01.18.06
More on Freakonomics
Someone came up to talk to me recently because I was holding on to the Freakonomics book. According to his reading circle, the book was highly recommended.
As for me, I think the book is good (not bad and not very good either). I have a soft spot for books that present facts in a controversial way. These facts are semi-facts because though the reasoning is eloquent and backed with good supporting evidences, the truth is that there are always hidden assumptions not revealed or perhaps even not known to the authors. It is not a very good book because I am familiar with causality, correlation and data sampling, having read them from other sources.
Freakonomics brought out correlation and causality very often throughout the book. The problem with us is that we always like to seek reason and for that reason (pardon the pun), we always see things with a causality perspective. There is a lot of times “may” is used in the book but I think, for the average reader, it is often overlooked. The reader tend to read through the anecdotes and form their causality chains unknowingly and wrongly. The worst part of this matter is that as people like controversial facts, these controversial facts get propagated quite quickly over lunches and drinks.
One thing that I have not seen it mentioned in Freakonomics is sampling. We are using sampling to derive information about the population (and remember in Freakonomics, the population is at best Amercian citizens and not all human beings). There may be flaws in selecting a certain sample (which may only be realized much later).
Of course, this post is meta-prophetic. I am trying to bring in controversial ideas about a controversial fact book being not as good as it seems.