Yesterday, HuffingtonPost ran this cast of characters you can expect to hear about in SuperFreakonomics. It was accompanied by a video preview in which Dubner’s juggling practice pays off and Levitt wonders why college students, if they’re so altruistic in the lab, never give him money in the subway:
A SuperFreakonomics Video Preview
TAGS: SuperFreakonomics
and 
. You can also watch it on 
SD, can I be the first person to comment?
I liked it. I bet you’re going to make some people angry. Fun.
Wait, so the book is out…? :O
Everyone should also understand how wrong Levitt and Dubner get the topic of oil depletion, AKA Peak Oil.
They do not understand the fundamentals behind peak oil, which ultimately surprises me since oil depletion analysis is nothing more than probability and statistics, which they purport to be authorities on. I myself consider it no more difficult than bean-counting.
This is what they have said in the past:
” So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade. ”
http://freakonomics.com/2005/08/21/peak-oil-welcome-to-the-medias-new-version-of-shark-attacks
At one time, I thought Freakonomics was all about looking at the statistics and basic math underlying a premise and trying to debunk or support that premise. They have often been able to do this by demonstrating how that almost certain correlations between cause and effect were simply anomalies that could not overcome the null hypothesis.
But here Freakonomics says “I don’t know much about world oil reserves.” So, with that, how can they predict anything, one way or another, on how things will turn out?
They don’t even mention that the USA has gone through its own peak oil in the 70′s. This could have formed the basis for a classic Freakonomics statistical studies from that well-understood set of data. Economists largely ignore this topic, yet I thought these guys were FREAK economists, willing and able to buck the tide. Yet they don’t do that.
Please, why don’t you cover this topic properly?
Wait! Wouldn’t you want to eat *more* cows so that there are fewer of them left to emit the methane?
No, if we eat more kangaroos then ranchers will stop raising cattle and start raising ‘roos. More Rooburgers equals fewer Mooburgers.
Would a Rooburger for a kid be called a Joeyburger?
Ordering the book now.
You may put yourself in more danger by walking drunk, but I doubt more innocent victims have been killed by drunk walkers than by drunk drivers.
What poor poor analysis.
OK, walking drunk a mile is 8 times more likely to result in your own death than driving drunk a mile.
But what about causing other people’s death? Shouldn’t we take that into account?
What about non-lethal injuries?
And what about the cost in property damage? Like what about damage to your own car? Isn’t property damage MUCH more likely than lethal injury?
So, if you only taking into account the risk of your own death, you might come to one answer. But you’ll also be ignoring most of the issues, including the most likely ones.