Freakenomics inspired thoughts

Sat down and finished ‘Freakenomics’, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, yesterday. Somebody talked about it on Saturday night, so I was interested to see what it was about. It wasn’t bad, but I was expecting more. It had been pumped up a great deal by the different writers I’d come across. I guess you can’t expect too much, though. After all, the book is quite short.

The case studies are definitely quite interesting and the book does make some good observations, above all about such things as conventional wisdom and a lack of rigorous thinking. It shows how some things that we think are correlated, aren’t really. While things that we didn’t realise had anything to do with each other, do.

Basically, it asks you to reassess your held beliefs and not just take things that others say at face value. They, too, are human and they, too, have vested interests in the things they say.

If you don’t sound confident when you say something, nobody will listen to you. That means that often people try to sound confident, even when they really aren’t. People use speech that sounds definite, while really they should be hedging their bets. That’s the way society has developed, with nobody really wanting to deal with probabilities, just absolutes.

It is difficult, though. Since we can’t learn and understand everything individually anymore (there is just too much information), we need to rely on experts for certain information. Yet it is really easy to say you’re an expert and, if you’re convincing enough, other people will often believe it. It’s also really valuable to call yourself an expert. After all, people are willing to pay experts a great deal of money to make decisions for them that they don’t feel they know enough to make themselves.

I can see why it would be inviting to pretend you understand a great deal more than you do. Only other experts (or wannabes) are really likely to call you on it and by then you might have already made your millions.

The only way to counteract that, is by establishing institutions that can vet and verify experts, based on their actual knowledge and ability. We used to have those institutions, they were called universities. Unfortunately, recently their reputation has taken a bit of a nose dive. Everybody can get a university to give them a degree now. They can even buy them over the internet.

We basically need another vet and verifying group to judge the universities. Of course, such groups actually exist, but their purpose is largely defeated because so few people actually listen to them (or know where to find them in the first place).