Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

To be sure, these are early days in microbial exploration. The gut is still a frontier—think of the ocean floor or the surface of Mars. But already the research is paying off. A handful of doctors have successfully treated patients suffering from intestinal maladies by giving them a transfusion of healthy gut bacteria.

who drew inspiration from Barry Marshall’s ulcer research, have identified one answer: human feces. Yes, it appears that the microbe-rich excrement of a healthy person may be just the medicine for a patient whose own gut bacteria are infected, damaged, or incomplete.

Fecal matter is obtained from a “donor” and blended into a saline mixture that, according to one Dutch gastroenterologist, looks like chocolate milk. The mixture is then transfused, often via an enema, into the gut of the patient. In recent years, doctors have found fecal transplants to be effective in wiping out intestinal infections that antibiotics could not. In one small study, Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis—which, he says, was “previously an incurable disease.” But

Borody sees the benefits of fecal therapy as “equivalent to the discovery of antibiotics.”

But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased.

If you meet someone who fancies himself a thought leader or an intellectual, one of the nicest compliments you can pay is to call him a “big thinker.”

To think like a Freak means to think small, not big. Why? For starters, every big problem has been thought about endlessly by people much smarter than we are. The fact that it remains a problem means it is too damned hard to be cracked in full.

Sir Isaac Newton, for instance. “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age,” he wrote. “Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.”

One in four children, it turns out, has subpar eyesight, while a whopping 60 percent of “problem learners” have trouble seeing. If you can’t see well, you won’t read well, and that makes school extra hard.

gamification,

Raw talent is overrated: people who achieve excellence—whether at golf or surgery or piano-playing—were often not the most talented at a young age, but became expert by endlessly practicing their skills.

Let’s say the going interest rate is 1 percent. In a PLS account, you agree to surrender a small chunk of that interest, perhaps .25 percent, which then gets pooled with all the other small chunks from fellow PLS depositors. What happens to that pool of money? It is periodically paid out in a lump sum to some randomly chosen winner—just like the lottery!

That said, we aren’t suggesting you should model all your behavior after an eight-year-old. That would almost certainly cause more problems than it solves. But wouldn’t it be nice if we all smuggled a few childlike instincts across the border into adulthood? We’d spend more time saying what we mean and asking questions we care about; we might even shed a bit of that most pernicious adult trait: pretense. Isaac

there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives.

There are several explanations: 1. Novelty. When is the last time a charity—or any kind of company—offered to never bother you again? That alone is enough to get your attention. 2. Candor. Have you ever heard a charity acknowledge what a hassle it is to get all those beseeching letters in the mail? In a world of crooked information, it is nice to hear some straight talk. 3. Control. Rather than unilaterally dictate the terms of the transaction, Smile Train gave the donor some power. Who doesn’t like to control their own destiny?

In the second case, you ignored the obvious rules of the financial framework (and maybe got arrested). In the first, you polluted the loved-ones framework by bringing money into play (and maybe lost a friend). So you can plainly get into trouble by getting your frames mixed up.

how could Zappos recruit a better breed of customer rep? The standard answer would be to pay them more. But Zappos couldn’t afford that. Instead, it offered more fun and more power. That’s why company meetings are sometimes held in a bar. And why a stroll through the cubicles at Zappos feels like a trip to Mardi Gras, with music, games, and costumes. Customer reps are encouraged to talk to a customer for as long as they want (all without a script, natch); they are authorized to settle problems without calling in a supervisor and can even “fire” a customer who makes trouble.

This phenomenon is sometimes called “the cobra effect.” As the story goes, a British overlord in colonial India thought there were far too many cobras in Delhi. So he offered a cash bounty for every cobra skin. The incentive worked well—so well, in fact, that it gave rise to a new industry: cobra farming. Indians began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to take advantage of the bounty. Eventually the bounty was rescinded—whereupon the cobra farmers did the logical thing and set their snakes free, as toxic and unwanted as today’s HFC-23.

the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

5. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do.

And so it was that David Lee Roth and King Solomon both engaged in a fruitful bit of game theory—which, narrowly defined, is the art of beating your opponent by anticipating his next move.

As disparate as their settings were, the two men faced a similar problem: a need to sift the guilty from the innocent when no one was stepping forward to profess their guilt.

So even though the job might pay only $11 an hour, Zappos wants to know that each new employee is fully committed to the company’s ethos. That’s where “The Offer” comes in. When new employees are in the onboarding period—they’ve already been screened, offered a job, and completed a few weeks of training—Zappos offers them a chance to quit. Even better, quitters will be paid for their training time and also get a bonus representing their first month’s salary—roughly $2,000—just for quitting! All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. Doesn’t that sound nuts? What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A

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.

How can a Nigerian scammer tell, just by looking at thousands of e-mail addresses, who is gullible and who is not? He can’t. Gullibility is in this case an unobservable trait. But, Herley realized, the scammer can invite the gullible people to reveal themselves. How? By sending out such a ridiculous letter—including prominent mentions of Nigeria—that only a gullible person would take it seriously.

So as these American idiots were being skewered in the British media for giving advice to terrorists, what kind of person suddenly had a strong incentive to run out and buy life insurance from his bank? Someone who wanted to cover his tracks. And our algorithm was already in place, paying careful attention. Having learned from the great minds described in this chapter, we laid out a trap designed to ensnare only the guilty. It encouraged them to, in the words of King Solomon, “ambush only themselves.”

People who did well on the math and science quiz were more likely to hold an extreme view of climate change in one direction or another—that is, to consider it either gravely dangerous or wildly overblown. This seems odd, doesn’t it? People with higher science and math scores are presumably better educated, and we all know that education creates enlightened, moderate people, not extremists—don’t we? Not necessarily. Terrorists,

Daniel Kahneman has written: “[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

ask us to assume that their latest projects—whether a piece of legislation or a piece of software—will perform exactly as it was drawn up. It rarely does. So if you want your argument to be truly persuasive, it’s a good idea to acknowledge not only the known flaws but the potential for unintended consequences.

If you are trying to persuade someone, why on earth would you want to lend credence to his argument? One reason is that the opposing argument almost certainly has value—something you can learn from and use to strengthen your own argument. This may

Uh-oh. Now you’ve gone and called your opponents a bunch of misanthropes, troglodytes, and idiots. Have we mentioned that name-calling is a really bad idea if you want to persuade someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded? For evidence, look

someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story. By “story,” we don’t mean “anecdote.” An anecdote is a snapshot, a one-dimensional shard of the big picture. It is lacking in scale, perspective, and data. (As scientists like to say: The plural of anecdote is not data.) An anecdote is something that once happened to you, or to your uncle, or to your uncle’s accountant.

Perhaps the best reason to tell stories is simply that they capture our attention and are therefore good at teaching.

Epstein discovered that straightforward recitation of the rules and regulations wouldn’t work. So he created a book of true stories called The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure. It is a catalog of the epic screw-ups perpetrated by federal workers, divided into helpful chapters like “Abuse of Position,” “Bribery,” “Conflicts of Interest,” and “Political Activity Violations.”

What the Encyclopedia proved, at least to Steve Epstein and his Pentagon colleagues, is that a rule makes a much stronger impression once a story illustrating said rule is lodged in your mind.

we have such a hard time recalling the most famous set of rules from perhaps the most famous book in history, what do we remember from the Bible? The stories. We remember that Eve fed Adam a forbidden apple and that one of their sons, Cain, murdered the other, Abel. We remember that Moses parted the Red Sea in order to lead the Israelites out of slavery. We remember that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his own son on a mountain—and we even remember that King Solomon settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby in half. These are the stories we tell again and again and again, even those of us who aren’t remotely “religious.” Why? Because they stick with us; they move us; they persuade us

God sent a prophet named Nathan to let David know this behavior was unacceptable. But how does a lowly prophet go about imparting such a message to the king of Israel? Nathan told him a story. He described to David two men, one rich and one poor. The rich man had huge flocks of animals; the poor man had just one little lamb, whom he treated like a member of his family. One day a traveler came through. The rich man, Nathan told King David, was happy to feed the traveler but he didn’t want to take a sheep from his own flock. So he took the poor man’s only lamb, killed it, and served it to the traveler. The story enrages David: “The man who did this deserves to die,” he says. “That man,” Nathan tells him, “is you.”

The message is unequivocal: failure may be an option but quitting is not.

“A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.” To quit is to prove oneself a coward, a shirker, a person of limited character—let’s face it, a loser. Who could possibly argue with that?

There is in fact a huge upside to quitting when done right, and we suggest you give it a try. You’ve been at it for a while now, whatever the “it” is—a job, an academic pursuit, a business start-up, a relationship, a charitable endeavor, a military career, a sport. Maybe it’s a dream project you’ve been working on for so long you can’t even remember what got you all dreamy in the first place. In your most honest moments, it’s easy to see that things aren’t working out. So why haven’t you quit? At least three forces bias us against quitting. The first is a lifetime of being told by Churchill wannabes that quitting is a sign of failure. The second is the notion of sunk costs. This is pretty much what it sounds

but what might you have done with that time and money had you not been in school? Or let’s say you’ve been a competitive runner for years and it’s still a big part of your identity—but what else might you accomplish if you weren’t slamming your joints into the pavement ten hours a week? Might you do something that makes your life, or others’ lives, more fulfilling, more productive, more exciting? Perhaps. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk costs. If only you could quit.

“In medicine, or in science, [if] you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again,” he said. “In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government.”

The hardest part of running the lab, he says, “is training people to understand that risk is part of their job, and if they fail well, they will be given the license to fail again. If we try to spend ten thousand dollars on our failures instead of ten million dollars, we’ll get the opportunity to do a lot more things.”

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 project that no one had been willing to speak aloud. This suggests one way to make a premortem even more useful: offer anonymity.

In any case, Wrosch found that people who quit their unattainable goals saw physical and psychological benefits. “They have, for example, less depressive symptoms, less negative affect over time,” he says. “They also have lower cortisol levels, and they have lower levels of systemic inflammation, which is a marker of immune functioning. And they develop fewer physical health problems over time.”

There seemed to be three options: 1. Plow on regardless. 2. Quit economics entirely and move into Mom and Dad’s basement. 3. Find a new specialty within economics that wasn’t so dull. Number 1 was the easiest choice. A few more publications and our hero would likely earn tenure at a top economics department. This option exploited what academics call the status-quo bias, a preference for keeping things as they are—and, to be sure, a prime force against quitting anything. Number 2 had some intrinsic appeal