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Posts Tagged ‘Blog Comments’

Is Not Saying "I Don't Know" a Guy Thing?

Our most recent podcast, “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” continues to draw interesting replies. Here’s one from Erich Knobil, who works in the finance office of the Falls Baptist Church & Academy in Menomonee Falls, Wisc.:

A couple of minor notes about “I don’t know” —

Someone (a consultant) once told me the “Consultant’s Motto” was “Maybe wrong, but never in doubt.”

Someone else (female) once called it “Male Answer Disorder (MAD),” where men seem compelled to always have an answer for everything.

Anyone know of any good empirical work on whether MAD is real?



More on Saying "I Don't Know"

In our latest podcast, “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” Levitt talked about how it is practically forbidden in the business world to say that you don’t know the answer to a question, lest you be deemed incompetent or irrelevant.

That idea has generated some reader feedback that I thought was interesting enough to share. First, from Mike Wrubel, an office manager for a medical practice in Elkhart, Indiana:

I would generally agree with the notion that people in business are very much inclined to not say “I don’t know.” I have worked in the same hospital for 20 years, and while I am very comfortable saying it, not everyone else is. I think people fear being perceived by others as they are not paying attention to their work, or being seen as incompetent, or that it’s their job to “know.”



The Art of Trashing the Classics

We’ve written before about the occasional hyper-critical comments on certain blogs, but such comments are like valentines compared to what some Amazon.com customers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The Godfather, The Dairy of Anne Frank, and other standards. The Cynical-C blog lists the most caustic of these every day.



Boo This Post

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters? Not too long ago, they did; in 1849, to pick an extreme . . .



One Great Reply to Our "Favorite Scientist" Query

Yesterday we invited you to tell us your favorite scientists. The replies make for great reading. I would think that for anyone working in the field (science education, publishing, etc.) the answers could also be very useful. One of my favorite lists comes from a reader named Hale McMichael, a University of Texas senior who is “about to graduate with . . .



How Many Reviews Are Too Many?

| Does the 3,250th review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have any influence on an Amazon customer? An Economist article says it does. In fact, says the article, the more online reviews a product has, the more likely people are to buy it. If reviewers know the reviews they write have influence, it may help answer Levitt’s earlier . . .



Comment, Comment on the Wall, Are You Community or Not at All

One of the coolest things about posting at Freakonomics is the chance to be educated by your high-quality comments, which add to our posts and sometimes correct our mistakes. But to be honest, every once in a while I have been depressed by the harsh general tone of criticism. (For example, the comments here got me down. To be specific, . . .



Our Daily Bleg: Why Do You Vote?

We received an interesting bleg from Martin Saavedra, who is studying international economics and finance at the Catholic University of America and plans to start an economics Ph.D. next fall. He is interested in a subject we’ve written about before — the utility of voting — although he is after a more personal set of information, namely: why do you . . .



FREAK-TV: Care for a Brain Chip?

Video In the video player over to the left, you’ll find a new short video that’s a brain tease about your brain. Go give it a click, and then leave your answer in the comments section of this post.



Moving Day

Freakonomics.com announces its move to the New York Times Online.



The Full Tilt/CNN Phishing Scam, Resolved

Last night, Levitt posted this discovery of what seemed like a phishing expedition (and revealed to the world his late-night poker habits). As of 9:10 a.m. today, the site in question (http://www.fulltilt-cnn.com) was down. (Back when we wrote a column about Steven Peisner and identity theft, a fake Bank of America site was also summarily disabled, showing that if nothing . . .



$2 Pringles Are the Least of Northwest Airline’s Worries

I blogged recently about a strange little incident with Northwest Airlines and a can of Pringles. Your comments indicated that Northwest has been plagued by rocky service. (Your comments also indicated that I’m a [expletive deleted] whiner, but I would argue that such comments missed the point of the post.) As Joe Sharkey reports in today’s New York Times, Northwest . . .



QWERTY vs. Dvorak

Readers of this blog fiercely debated the validity of the QWERTY keyboard story a few months back. As the legend goes, Christopher Sholes engineered the QWERTY layout that is still in use today in order to slow typists down and prevent key jams. One commenter (ludvig) pointed to this 1996 article from Reason magazine by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. . . .



This Week In Reader E-Mail

Rarely does a reader express his sentiment so cogently as in this case, from one “Fred Peck”: Your article that tries to shed light on Realtors is probably the dumbest and most pointless thing I have ever read. Rogue economists, huh? You idiots sound more like cynical morons that think they know everything. I guess I’m the fool, though. You . . .



Since We’re on the Subject of Race and the N.B.A. …

Levitt blogged a few minutes ago about today’s N.Y. Times piece by Alan Schwarz about possible racial bias among N.B.A. referees. The piece is based on a draft academic paper by Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers. I have two quick things to add to Levitt’s post, and then a separate but related question. 1. Never in the history of the . . .



One Further Note on IBM Service

I blogged the other day about the nice service I got on having my IBM laptop repaired. The second commenter on the post, “Kent,” wrote this: Why is the co-author of Freakonomics buying overpriced insurance/ warranty for a computer?! He then goes on to cite our friend Tim Harford as arguing that add-on insurance for things like computers, cell phones, . . .



Held Hostage by our Blog

While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage. We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds of suspect words (automatically . . .



Our Blog Has Moved

We have changed platforms for our blog, so if you have this page bookmarked — and have been wondering where the heck we’ve been — you should change your bookmark to this page. We haven’t been writing much there, either; but we’re getting caught up, and eventually we’ll move the archives there as well. One difference: you need to register . . .



The downside of blogs

To all who enjoy this blog, I apologize for the onslaught of comments from Steve Sailer and the various pseudonyms he operates under. Apparently he believes that if he says the same thing over and over it will turn into the truth, or at least direct some traffic to his website. As far as I can tell he is still . . .



Welcome to the new blog.

Welcome to the new Freakonomics blog. We have changed content management systems. The old blog can still be found at www.freakonomics.com/blog.php. If you have subscribed using FeedBurner, then your feeds should stay the same. http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlog Also, you now have the option of subscribing to the comments at http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlogComments



Crime vs Crime Rate

A host of commenters on my Bill Bennett post get very agitated over the question of “crimes” vs. “the crime rate.” The term “crime rate” implies a denominator, typically “per 100,000 residents.” So the number of crimes can fall, but the crime rate can rise if the population shrinks. Bill Bennett said, “But I do know that it’s true that . . .



Miscellany

It’s been a busy few weeks, a combination of deadlines and vacation and various Freakonomics duties. So there are a variety of things that should be said on this here blog that haven’t yet been said. With any luck I’ll soon get caught up. Topics in the very near future will include: — Freakonomics is a finalist in the first . . .