The Downtown Diner

Every time I have a conversation with my friend Amiram he says, "Well you know what the guy says in Freakonomics - did you read that book?" So I finally did, well, I listened to it. It was fascinating. So fascinating in fact that I allowed myself to be mesmerized and I stopped thinking critically. Not good.

I concluded that Freakonomics and The Tipping Point and other like-minded books do the same thing. The author wants to push a particular explanation for some phenomenon and they want you to believe it too, so they put the spotlight on their theory and ignore the many other possible explanations for the phenomenon. Take for example the downturn in crime in New York in the mid-1990s. Both Freakonomics and The Tipping Point have a compelling explanation for it. Both present their data and their interpretation of their data. And they come to completely different conclusions to explain the very same phenomenon. Gladwell says it was innovative policing techniques, while Levitt and Dubner trace it back to an increase in the number of city police officers. Now mind you Gladwell mentions the increase in the police force but he brushes it off as irrelevant. And Levitt/Dubner say the same thing about innovative policing tactics.

So who am I supposed to believe? No one, obviously.

For me it means that these books are entertaining and they're data points but you wouldn't want to base your opinions on them. Take them for what they are and what their authors probably intended them to be - one data point.