Think Like a Freak

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. And a blithe acceptance of it can lead to sloppy, wasteful, or even dangerous outcomes. Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other.

At university, he had been learning about game theory and now it came in handy.

The second lesson to be drawn from Kobayashi’s success has to do with the limits that we accept, or refuse to. Over dinner that night at Cafe Luxembourg, Kobayashi said that when he started training, he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the existing Coney Island record of 25⅛ HDB. Why? He reasoned that the record didn’t stand for much since

extrapolation algorithm?

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, deciphering them—is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.

the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame. It is most powerful when least expected, like when things have gone wrong. Some

The first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat? This question led him to experiment and gather the feedback that changed the game

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good.