A Prophet Who Dares Admit the Limits of Prophecy
Fill in the blanks. I dare you. And then read the rest of the post to see who wrote this, and what it’s about.
We’re currently finishing up an hour-long radio program called “The Folly of Prediction,” and I have to say that it was bracingly refreshing to read this paragraph and the column that follows it.
Read More »After more than a quarter-century as a professional _________, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about _________. Indeed, the area of __________ where I have devoted most of my energy and attention — the ups and downs of _________ — is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers.
Smart Kids in Abbottabad
Life is all about incentives, as this paragraph from a New York Times article about Bin Laden makes clear:
“When children playing in the fields let a ball fly into the [Bin Laden] compound by mistake, the owners never let them retrieve it but gave them 50 rupees to buy a new one, said one of the neighbors, a woman with a small boy on her hip who gave her name only as Bibi. When the children began to throw balls into the compound on purpose to get more money, the owners kept paying, she said, laughing.”
(HT Jim Covington) Read More »
Our Daily Bleg: How to Weed Out “Weirdos” in Interviews?
We put out a call for blegs yesterday — questions or quandaries that you want to put in front of Freakonomics readers — and received a lot of good ones. Let’s start it off with the following request from a reader named tish.
Read More »“What interview questions can I ask to help weed out weird people? “Weird” meaning antisocial, incompetent, lazy, disinterested, dishonest, unprofessional, combative and disruptive. I just got out of a work situation where one superior was all of these things, and I’d love to avoid people like this in the future. She seemed normal enough when I interviewed with her. Oh also, the person is in total denial that they are like this, by the way, so outright asking them probably won’t work. These would be questions to ask in both “interviewer” and “interviewee” roles.”
This Year’s Kentucky Derby Picks
Dubner and I have been thinking a lot these days about pundits who make predictions. The incentives surrounding predictions are completely skewed. If I make a wild prediction, and it just happens to come true, I have strong incentives to constantly remind the world about how my prediction came true. If, as is much more often the case, the prediction is wrong, it is likely to be quickly forgotten because there is typically no one else who cares enough about my failed prediction to go to the time and effort to continually remind others that I was wrong. Thus, even if I am rarely correct, it makes sense to make a lot of crazy predictions.
Which leads me, of course, to the Kentucky Derby. I’ve made Kentucky Derby predictions every year since we started the blog. Rarely have I been correct. But I did, many years ago, publicly and correctly predict that a 50-1 shot would win the race. I cannot tell you how many times I have mentioned that to people. I have been much quieter about the time that the horse I predicted would finish dead last actually won the race, although in its own way that is also quite a feat. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 