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Talks at TEDx Midatlantic
The talks are here, including one by yours truly on the limits of story-based thinking. I was happy to meet Sonja Sohn. One thing I learned from this experience is that if you follow professional entertainers, the "status rub-off" effect dominates the "suffer by comparison" effect. The audience is primed to be sympathetic to you and many of them do not actually know which of the speakers are truly the high status people. Perhaps the talk has to meet some minimum quality standard, or involve some minimum level of self-confidence, for the rub-off effect to hold.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 6, 2009 at 07:05 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
Excellent talk! As coherent and penetrating as any contemporary philosophy I can remember -- the scepticism and anti-dogmatism: t'is well done.
Posted by: Chris Dornan at Nov 6, 2009 8:46:07 AM
Is anybody studying that in academically?
We give it different names, such as "sentiment drives the data" and the like.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 6, 2009 9:12:33 AM
Good story. (If you watch the video, you will understand the irony.)
Posted by: Bill at Nov 6, 2009 9:40:43 AM
"Non-fiction is the new fiction." Classic Tyler!
Alex
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Nov 6, 2009 10:15:08 AM
I've noticed the rub-off effect as well. I once had to present immediately after the brilliant Simon Singh (very well known here in the UK - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh), and the audience was great. I jokingly complained to them about having to follow such a superstar, and they clearly went out of their way to be attentive and engaged. But I think that this was helped by the fact that I am a confident and fairly engaging presenter. There's only so much help an audience can give you.
Posted by: jd at Nov 6, 2009 10:50:53 AM
This reminds me of some of Mises comments on widely accepted notions of what history is. We are subject to same problem of being seduced by a good story.
History is usually some quite selective collection of statistics weaved together subject to some theory of the author. An alien with no economic or historical knowledge reading a history of the 1930s by Rothbard and then reading a history of the same period by Krugman would find both quite convincing but without a grounding in economic theory (and then which one? sold to him by various schools of thought all with great stories) would be left quite understandably confused.
I believe Mises coined the word thymology as the study of history given explicit underlying concept of theory, e.g. in his case Austrian economic theory. Rothbard did this with his 2 volume history of economic thought.
We mustn't be too agnostic, you will end up like Montaigne claiming to know nothing but in the process of knowing what is not so one does learn.
Posted by: Jonathan at Nov 6, 2009 12:12:44 PM
Great talk. Have you read Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock? It argues that Plato was saying pretty much the same thing. I read it around the time I read Create Your Own Economy and have been noticing partial analogies ever since (by coincidence, I gave a talk on it last night).
Posted by: Brian Frank at Nov 6, 2009 2:57:54 PM
Tyler, you're far too kind to Sonja Sohn. Yes, she was excellent in The Wire and her engaging personality and manner of speech makes it sound like she'd be a great slam poet.
But, seriously, her talk was so awful that I couldn't get through the introduction. Al Gore mentioned global warming once at a TED talk and now we all agree on the extend of the problem and what we need to do about it?
Seriously?
How ignorant of the real world do you have to be to understand that Gore's message, and Gore himself, are hugely controversial? And it's controversial in part because his own home's energy bill was at least twelve times higher than the average American's and, after his additional attempts at energy efficiency, is actually growing?
Posted by: ck at Nov 7, 2009 4:50:17 AM
Is it really true that Toyota is making more money from selling luxury cars than from selling cheap cars? I'm thinking that selling lots of cheap cars can give you a higher overall profit than selling relatively few expensive cars.
Posted by: vt at Nov 7, 2009 9:37:52 AM
Another TED view on the limits of story-based thinking, from very different viewpoint.
Posted by: Curt Fischer at Nov 7, 2009 10:44:15 PM
