Great Performance !

The two previous chapters were built around a pair of admittedly freakish questions: What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? But if you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile. The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.

But if you can question something that people really care about and find an answer that may surprise them—that is, if you can overturn the conventional wisdom—then you may have some luck.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “
with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behavior, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”

So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false— noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking— is a nice place to start asking questions.

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything