Think Like a Freak

“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. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.” 

This is as close as the authors come to defining what a “Freak” is. A back-formation from the word Freakonomics, the term is used liberally throughout the text to describe someone who approaches problems in a unique way, relying on data and realistic observations. Given the word’s common definition, which has a slightly negative connotation, its use here is also part of the authors’ playful and quirky tone.

“Our thinking is inspired by what is known as the economic approach. That doesn’t mean focusing on ‘the economy’—far from it. The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).” 

This passage further refines what is meant by thinking like a so-called Freak. Overwhelmingly, the emphasis is on data and objective observation—that is, the actual rather than the hoped for, the realistic rather than the ideologically or morally pure. The authors want to teach people to think about the world as it truly is, not as they think it should be.

“When asked to name the attributes of someone who is particularly bad at predicting, Tetlock needed just one word. ‘Dogmatism,’ he says. That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don’t. Tetlock and other scholars who have tracked prominent pundits find that they tend to be ‘massively overconfident,’ in Tetlock’s words, even when their predictions prove stone-cold wrong. That is a lethal combination—cocky plus wrong—especially when a more prudent option exists: simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.” 

The authors describe the research of Philip Tetlock, who studied the predictions made by people considered to be experts. The results showed that “dart-throwing chimps” would be almost as accurate (24). Even though almost all the experts in the study had postgraduate training, their predictions were less accurate than a computer algorithm also used in the study.