The prima donna mannerisms of Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth seemed exaggerated even by the standards of successful rock bands. The band’s contract for the performance consisted of 53 pages full of detailed instructions on how to design and edit the stage and backstage, while on page 40, for example, it explicitly instructed the artists to place a saucer of M&M candies in different colors “and absolutely not brown!” in the artists’ room, which necessitated the employment of a special employee to manually pick the brown candies from the saucer.
The order seemed idiotic to all and symbolized for years the corruption of big rock stars. In practice, however, the order to remove brown candies was a simple and ingenious way to make sure that the preparations for the performance were done properly and that no one would be killed by falling a lamppost or crushed to death because of poor entrance gate planning. The band could not verify in advance that all the safety preparations had been made properly and by arrival there was too little time left to check everything.
David Lee Roth’s solution was ingenious in its simplicity, drafting a detailed contract that ensured a safe appearance and planting the instruction on brown candies in it. At every performance he would go backstage first to check the candy dish, if the saucer was free of brown candies one could cautiously conclude that the rest of the preparations were also made with due attention. On the other hand, the presence of brown candy in the dish signaled an overlapping attitude on the part of the organizers, David Lee Roth would wreak havoc in the dressing room and send the band staff to carefully check the security arrangements along the way.
The two authors of Think Like a Freak, or the Stephens, have long been considered the bad boys of economics.
In their previous articles and books [Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics] they did not hesitate to raise charged topics such as abortion, suicide or terrorism policies and to trace the real causes and consequences of any phenomenon without bias or political correctness. They were called upon to advise policymakers and giant corporations, and at the same time continued to be criticized, time after time. One of the highlights came when they were accused live during a television interview of knowingly instructing terrorists on how to cover their tracks. The criticism follows a chapter in their joint book that described the algorithm that can help security forces monitor the bank accounts of terrorist operatives and how the latter can trick followers by purchasing life insurance [which suicide bomber would spend money on life insurance??]. However, just like Van Halen’s brown candy, in fact the recommendation to purchase life insurance was the result of cooperation with the intelligence services and automatically placed those who acted according to the recommendation under surveillance.
In their current book, the authors take a few steps back, look at the analyses and suggestions they made in their previous work, and formulate with a smile a practical guide on how to learn to think critically and penetratingly, or as they put it: “think like a freak.” A freak is someone who does not look for evidence to corroborate the obvious conclusion but looks at things like a child in an unbiased way. In childhood, we all observe the world with genuine curiosity and without assumptions and preconceptions, but over time we lose originality and learn what to expect from the world automatically based on past experience. Or as Joe Bernard Shaw put it, “Few people think more than two or three times a year, I myself have earned an international reputation for thinking once or twice a week.” Such a process of maturation was necessary for our ancestors in the process of searching for food and avoiding random encounters with a tiger, and continues to be very effective today in simple daily tasks. But once one tries to deal with a complex systemic problem, in our personal lives or at the level of the state or society, what usually seems to be a simple conclusion constitutes only the superficial and non-exhaustive layer of things, and the authors teach how not to stubbornly attack only the visible part of the problem.
Once we set aside the bad habits we have acquired, we discover a wonderful world of enigmatic causation. The map of the dukes who ruled Germany in the 16th century dictates the economic development of these regions today. Ping-pong teams are proving to be the only and necessary window into warming relations between hostile powers. A brave and original doctor had to infect himself with a deadly bacterium in order to prove to his conservative friends that everything considered medical knowledge about ulcers was nothing more than a collection of unfounded beliefs, and more. Reading the book is refreshing, funny and like listening carefully to the voice of the child shouting from the crowd, “The king is naked!”
Happy reading!
