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Think Like a Freak

the Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
Sep 15, 2015danielestes rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
I love Steven and Stephen. I was blown away a few years ago by Freakonomics and now I tore through this book, Think Like a Freak, in just two nights. Along the way I was reminded that I somehow missed SuperFreakonomics. (Now added to my to-read list.) The process of thinking like a freak starts with a fundamentally simple underlying principle, a classic tenet of science: Look at the data without bias and draw your conclusions accordingly. The key here is "without bias." That problem alone could account for the deficit of useful scientific discourse in the world today. On the flip side, as any Freak will tell you, bias sells so that's a powerful incentive to overcome. With the above foundation in place Steven and Stephen next go looking for hidden causalities that may be undergirding everyday phenomenon. Here I'm reminded of H. L. Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." In the economic arena of cause and effect it's easy to think the root of a problem is one thing when it might be something else entirely. Or maybe there are entrenched incentives blocking an obvious solution. Sometimes the truth is hidden; sometimes our biases cause us to want to not see the truth. This book provides plenty of real-world examples to explore these ideas. To Think Like a Freak is to not only think outside of the box, but to think outside of our own preconceived notions.