TEDxMidAtlantic - Tyler Cowen - 11/5/09

[thrillscience]

You would think Tyler Cowan would be invited to real TED and not one of the fake TEDs

[drmarkchang]

Say the word "story" again...I dare you.

[animalcolm]

...love the irony : telling good vs evil stories is EVIL!

great talk!

[1maxroman]

Sometimes it is a bit funny how people take some common things everyone does and name it somehow. I more often see this in computers. how just common sense takes and named as some kind of theory. ex: waterfall model of software development. of course people think in terms of stories. if they did not, they would think in some other way, and that way would have been described here huh. also sad that it is obvious from aside, but when it comes to me personally :) I am lost..

[Fingolfin3423]

I love TED talks, but this is a weak one.

[WarEffort]

Dislike. I <3 Stories. All kinds.

[LeonardGarden]

Alexandre Dumas was told by a mentor of his that there are about 200 stories known to man. Master them and you will master writing. In my humble opinion, stories are not told to provide us with an accurate account of what happened, (the fiction) rather what our reaction was and why (a more likely reality). Use this tool (like Dumas) and you'll compel those who are listening and make them think.

[minkr1]

dont confuse this with a talk on literature. its about myths and economics.

[grey0powerlessnesss]

Another anti-scientific rant (economics is not a science). Qualitative descriptions are almost meaningless without reproducible quantitative data. Religion, marketing, economics are 'stories'.

Retired science teacher & researcher.

[Alkrodion]

Cool Story bro...

TeD talks have declined massively...

[PoledniceWP]

We need to get tough on stories.

[jodogohoo]

@PoledniceWP looolololol

[aboko123]

so then why should i believe your story

[deadpassive]

Cool story bro.

[deenalev]

This talk makes me feel better about myself. I often hate stories. They usually don't sit 100% right with me. But I feel badly for not buying into them because they are often considered great. Also, I am a writer but can't really tell stories and always feel badly about that. I write about real things and that just doesn't seem very creative but I don't want to make stuff up and stories often feel like they're lacking. So, thanks for making me feel like I'm actually a forward-thinking person. :)

[kraskata2012]

It looks more like a Nassim Taleb talk than a Tyler Cowen talk. Im dissapointed.

[whatevyouknow]

I just couldn't get into the talk because of his non-engaging delivery.

[account98]

@whatevyouknow you mean his talk wasn't enough of a story? lol

[barkal100]

@whatevyouknow 

[angolnyelvtanitas]

Here's a story easily grasped: stories work because they seduce us. And that's gooood. Period. Stories may lower my IQ by 10 but sometimes I need to think less (and act more) in order to get where I want to be. If a story does that to me, I'll simply be grateful. I may end up buying a product as a result of reading a marketer's story but if they CAN sell me something that actually HELPS through a story then BE IT. May storytellers live a long, rewarding and fruitful life.

[theANSWERisXLII]

meta-story... seemed like a waste of 16 mins

[thezabful]

In Tyler we trust.

[mizztotal]

Excellent, relevant, and timely. I agree with what @wytcld said: "He's coming close to a central truth here, a realization about the architecture of modern consciousness." He's coming close to telling us how to get out of the box. Let those who have ears...hear.

[pcharlesleddy]

can you say a sentence without that word?

[RomansBookReport]

Gosh. I'm sorry I told myself the story that listening to this lecture would be worth while. Never again.

[mshulhan]

His first name is Tyler. What a coincidence.

[wytcld]

He's coming close to a central truth here, a realization about the architecture of modern consciousness. But all he can do is dance around it. As they say in another context, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Nice enough dance though. Basic Buddhist/Taoist stuff. But then he's not telling an origin story.

[speedbagger]

David McRaney's YOU ARE NOT SO SMART does emphasize the heuristic narratological basis of self-delusion (though it appeared in book form two years after this presentation).

Nietzsche and his successors are all about the stories and metaphors we seduce ourselves with.

Does Cowen seriously believe scholarship has overlooked embedded narratological bias, or is he just peeved that Malcolm Gladwell is a millionaire?

[jamilalkhatib]

By the way, the whole behavior economics field hasn't done any improvement in the way we invest in the financial markets. He forgets that the best investors are good story tellers because they know how to connect the dots and simplify the complex world to make decisions rather than rely on  mechanical formulas that these economist churn out of their ivory towers. If anything, it is truly a dismal science.

[FeelGood1nc]

@jamilalkhatib It's a story called the illusion of validity that tells us that only skillful investors succeed because they "connect the dots" better. Skill really has very little to do with it - in the long run, almost no one beats the S&P 500 consistently. And, every investor uses those ivory tower equations to some extent (though maybe not behavioral ones since I haven't heard of them inventing a useful one yet).

[jamilalkhatib]

This guy is spending his short time on this earth on how to make our lives more boring by not thinking in terms of inspirational stories. This whole behaviorism school is making every thing look irrational even though they are the same irrational agents they criticize. The end of the road is complete nihilism and void and maybe short of suicidal for the human race.

[FeelGood1nc]

@jamilalkhatib Tyler Cowen doesn't do behavioral economics for the most part. Check out his blogging at Marginal Revolution.

[ScissorHand26]

@jamilalkhatib

It seems pretty clear that you didn't understand the point of his speech at all. He wasn't about being negative towards stories that are inspiring, but not being deluded by them. He also doesn't expect (from what I could see) to be able to avoid being an irrational agent. He recognized that life is quite a mess. The best we can do is try to decrease our irrationality. If you're going to just give up on that because it's impossible then so be it, but some of us think it's worth it

[RBarrett1010]

Stories, take a look at the wealth of thinking on genre studies.

[Gwern0]

Transcript: lesswrong . com/r/discussion/lw/8w1/transc­ript_tyler_cowen_on_stories/

[KurosenvsGrither]

@Gwern0 I probably should have put that link here, now that I think about it.

[KurosenvsGrither]

This is a very interesting perspective. People are always thinking in terms of direct causality, predictable domains, agents with directed will, conflicts, et cetera, and very few people catch themselves in the act. I think a likely source of this tendency is the anthropomorphic bias, where people use a model of "what they would do" in a situation, obscuring to themselves both that other people may not act like them, and that non-humans may not act even remotely like a person at all.

[Wormtail81]

"Inside Job" is a story.

[umidias]

So he tells a story to tell us to be suspicious of stories. He might as well say: trust me and not anyone else.

Great.

[wraft]

The problem is that evil people really do conspire.

[ambigera]

@wraft More like evil people really do perspire.