Think Like a Freak

By -
Think Like a Freak, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

These guys are like John and John of They Might be Giants.  Except they have different spellings, which makes it more confusing.  Anyway, I read this a while ago, procrastinated the review, and am now just going to give you a short rundown.

I guess people kept mailing the Freakonomics guys with questions about how to solve giant, intractable problems--big things like world hunger or poverty.  Or about anything else anyone thought of, from breastfeeding to fracking to whether prayer works.  Since they can't actually solve world hunger, they thought they'd try writing a book that explains something about how they think about problems and how economics-type thinking might be a handy tool for some of us, too.  That way maybe people will stop bugging them.

It's a pretty fun book with anecdotes about soccer and lotteries, potty-training and charitable giving, and tips about how to think about problem-solving.  We often try to solve problems by incentivizing some particular behavior, for example, but that can easily backfire and will always lead to some folks gaming the system for quick profit.  So, they offer tips on incentive designing.  Stuff like that.

I don't know that it's a world-changing book, but it was fairly entertaining.  Especially the potty-training story.  I don't always buy Levitt and Dubner's sometimes-facile explanations for things, but they're fun to read.

Comments

  1. CleoOctober 9, 2014 at 3:47 PM

    I loved their book Freakonomics but their Super Freakonomics and this one left me rather flat. I can't remember my beef with it but this is what I wrote on Goodreads:

    Did not finish. Interesting anecdotes but faulty reasoning. What does a moral compass have to do with a ship's compass and how can morality be reasonable for suicides? Their premises hang by a thread.

    Now if we'd read it as a read-along, I would have drawn more out of it. :-) I'm finally enjoying Arthur, BTW. Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to reading I go!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanOctober 9, 2014 at 6:11 PM

    Yeah, I don't think there's always much substance to their theories.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more