In Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephan Dubner, the dominant discourse of correlation being the same thing as causation is examined. One of the things that they studied were the fact that many people in our society today have very unique names compared to names that are very common. Since the beginning of modern civilization, people have believed that there are some names that will increase a person's chances of success in life. Freakonomics showed an experiment done by a Harvard professor to see if there was indeed any correlation between names and a person's future. The study showed that a white man with the name, Greg, will get a job faster than someone who has a very stereotypical black name, Tyrone. The two men have the same qualifications and were applying for the same field of work. The results showed that Greg would get a job 5 weeks faster or 33% faster. That is a very long time. Especially for someone that is unemployed. This was one of the few examples where they showed that correlation and causation is in fact the same thing.
In Freakonomics, the authors seemed to have relied on ethics and moral beliefs of people rather than statistics. For the example with the Sumo wrestlers, all the sumo wrestlers are honored and even feared by the people of Japan. However; "If there is an incentive to cheat, they will cheat." A lot is in the balance if one person loses a match. I personally did not feel very convinced by the sumo wrestler cheating data because I felt like it was more speculation than concrete fact. This is probably because of the fact that the data was so vague since cheating is punishable by death/banishment.
I agree that Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. This movie explored topics that I thought I knew something about and enlightened me further. There wasn't a single segment where I felt as if it was absurd or weird to me. It all seemed to be issues that I already know something about but in more detail than I would have ever indulged in. For example, I have read a lot about why abortion should be illegal and why it shouldn't, but I would have never thought that abortion could be related to drastically reducing crime rates. The makers of Freakonomics seemed to be able to perfectly send the message they wanted to to the readers/watchers.
