Think Like a Freak

The question posed in the title to Chapter 3 sums up its topic. A more precise question might be, “What’s the problem you’re facing?” Levitt and Dubner emphasize that knowing the problem at hand is key to solving it—but knowing the problem is not as easy as it seems. This chapter examines how to see a problem clearly enough to ask the right questions needed to fix it.

The authors start with the issue of education. When people think about how to improve it, they usually focus on schools and problems like class size and teacher quality. Much research, however, indicates that the more important factors are things that happen in the home, like parental support. The point is to look beyond the obvious areas; to solve a problem, it needs to be accurately defined, and that might mean redefining it altogether.

An example of this is the story of Takeru Kobayashi, a young Japanese man who won the Coney Island hot dog eating contest by adopting a new approach. He studied the problem by analyzing the different ways one can ingest a hot dog. Everyone else took the usual approach: take a hot dog in a bun and cram as many down as possible in the given time.