Think Small to Solve Big Problems, with Stephen Dubner | Big Think

Think Small to Solve Big Problems, with Stephen Dubner
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STEPHEN J. DUBNER:

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2009), which have sold more than 5 million copies in 35 languages. Their latest books are When to Rob a Bank... and Think Like a Freak (2014).

Dubner is also the author of Turbulent Souls/Choosing My Religion (1998), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003), and the children's book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons (2007). His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and others.

Freakonomics, published in April 2005, was an instant international best-seller and cultural phenomenon. It made numerous "books of the year" lists, a few "books of the decade" lists, and won a variety of awards, including the inaugural Quill Award, a BookSense Book of the Year Award, and a Visionary Award from the National Council on Economic Education. It was also named a Notable Book by the New York Times. SuperFreakonomics, published in 2009, was published to similar acclaim, and also became an international best-seller.

The Freakonomics enterprise also includes an award-winning blog, a high-profile documentary film, and a public-radio project called Freakonomics Radio, which Dubner hosts. He has also appeared widely on television, including a three-year stint on ABC News as a Freakonomics contributor. He also appeared on the reality show Beauty and the Geek. Alas, he played neither beauty nor geek.

Dubner's first book, Turbulent Souls, was also named a Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Koret National Jewish Book Award. It was republished in 2006 under a new title, Choosing My Religion, and is currently being developed as a film.

The eighth and last child of an upstate New York newspaperman, Dubner has been writing since he was a child. (His first published work appeared in Highlights magazine.) As an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, he started a rock band that was signed to Arista Records, which landed him in New York City. He ultimately quit playing music to earn an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia University, where he also taught in the English Department. He was an editor and writer at New York magazine and The New York Times before quitting to write books. He is happy he did so.

He lives in New York with his wife, the documentary photographer Ellen Binder, and their two delicious children.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Stephen J. Dubner: One argument that we make is that we could all benefit a little bit from thinking more like children, okay. Now you could say well, we're -- first of all everybody's biased in a lot of ways and we have our set of biases too. It may be that we embrace the idea in this book of thinking like children because we're kind of, you know, childlike. We have kind of obvious observations sometimes. There's observations that strike people as obvious. We ask a lot of questions that are not considered, you know, the kind of questions that people ask in good company or smart company. But one of the most powerful pieces of thinking like a child that we argue is thinking small. So I realize that this runs exactly counter to the philosophy of the arena in which I'm appearing which is thinking big, Big Think, but our argument is this. Big problems are by their nature really hard to solve for a variety of reasons. One is they're large and therefore they include a lot of people and therefore they include a lot of crossed and often mangled and perverse incentives.

But also a big problem -- when you think about a big problem like the education reform. You're dealing with an institution or set of institutions that have gotten to where they've gotten to this many, many years of calcification...

[ttwilightzzone]

This is how computing works. The computer works on many simple problems EXTREMELY fast to solve a huge problem.

[NawidN]

Solving a big problem = solving a set of smaller problems.
His point is moot.

[amaxwell]

I love this. I always try to think small because thinking small and micro wins can lead to some amazingly large accomplishments over time.

[psznt]

Optimism, which probably is one of our precious resources. Thank you for realizing me that crucial thing!

[ajtronic]

So basically solving a bunch of small problems that add up to the larger problem.
Okay.  

[doodelay]

He just gave us permission to think small. I like him.

[ionutagatinei]

Goes hand in hand with the idea that tackling big problems is very hard and that is why we should deconstruct them heavily into tiny problems that are more manageable to find a solution for. And sometimes the solution for the smaller problem is simple, but if we keep looking at the big problem we might be overwhelmed and not very likely to find an answer.

[aliancemd]

I felt the problem of vision in school on myself...
I was a very good student, doing best at math in my school, winning math olympics. I was reading A Lot... I started losing eye sight and my grades just drastically started declining. I was sitting in the back of the class and I was not seeing anything what was happening in the front, what the teacher was writing on the board... It was way harder to understand the material by myself when I was going at home, add to it that I had many subjects to study and keep up with and it was a disaster.
I got glasses around 4-5 years later after I started seeing bad. I was left back on the material and I hardly kept up.
Just at university I started getting back on track...

[Pilitos.]

that's true, my cousin needs glasses but he doesn't wear it because his grandmother makes fun of him and when I see his notebooks, he has bad writring, so when he is going to study his notes, he doesn't understand and he fails his tests for that. i know this is a old video, i just wanted to write it.

[dannycraps]

I could not agree more with this idea. Great (small) idea!

[tracylemme]

My dad said that when you have a job (He had a machine &welding shop) that you don't know how to fix, just do what you know what to do and the rest will fall into place.

[livelife]

UK government adopted this philosophy years ago re education. They figured out that kids who didn't eat breakfast in the morning had lower academic attainment levels, so most schools offer breakfast meals now before school starts. 

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

We can always break big problems into small parts!

[ScienceByMike]

Ask the children how to fix something. Many answers will be give everyone a pizza but one will have a good suggestion

[damianblue]

So much useless talking, just get to the point.

[onetwoxplore]

There are guidelines for "small" thinking effectiveness. Presenting "small" as a cure-all can be deceiving bcs complexities surface almost immediately. The suggestion to extrapolate from large to small (manageable chunks) has a place, but small pieces can be extremely complex. I think you need a bird's eye view where the process of the large informs but the process of the small outlines how to go about fitting together the pieces of the puzzle. Large-to-small thinking or vice versa is fluid and not a zero-sum game. This video is just general and common sense advice. I was hoping for more.

[rowland]

Sounds very similar to Elon Musks First Principles way of solving problems which has its grounding in Physics.

[harrypearle]

EASY vs HARD School Challenge Division?
EASY and NO buttons are available, and they could be used to remind students of EASY vs HARD.
(Easy tasks may be done right away, but still appreciated) Hard tasks are frustrating, but need time

[usenlim]

This argument seems like comparing opensource software making to microsoft software making. And we know which is better.

[pikachu]

get to the point jesus 9 minutes i watched for 5 minutes does this go any slower