Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

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

Correlation does not equal causality.

When people don’t pay the true cost of

something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

The world is also thick with “entrepreneurs of error,” as the economist Edward Glaeser calls them, political and religious and business leaders who “supply beliefs when it will increase their own financial or political

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.

As two psychologists recently put it in an academic journal: “Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.”

ultracrepidarianism, or “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

The key to learning is feedback.

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.

never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.

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.

Here are a few reasons:

One in four children, it turns out, has subpar eyesight, while a whopping 60 percent of “problem learners” have trouble seeing.

Here’s another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don’t be afraid of the obvious.

numbers published in the Statistical Abstract of the United States

There has been a recent surge in research into “expert performance,”

The single-most compelling finding? 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. Is

From what we’ve seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do.

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

We’ll often say one thing and do another—or, more precisely, we’ll say what we think other people want to hear and then, in private, do what we want.

declared preferences and revealed

prefer...

How can you determine someone’s true incentives? Experiments can help. The psychologist Robert Cialdini, an éminence grise in the study of social influence,

Look around the world and you’ll find overwhelming evidence of the herd mentality at work. It influences virtually every aspect of our behavior—what we buy, where we eat, how we vote.

Backfiring bounties are, sadly, not as rare as one might hope. This phenomenon is sometimes called “the cobra effect.”

Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide.

Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself.

Our best advice would be to simply smile and change the subject. As hard as it is to think creatively about problems and come up with solutions, in our experience it is even harder to persuade people who do not wish to be persuaded.

we all know that education creates enlightened, moderate people, not extremists—don’t we? Not necessarily.

Even on a topic that people don’t care much about, it can be hard to get their attention long enough to prompt a change.

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent’s opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking.

Okay, so how can you build an argument that might actually change a few minds? It’s not me; it’s you.

Don’t pretend your argument is perfect.

If you make an argument that promises all benefits and no costs, your opponent will never buy it—nor should he.

Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent’s argument.

Keep the insults to yourself.

A spate of recent research shows that negative information “weighs more heavily on the brain,”

in the human psyche, “bad is stronger than good.”

Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were

Why you should tell stories.

he created a book of true stories called The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure.

Nor should failure be considered a total loss. Once you start thinking like a

“It’s just a fact of invention that most ideas won’t work out,” says

Valley. I prefer the statement ‘failing well,’ or ‘failing smart.’

That’s the idea behind a “premortem,” as the psychologist Gary Klein calls it. The idea is simple. Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go wrong before it’s too late.