Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

It strikes us that in recent years, the idea has arisen that there is a “right” way to think about solving a given problem and of course a “wrong” way too. This inevitably leads to a lot of shouting—and, sadly, a lot of unsolved problems.

“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.”

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

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

A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they’re not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn’t); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.

But a lot of obvious ideas are only obvious after the fact—after someone has taken the time and effort to investigate them, to prove them right (or wrong). The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t.

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, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

That is in part because the very words “education reform” indicate that the question is “What’s wrong with our schools?” when in reality, the question might be better phrased as “Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?” When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.

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, or how much change is too much, or what kinds of behaviors are acceptable. The next time you encounter such a barrier, imposed by people who lack your imagination and drive and creativity, think hard about ignoring it. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

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.

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 it possible to endlessly practice something you don’t enjoy? Perhaps, although neither one of us is capable of it.

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.

Not even close. The clear winner of the four was “Join Your Neighbors.” That’s right: the herd-mentality incentive beat out the moral, social, and financial incentives.

Mullaney had come to believe that too many philanthropists engage in what Peter Buffett, a son of the über-billionaire Warren Buffett, calls “conscience laundering”—doing charity to make themselves feel better rather than fighting to figure out the best ways to alleviate suffering.

Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we’ve learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn’t like the idea of quitting.

Sunk cost fallacy

The third force that keeps people from quitting is a tendency to focus on concrete costs and pay too little attention to opportunity cost. This is the notion that for every dollar or hour or brain cell you spend on one thing, you surrender the opportunity to spend it elsewhere.

Now that we’ve arrived at these last pages, it’s pretty obvious: quitting is at the very core of thinking like a Freak. Or, if that word still frightens you, let’s think of it as “letting go.” Letting go of the conventional wisdoms that torment us. Letting go of the artificial limits that hold us back—and of the fear of admitting what we don’t know. Letting go of the habits of mind that tell us to kick into the corner of the goal even though we stand a better chance by going up the middle.

When you talk about problems like income inequality, poverty generally, famine, we tend to focus on the parts of the problem that disturb us, the very visible parts which are often not even the problem so much as the symptom.

HARI: We’re going to take some audience questions now. The first one wants to know what we worry about that we shouldn’t worry about. DUBNER: Almost everything.

by a really interesting group called the Cultural Cognition Project. It basically shows that the more education a person has, the more likely they are to hold an extreme view—on one end or the other—of a topic like climate change, nuclear power, and so on, which is puzzling.

We have a chapter in the book called “How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to Be Persuaded,” which is really, really hard. So we listed a series of rules of what you could try to do, and then some of the surefire things not to do. One of the surefire things not to do is insult people. A lot of smart people seem to forget this. Once you start personally insulting your opponent, there is no way he is going to come around to your side.