Think like a freak. Steven D.Levitt/ Stephen J.Dubner

Think like a freak. Steven D.Levitt/ Stephen J.Dubner

Chapter 1

What Does It Mean to Think Like a Freak?

What makes people truly happy?

Extract some buried wisdom

if it might be better to write a book that can teach anyone to think like a freak.

What if you can outfox your opponent by thinking beyond the obvious?

it just makes them human.

sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.

we wrote this book to answer that sort of question.

 

The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally ; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism.

 

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

Correlation does not equal causality.

 

This book steps out of the shadows and tries to offer some adice that may occasionally be useful, whether you are interested in minor lifehacks or major global reforms.

 

And some of our advice tends to get people into trouble rather than out of it.

 

What’s perplexing is that so few people do.

 

What’s wrong with that? When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

 

You should focus on small problems whenever possible.

 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.

 

On it’s own, this is problem enough. But the stakes get higher when we routinely pretend to know more than we do.

 

Just think how much harder it is to predict what will work in the future.

 

That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don’t.

 

That the future is far less knowable than you think.

 

Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.

 

The incentives to fake it are simply too strong.

But the more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedbacks.

 

If however you’re willing to think like a freak and admit to the power of a good randomized experiment.

 

When done well, field experiment can radically improve how problems get solved.

 

But that wan’t even the most surprising findings.

 

This doesn’t seem like a bad strategy.

 

Chapter 3 What’s your problem?

Think about a problem you’d really like to see solved.

 

Most people don’t have the time or inclination to think very hard about big problems like this.

 

When he put it all together, Kobayashi found that his physical preparations could produce an elevated mental state.

 

Only by redefining the problem was he able to discover a new set of solutions.

 

A good start would be to assess the core of the problem as shrewdly as Kobayashi did with his.

His success has to do with the limits that we accept, or refuse to.

 

It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.

 

All of us face barriers- physical, financial, temporal- everyday. 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 net 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.

 

Chapter 4

Like a Bad Dye Job, the Truth Is in the Roots

 

Thinking like a freak means you should work terribly hard to identify and attack the root cause of problems.

 

Of course this is far more easily said than done.

 

That may not be a simple conversation. But when you are dealing with root causes, at least you know you are fighting the real problem and not just boxing with shadows.

 

Protestants embraced the earthly notion of hard work as part of their divine mission.

 

With all the attendant complications

 

There wan’t much of an incentive to find a cure – not, at least , by the people whose careers depended on the prevailing ulcer treatments.

 

Chapter 5 Think like a child

 

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age.

 

It would seem that the secret to raising money is to make people feel so guilty that they can’t hold out any longer. Might there be another way?

 

This is a perfectly Freakish illustration of how, by seeing things from a literally new angle, you can sometimes gain an edge in solving a problem.

 

Chapter 6 Like giving candy to a baby

 

If there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives.

You must learn to be a master of incentives- the good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

When it comes to financial incentives, size matters.

 

The key is to learn to climb inside other people’s minds to figure out what really matters to them.

 

Thus the old saying: Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.

It’s often the case that when you most desperately want to know someone els’s incentives- in a negotiation, for instance- your incentives and theirs are at odds.

 

How can you determine someone’s true incentives?

 

Almost every charity initially loses money in this phase. But donors, once hooked, tend to give again and again. The secret to fund-raising success is cultivating these repeat givers- so the last thing you’d want to do is set them free as soon as you’ve booked them. “ Why would you ever agree to not harass donors when harassing is the main ingredient for success in direct mail?

 

A lot of problems can be solved by shifting the dynamic between parties, whether it’s two people or two billion.

 

Even when th stakes are not so high as this, changing the framework of a relationship can produce rapture.

 

Customer service, it declared, would be its defining strength. Not just your standard customer service, but way-over-the-top, call-us-anytime, there’s nothing-we-won’t-do-for-you customer service.

 

Voila! The financial framework had been recast as a collaborative one, leaving all parties- and most especially the Soccer Boys and Girls of the world- in better shape.

 

Backfiring bounties are, sadly, not as rare as one might hope. This phenomenon is sometimes called “the cobra effect”. As the story goes, a British overlord in colonial India thought tjre were far too many cobras in Delhi. So he offered a cash bounty for every cobra skin. The incentive wrked well- so well, in fact, that it gave rise to a new industry: cobra farming. Indians began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to take advantage of the bounty.

 

Chapter 7 What do king Solomon and David Lee Roth have in Common

 

One of the most famous stories about each man involves a clever piece of strategic thinking that anyone who wishes to think like a Freak would well to mimic.

 

Short-circuiting light tower

 

Teach your garden to weed itself

 

Trial-by-ordeal phase

 

Chapter 8

How to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded

 

But if you are hell-bent on persuading someone, or if your back is truly against the wall, you might as well give it your best shot.

 

carries a significant risk

 

One reason maybe that smart people simply have more experience with feeling they are right, and therefore have greater confidence in their knowledge, whatever side of an issue they’re on. But being confident you are right is not the same as being right. Think back to what Philip Tetlock, who studies the predictive ability of political pundits, found to be sure sign of a bad predictor: dogmatism.

 

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

 

Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent’s argument.

 

Most of us don’t take criticism well at all. A spate of reent research shows that negative information “weighs more heavily on the brain,” as one research team put it. A second team makes an even starker claim: in the human psyche, “bad is stonger than good.”

 

Why you should tell stories.

 

But if you really want to persuade someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

 

A story, meanwhile, fills out the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things. A good story also includes the passage of time, to show the degree of constancy or change; without a time frame, we can’t judge whether we’re looking at something truly noteworthy or just an anomalous blip.

 

It is a testament to the power of storytelling that even stories that aren’t true can be so persuasive.

 

Why are stories so valuable?

 

Stories also appeal to the narcissist in all of us.

 

Perhaps the best reason to tell stories is simply that they capture our attention and are therefore good at teaching.

 

And to do that we discovered that the first thing you hav to do is you have to entertain folks enough so that they will pay attention.

 

front to back, back to front, and every way in between, right?

 

to slice a baby in half?

 

Chapter 9 The upside of quitting

All these years later, the words still resonate: Never give in, never give in, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty.

 

The message is unequivocal: failure may be an option but quitting is not.

“A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.”

 

The third force that keeps people from quitting is a tendency to focus on concrete costs and pay too little attention to opportunity cost.

 

Might you do something that makes your life , or other’s lives, more fulfilling, more productive, more exciting?

 

Let’s be clear: We are not suggesting you quit everything in order to do nothing, to spend all day on the couch in your underwear, eating nachos and watching TV.

 

When ti comes to inventing, ideas are rarely in short supply.

 

The key is failing fast and failing cheaper. That’s a mantra that comes out of Silicon Valley.

 

별다른 훌륭한 의미가 있어 적어 둔 것은 아니다. 그냥 재미삼아 옮겨보았다.

담에 다시 찬찬히 읽어보기로 하고 적어두다.

 

2014.10.29  金