HW#9

One of the techniques that the people in Freakonomics used was bribery. The students/professors at the University of Chicago wouldn't have had a study at all if they hadn't bribed the high schoolers with money. Money served as a good motive to succeed they thought. The bribery with cash didn't go as nearly successful as I or even they thought,  one kid was even to lazy to push himself to do good with the money bribe. Even though things didn't exactly go as according to plan bribery was still a tool they used to gather data.

The simplest intellectual move that I noticed from the movie was simply to go on the streets of New York and ask New Yorkers questions. I think they should have noted where they asked people for example the neighborhood of Chelsea, oppose to the neighborhood of Stuyvesant Town. Regardless, it was a intellectual move, and it primarily took place in the names section of the movie.I felt that this was probably the best possible way to go about this problem as long as they kept varying the races of people they asked, so it would't become biased.  While analyzing the data we figured out there are some patterns in names considered normal,  or unusual. But if you take it a step further the stories behind these names were pretty odd to me.

The last intellectual tool I observed was statistics. I found that statistics were in all parts of the movie but mainly the sumo wrestling section. Until lately, sumo wrestling was a respectable honorable sport especially in Asian society.However, when researchers looked at the stats 75% of the time when a wrestler needed just one more victory to get to the next round, fought a fighter who needed none and had nothing to lose the fighter who needed it more would win. Coincidence maybe but very unlikely.

As far as the sources of evidence relied on my the researches go I would say would be stats. Though stats can be skewed there can be injuries especially in sports, and age even. Also there is such a thing as coincidence. Never rule that out.  For instance with the sumo wrestling section the researchers were trying to point out a possible conspiracy between fighters. As Ben Harker said in his post it is completely possible that the fighter with enough wins was being generous and didn't fight as hard. Especially while knowing that there is money at stake with every win. Also as Ben Harker stated the fighter that needed the win had more at stake if he lost he would be eliminated.

I agree with the statement that Freakanomics served as a good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden in plain sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. The film was much more interesting than I thought it would be even though I had no idea what it would be about. Things we think are normal actually have some weird and complex things going on.  Freakonmics can even relate to our food ways unit. Many things we think are normal in food ways and in the movie weren't really normal. In the sumo wrestling section of the movie they said sumo wrestling has a lot of history behind it, and now Japanese religion has become apart of it. Its odd that our foods are processed and have chemicals/ hormones and many other things that I don't know about and yet we eat them.