Discussion: Freakonomics

I love it. It's both fun and educational. Hardcore History sounds fun and educational, too.

Hardcore History is educational if you can stand to listen to him (I can't).

I think I see what you mean. However, I am not sure of the proper way to put my feelings into words here. How would you characterize the reason you can't stand to listen to Dan Carlin?

When he talks he sounds like a guy who thinks very highly of himself and loves to hear himself talking. The episodes I listened to were of interesting topics and I wanted to enjoy them but I really didn't. I found it hard to follow what he was talking about and didn't enjoy his tone.

Thankfully there are zillions of podcasts out there so all of us can find ones we like. :-)

mmm...sadly, I have become skeptical about Freakonomics after finding out that the baby names chapter of their book was mostly incorrect ... and part of it was based on a common urban legend.

Yeah, they lost me after the gun control episode of their podcast when they went on and on about how it was so clear none of the gun control proposals would have any effect but never once mentioned Australia.

The characterization of Dan Carlin makes sense.

Observational science is not easy. It takes special sort of talent to get it right when it is immoral and/or impossible to set up one's own experiments to test the predictions of a theory. I have heard similar, quite possibly a propos, skepticism about another piece of popularized observational science, one that actually combines history, social science and economics - the book Collapse by Jared Diamond.

I cannot listen to Radiolab after one of them gave the most poorly rehearsed, pompous keynote of all time at our Neuroday. It was really, really bad.