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Comment by swehner | Hacker News Reader

Who's reading freakonomics?? I don't think they (freakonomics) ever corrected their horrendous mistakes with respect to climate change.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/16/why-everything-in...

Embarrassing people! Here they serve up some more gossip ...

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I've always kinda hated "Freakonomics" - albeit irrationally. It just never felt like the author truly understood the difference between correlation & causation.

I too grew a distaste for them, more accurately the Freakonomics Podcast. Steven Levitt comes across like a total snob and he has all these annoying quirks and preferences, I find his personality really irritating. He reminds me of someone who won't do manual labour and thinks it's funny and charming to be someone who sees anything physically strainful as being this horrendous undertaking. He really embodies so many detestable human qualities, and that's the thing, it's like his 'image', he's this weirdo guy who gets to be reprehensible because he's a notable economist. Also their Podcasts frequently air re-runs, and their shows consist of 1 revelatory finding (i.e. legalizing abortion reduces crime rate) that they drag out for 30 mins until you get to the 'gem' of their findings. That being said these are personal gripes from previously being an avid listener who got tired of their stuff.

Not sure it's about hating. I imagine they just personally got the wrong kind of encouragement and incentive.

If someone consistently misrepresents facts, that's one thing. If they constantly produce content and sometimes fail, that's another. Freakonomics is cool for new ideas, but if you really get excited by something they publish, it's worth doublechecking. I don't think discounting them as gossip based on one article is the right solution.

There's nothing wrong with "content" when it's purely entertainment, but freakonomics falls well into the TED, Malcolm Gladwell, "fake-insight" category, that makes you feel clever about knowing some counter-intuitive fact, when the majority of the time, it's only counter-intuitive because it has been presented unintuitively in the first place, or because the fact is actually bullshit.

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