoralized by your financial standing. The
    national economy is humming along, but it seems as if you and everyone else in t
    own is running in place. The people who live just a few towns over, meanwhile, a
    re doing considerably better. Why?
    The Ocean journey of a slave from Africa to America
    Fresh medical research may prove that the salt-sensitivity theory isn t even right
    . But if it is, even in small measure, the potential benefits are huge. There s som
    ething that can be done, Fryer says. A diuretic that helps your body get rid of yo
    ur salts. A little common pill.
    He identified three factors:
    1.Protestants tend to work a few more hours per week than Catholics.
    2.Protestants are more likely than Catholics to be self-employed.
    3.Protestant women are more likely than Catholic women to work full-time.
    Yes,

    he says,

    we call it a

    transpoosion.

    5. Think Like a Child


    To think like a Freak means to think small, not big.
    We re not saying that giving glasses to the schoolkids who need them will fix ever
    y education problem, not by a long shot.
    But when you are fixated on thinking big, this is exactly the kind of small-bore
    solution you can easily miss.*
    Here s another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don t be afraid of the obviou
    s.
    What do the numbers say? Nothing more than this: within ten years, the United St
    ates went from very few abortions to roughly 1.6 million a year, largely because
    of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in all fift
    y states.

    Freaks like to have fun.


    PLS Account
    6. Like Giving Candy to a Baby
    Amanda, three years old, - M&M
    Chinese city of Foshan
    Brian Mullaney s Mark Twain once wrote:
    [T]he best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in
    India is to pay a bounty on their scalps.
    Then every patriot goes to raising them.

    1.Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.
    2.Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you t
    o provide.
    3.Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates y
    ou, learn from it and try something different.
    4.Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to c
    ooperative.
    5.Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the right thing
    to do.
    6.Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding wa
    ys to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try
    to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

    7. What Do King Solomon and David Lee Roth Have in Common?


    1.
    2.
    3.
    4.
    5.

    King Solomon
    David Lee Roth - M&M
    medival priest
    zappos
    Nigerian Scammer

    Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself.


    A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently
    than an honest person. How can this fact be exploited to ferret out the bad guy
    s? Doing so requires an understanding of how incentives work in general (which y
    ou gained in the last chapter) and how different actors may respond differently
    to a given incentive (as we ll discuss in this one). Certain tools in the Freak ar
    senal may come in handy only once or twice in your lifetime. This is one such to
    ol. But it has power and a certain elegance, for it can entice a guilty party to
    unwittingly reveal his guilt through his own behavior.
    Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J. Dubner (2014-05-12 10:00:00+10:00). Think Like a Fr
    eak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain (Kindle Locations 1
    623-1627). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
    A clever company. It s really putting the employee in the position of Do you care mo
    re about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?
    says Tony
    Hsieh, the company s CEO. And if they care more about the easy money, then we proba

    bly aren t the right fit for them.


    The secret bullet factory and Zappos each dangled some bait cold beer in one case,
    $2,000 in the other that helped sort things out.
    David Lee Roth and King Solomon, meanwhile, each had to make themselves look bad
    in order to flush out the truth Roth by posing as an even bigger prima donna than
    he was and Solomon by suggesting he was a bloodthirsty tyrant, eager to settle
    a maternity dispute by hacking the baby to pieces.
    The method notwithstanding, seducing people to sort themselves into different ca
    tegories can be all sorts of useful. It can also be extraordinarily profitable.
    The scammer wants to find the guy who hasn t heard of it, Herley says. Anybody who do
    esn t fall off their chair laughing is exactly who he wants to talk to.
    How can a Nigerian scammer tell, just by looking at thousands of e-mail addresse
    s, who is gullible and who is not? He can t. Gullibility is in this case an unobse
    rvable trait. But, Herley realized, the scammer can invite the gullible people t
    o reveal themselves. How?
    Their ridiculous e-mails are in fact quite brilliant at getting the scammers
    ive garden to weed itself.

    mass

    It encouraged them to, in the words of King Solomon, ambush only themselves.

    8. How to Persuade People Who Don t Want to Be Persuaded


    Stories also appeal to the narcissist in all of us. As a story unspools, with it
    s cast of characters moving through time and making decisions, we inevitably put
    ourselves in their shoes. Yes, I would have done that too! or No no no, I never
    would have made that decision!
    9. The Upside of Quitting
    The first is a lifetime of being told by Churchill wannabes that quitting is a s
    ign of failure.
    The second is the notion of sunk costs. This is pretty much what it sounds like:
    the time or money or sweat equity you ve already spent on a project.
    The third force that keeps people from quitting is a tendency to focus on concre
    te costs and pay too little attention to opportunity cost.
    we are not suggesting you quit everything in order to do nothing, to spend all d
    ay on the couch in your underwear, eating nachos and watching TV. But if you re st
    uck in a project or relationship or mind-set that isn t working, and if the opport
    unity cost seems to outweigh the sunk cost, here are some ways to think about th
    e big quit.
    A premortem tries to find out what might go wrong before it s too late.
    You gather up everyone connected with a project and have them imagine that it
    launched and failed miserably.
    Now they each write down the exact reasons for its failure.
    Klein has found the premortem can help flush out the flaws or doubts in a proj

    ect that no one had been willing to speak aloud.


    When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs even when it
    represents nothing more than a temporary setback.

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