Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.

We’d like to bury the idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism.

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, deciphering them—is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.

Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. And a blithe acceptance of it can lead to sloppy, wasteful, or even dangerous outcomes.

Correlation does not equal causality.

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology,

to understand 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 resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).

A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

It’s also tempting to run with a herd.

But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

Another barrier to thinking like a Freak is that most people are too busy to rethink the way they think—or to even spend much time thinking at all.

“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.”

We heartily disagree! For most

people, it is much harder to say I don’t know. That’s a shame, for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

When asked to name the attributes of someone who is particularly bad at predicting, Tetlock needed just one word. “Dogmatism,” he says. That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don’t.

That is a lethal combination—cocky plus wrong—especially when a more prudent option exists: simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

Making grandiose assumptions about your abilities and failing to acknowledge what you don’t know can lead, unsurprisingly, to disaster.

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good.

The incentives to fake it are simply too strong.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

You can gather a lot of facts, and that may be helpful, but in order to reliably measure cause and effect you need to get beneath the facts. You may have to purposefully go out and create feedback through an experiment.

it pays to be on the lookout for a “natural experiment,”

if you ask the wrong question, you are almost guaranteed to get the wrong answer.

When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.

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 attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

The second lesson to be drawn from Kobayashi’s success has to do with the limits that we accept, or refuse to.

In recent experiments, scientists have found that even elite athletes can be tricked into improvement by essentially lying to them.

“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,”

All of us face barriers—physical, financial, temporal—every day. Some are unquestionably real. But others are plainly artificial—expectations about how well a given system can function,

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Thinking like a Freak means you should work terribly hard to identify and attack the root cause of problems.

But when it comes to generating ideas and asking questions, it can be really fruitful to have the mentality of an eight-year-old.

Preconceptions lead us to rule out a huge set of possible solutions simply because they seem unlikely or repugnant;

As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.

To think like a Freak means to think small, not big.

“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.”

Since big problems are usually a dense mass of intertwined small problems, you can make more progress by tackling a small piece of the big problem than by flailing away at grand solutions.

don’t be afraid of the obvious.

It is easy to get seduced by complexity; but there is virtue in simplicity too.

Freaks like to have fun. This is another good reason to think like a child. Kids aren’t afraid to like the things they like.

Kids are in love with their own audacity, mesmerized by the world around them, and unstoppable in their pursuit of fun.

you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you’ll want to do more of it.

Rather than dismiss the fun impulse, why not co-opt it for the greater good?

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

Understanding the incentives of all the players in a given scenario is a fundamental step in solving any problem.

Different types of incentives—financial, social, moral, legal, and others—push people’s buttons in different directions, in different magnitudes.

Let’s begin with the most obvious incentive: money.