The Freakonomics authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner wrote a book on how to think like a freak. I read it on a recent visit to my granddaughter in Los Angeles. The core argument is that a freak is always doing experiments to create data to evaluate the real world.
I’ve been doing experiments as far back as I can remember. I’m going to describe three in this blog and the next two blogs. I think it may be important to have a habit of doing experiments. I believe that 199 out of 200 people have their curious brains turned hard boiled at age 23. I want to understand what generates that 1 out of 200. Maybe it is doing experiments.
I did many experiments at my home in San Francisco. I had a vast number of friends and regularly threw parties so it was easy to get 40 people to come to my house and use them as test subjects. (Except as described in the third blog on Sunday.)
It was widely believed in San Francisco that one pizza joint had the most exceptional pizza in the City. Franny's pizza. I could say it was universally believed. Nearly everyone considered themselves pizza connoisseurs in the 1970’s. As they still do today.
For the 40 guests, I had delivered six large pizzas from Franny’s with two different toppings and six from Round Table with the same toppings. The taste test was double blind. Even the person in the kitchen had no idea which pizza was which. Everyone tasted two and rated the pizza’s A,B,...F on a scale from 1 to 5. When I tallied the data, there was no difference. None.
I won no friends from that test and the people at the party continued to claim star quality for Franny’s for years to come. Popular themes dominate over taste.
The next test was even more harsh on my relations to friends. At the time, there was a mass migration from New York to San Francisco thanks to the appeal of Hippies and drugs. Everyone, no exceptions, derided the bagels in San Francisco in comparison to New York.
So I had another party on a Sunday morning, 11 am. That meant I got a large box of plain bagels from the Upper Westside of Manhattan, still warm, from a friend who flew out with them on a 6 am plane. And another box from San Francisco’s best bagel shop. Again, double blind, no one knew which tray had which bagels on it. Again rated A and B trays from 1 to 5.
In this case, the San Francisco bagels got a statistically significant number higher (tasted better) than the NY bagels.
Still, after that, no one ever stopped saying NY bagels were better. I hear that to this day, forty years later. (Here is an article about the NYTimes that claims the same perpetual NY bagel lie; never test anything is their motto)
I had several bagel bakeries as clients. Two important historical points about bagels.
* The great innovations in bagels made with raisins, blueberries and nuts all came from a bagel shop on Polk St. near Broadway, in San Francisco.
* The first national bagel chain came from Berkeley, Noah’s. It was bought by Einstein’s. Noah’s was different because the bagels were softer. Noah Alper put his racks of extruded dough in a tall box with steam before dropping them into boiling water.
Data on the real world for freaks.