Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

“Ultracrepidarianism” . . . The cost of pretending to know more than you do

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

Or is it?

The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married

what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources,

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.

where individuals can go out and get nearly any service they need and pay close to zero, whether the actual cost of the procedure is $100 or $100,000. What’s wrong with that? When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

Think of the last time you sat down at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. How likely were you to eat a bit more than normal? The same thing happens

This means the “worried well” crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients’ lives, often without much real advantage.

what if everyone were allowed to go down to the car dealership whenever they wanted and pick out any new model, free of charge, and drive it home?

The results of Tetlock’s study were sobering. These most expert of experts—96 percent of them had postgraduate training—“thought they knew more than they knew,” he says. How accurate were their predictions? They weren’t much better than “dart-throwing chimps,” as Tetlock often joked.

Smart people love to make smart-sounding predictions, no matter how wrong they may turn out to be.

Eight years, $800 billion, and nearly 4,500 American deaths later—along with at least 100,000 Iraqi fatalities—it

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual.

like a gamble

Incentives can also explain why so many people are willing to predict the future. A huge payoff awaits anyone who makes a big and bold prediction that happens to come true.

What happens if the market crashes instead? No worries. Your prediction will already be forgotten. Since almost no one has a strong incentive to keep track of everyone else’s bad predictions, it costs almost nothing

in Romania. That country boasts a robust population of “witches,” women who tell fortunes for a living. Lawmakers decided that witches should be regulated, taxed, and—most important—made to pay a fine or even go to prison if the fortunes they told didn’t prove accurate.

Most people don’t have the time or inclination to think very hard about big problems like this. We tend to pay attention to what other people say and, if their views resonate with us, we slide our perception atop theirs.

mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

there is only so much a school can do. Schools have your kid for only seven hours a day, 180 days a year, or about 22 percent of the child’s waking hours. Nor is all that time devoted to learning, once you account for socializing and eating and getting to and from class. And for many kids, the first three or four years of life is all parents and no school. But when serious people talk about education reform, they rarely talk about the family’s role in preparing children to succeed.

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.

schoolteacher—he or she must be trained and licensed by a state agency. No such requirement is necessary for parenthood. Anyone with a set of reproductive organs is free to create a child, no questions asked,

cyclists were told to pedal a stationary bike at top speed for the equivalent of 4,000 meters. Later they repeated the task while watching an avatar of themselves pedaling in the earlier time trial. What the cyclists didn’t know was that the researchers had turned up the speed on the avatar. And yet the cyclists were able to keep up with their avatars, surpassing what they thought had been their top speed. “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,”

Perhaps because most of us, when trying to figure out a problem, gravitate toward the nearest and most obvious cause. It’s hard to say whether this is learned behavior or if it dates to our distant past.

Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

In the United States, meanwhile, we throw away an astonishing 40 percent of the food we buy.

Alas, fixing corruption is a lot harder than airlifting food. So even when you do get to the root cause of the problem, you may still be stuck.

To find out, we must travel all the way back to the sixteenth century. In 1517, a distraught young German priest named

very good idea