Think Like a Freak

Coauthor Stephen Dubner is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Best American Crime Writing, among other publications. He has a bachelors in broadcast journalism from Appalachian State University and an MFA in writing from Columbia University. Aside from the Freakonomics series of books written with Steven Levitt, Dubner is the author of Turbulent Souls (1999), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003), and The Boy with Two Belly Buttons (2007). Turbulent Souls was a New York Times notable book and a finalist for the Koret National Jewish Book Award.

Like Levitt’s, Dubner’s professional life (also discussed in Chapter 9) has not followed a straight line. He started a rock band while in college, which was later signed by Arista Records. The performing life did not appeal to him, however, and he took up writing. After graduate school, he worked for The New York Times until his success as an author allowed him to write full time.

Tetlock is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania whose study on making predictions is cited in Chapter 2. He asked about 300 experts in various fields, such political science, national security, and economics, to make predictions, which he tracked for more than 20 years. The results indicated “they weren’t much better than ‘dart-throwing chimps’” (24). While the experts did a little better than undergraduates in predicting the same events, they were not as good as a simple computer algorithm that Tetlock also used. He concluded that the biggest obstacle to making accurate predictions is dogmatism: People simply hold a belief in something and refuse to let go of it regardless of the other factors involved.

Kobi, as he is called informally, was the six-time champion of Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, in the early 2000s. In his first try he doubled the existing record by eating 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes. The authors describe his methods in Chapter 3, where they explain the importance of properly defining a problem and asking the right questions in order to solve it. Kobi endlessly experimented with various methods of ingesting hot dogs to increase his speed. The contest did not stipulate how the hot dogs were to be eaten, but the other contestants used the traditional way anyone would eat them. Kobi did things like separating the meat from the bun, dividing the meat into two smaller parts, and soaking the bun in water and oil before squeezing it and eating it. Thus, he changed the question from how to eat more hot dogs to how to make them easier to eat.

Marshall is the Australian medical researcher who discovered the true cause of ulcers: a bacterium called H. pylori. Ulcers were long thought to be caused by excessive stomach acid, and this was considered a closed matter in the medical community even though treatments based on this were not very effective. Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren were not taken seriously because it was thought that no bacteria could survive the stomach’s acidity. They persevered, however, and Marshall tested the theory on himself, swallowing a culture of H. pylori and then taking an antibiotic to get rid of it. Marshall and Warren were eventually given the Nobel Prize for their work. This story is used in Chapter 4 to show that a problem must be attacked at its root—so finding the true cause of a problem is crucial. Before this finding, doctors had merely been treating the symptoms of ulcers, not their actual cause.

Mullaney’s work is discussed in Chapter 6 in the context of incentives. He quit a job in advertising to work in marketing for nonprofit organizations that provided surgery for children in poor countries who were born with a cleft lip. For the nonprofit Smile Train, he developed a novel approach to fundraising, which gave potential donors the option of “one and done.” That is, if they donated, they could opt out of all future mailings and other contact. This was unusual at the time because it seemed counterintuitive to willingly cut loose a potential long-term donor. However, it worked because it entirely changed the organization’s relationship with donors, giving them more control. As a result, donations went up, and two-thirds of donors chose to continue with future mailings rather than opt out.

The authors use the well-known biblical tale of King Solomon to discuss game theory in Chapter 7. Solomon offers to cut a baby in half, one half for each of the women claiming to be its mother. When one of the women objects and says to give the baby to the other, Solomon knows she is the real mother. With his method, he’s anticipating the next move of someone (usually an opponent or adversary of some kind). The authors use this as an example of identifying someone who doesn’t want to be identified.

Similarly to how they use the story of King Solomon, Levitt and Dubner also discuss Roth, the former singer for the rock band Van Halen. Part of the contract the band had with each venue they played stipulated that one of the snacks provided to them had to be M&Ms with the brown ones removed. In fact, it was a test with the same motive as Solomon’s decision: identifying someone who doesn’t want to be identified. If the candy demand was followed, they knew they could trust the venue to have also followed the details of the technical demands, which were much more important. However, if they arrived to find brown M&Ms, it was a sign they had to double-check the equipment thoroughly.