What Freakonomics Taught Us to See: Curiosity with Twenty Years of Receipts
Office Hours with Professor Alexander by Alexander Puutio
Episode notes
Stephen Dubner has spent the last two decades asking the kinds of questions most people are trained out of asking.
As the host of Freakonomics Radio and co-author of the Freakonomics books, Dubner helped turn curiosity into a public method. Why do drug dealers live with their mothers? What do sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers have in common? What happens when you stop accepting the official story and start looking for the incentives underneath?
In this episode of Office Hours, we talk about what Freakonomics changed, what it missed, and why the world may now be suffering less from a shortage of answers than from a shortage of better questions. Dubner joins us to explore the craft of asking, the discipline behind curiosity, the relationship between data and storytelling, and the danger of becoming too certain too quickly.
We also ...