One of the most obvious intellectual moves that the people in Freakonomics made was bribery. The researchers from the University of Chicago would not have been able to conduct their study at all if they had not bribed the high school freshmen with cash payments. Even though they found that the bribery treatment was not nearly as successful as they had predicted, in fact one of the students who had been bribed actually did worse in school. Despite the failure of bribery at this school, it was still a tool that they used in order to gather their data.
The most simple intellectual move that those who participated in the movie used was to simply go up to people in the street and talk to them. This was done primarily in the section about names in the early part of the movie, where many people on the streets were asked questions about all sorts of things relating to names. In my opinion, this is a very good tactic to find evidence from primary sources, because there is no way data like this could have become corrupt. From speaking to all of these citizens directly, we were able to learn while watching the movie that there are patterns in name considered normal, but when looking deeper we realize that the stories behind the reasons for some of these names are actually really odd. There were also some ex-sumo wrestlers that were interviewed and we learned a lot from them as well.
This leads into the third intellectual tool that was used in the film, which is statistics. This tool was used in practically all of the different sections of Freakonomics, but it was most heavily relied on in the section about corruption in sumo wrestling. Until recently, sumo wrestling was considered to be one of the most honorable sports in history, dating back so far that it has become infused with Japanese culture and religion. However, by simply looking at statistics of matches, researchers were able to discover that 75% of the time, when an a fighter who needed just one more victory to move on to the next round fought a fighter who was already guaranteed a spot, the underdog would win.
As far as the sources of evidence relied on by the authors of Freakonomics go, I would say that statistics are the most reliable. This is because although sometimes, similarities in statistics are simply coincidental, if observations are made in a large number of statistics that is unlikely. Hard facts are also meant to be completely objective, and usually are not tampered with. For instance, in the sumo wrestling section of the movie, the authors were trying to point out a conspiracy when a fighter who had enough wins would statistically lose 3/4 times to a fighter who needed a win. It is completely possible that the fighter with enough wins was being generous in a way and not fighting as hard as he possibly could. However, the fighter who needed the win would probably have a lot more motivation to win because he would really need the victory, so that could explain the previous statistic as well. Another source of evidence that was relied on by the authors of Freakonomics was numerous interviews with both professionals as well as random people on the street (such as in the names and education sections of the movie). Although this is the best way to get unaltered opinions of real people, no one feels exactly the same way about one issue, and therefore the information gathered by this method is accurate only to those who were questioned and not for the general public.
I agree with the statement that Freakonomics served as an information and a good example to attempt to explore the "hidden in plain sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. The film was very interesting, and although not all of the information given had me convinced, many facts did do a very good job of showing me how things we take for granted as normal actually have very interesting methods behind them. This leads me to how an aspect of the movie relates to our current study of how many things that are considered normal are actually not normal at all in foodways. This kind of, deception in a way, is very similar to the sumo wrestling section. In the movie, they spoke about how sumo wrestling is one of the oldest sports in history, and how it has actually become intertwined with Japanese culture and religion. It would be very odd to actually find hard, undeniable evidence that sumo wrestlers had been cheating, similarly to how it would be odd to find out how so many of our foods are processed before we eat them...
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