Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

1. Thinking like a Freak
   • Trying to think more creatively and rationally
   • Viewing things from different angles and with different expectations
   • Hard to do because existing biases and herd mentality
2. I Don’t Know
   • Hard to really understand complicated things
   • Studies on expert predictions have shown, experts are not very good at predicting
   • People wrong but still massively over-confident
   • Cost of not knowing is worse than being wrong
   • Moral compass can distort what the actual issue is
   • embrace spirit of experimentation, randomized control trials
   • obvious facts only obvious after the fact
3. What’s the problem? Find the Root
   • Wrong question guarantees wrong answer
   • Focus is on what bothers us. e.g. education, but not parenting
   • Redefine the problem e.g. Kobiyashi meticulously analyzed ways to get more hot dogs eaten, created new technique, doubled previous world record
   • Often times people focus on symptoms not the cause
   • Conventional wisdom dies hard
4. Think Like a Child
   • Preconceptions rule out huge set of solutions
   • Think small; all big problems have been thought about already
   • Don’t be afraid to ask about the obvious, most insiders scared to
   • Must have a good time doing what you do to become good
5. Incentives
   • Many different types: financial, social, moral, legal
   • Difference between declared preference and revealed. Observe actions not what people say.
   • Three reasons incentives fail
     • no individual or government smarter than everyone trying to game system
     • easy to envision changing your behavior, but not others
     • assumes people will behave consistently
   • Follow these guidelines
     • Figure out what people really care about, not what they say
     • incentivize them on dimensions valuable to them, but cheap for you
     • pay attention to how people respond and learn from it
     • switch frame from adversarial to cooperative
     • never assume people will do “right” thing
     • know people will try to game system, applaud ingenuity
6. Game Theory
   • King Solomon used to figure out real mother
   • David Lee Roth used to filter out which local promoters were meticulous
   • You can create filters to make people sort themselves out
     • e.g.1 Zappos offers a bonus for people to turn down the job
     • e.g.2 Nigierian scammers target the most gullible
7. How to Persuade People Whoe Don’t Want to Be Persuaded
   • Best to change subjects
   • Understand its hard, especially smarter people because more confident in what they believe
   • If your logic is airtight, but doesn’t resonate with listener, your fault
   • Don’t pretend your argument is perfect
   • Acknowledge strength of other side’s argument
   • Keep insults to yourself
   • Tell stories and use data to show show story fits into larger scheme
8. Quitting
   • Three things holding people back
     • Lifetime being told quitting is failure
     • Sunk Cost fallacy
     • Tendency to focus on concrete costs and ignoring opportunity costs
   • Have to understand not all ideas work out, better to fail fast and cheap
   • Premortem technique can help identify what can go wrong and make it okay
   • Authors have quit multiple things
   • Quitting is core of thinking like a freak
   • Let go of artificial limits holding you back