Tyler Cowen's TED talk Be Suspicious of Simple Stories is one of my favorite talks of all time. It's not saying anything new or controversial. He's relaying some pretty mainstream wisdom grounded in psychology. Our brains are more like story processing machines than logic processing machines. We like to think the prefrontal cortex is in charge because of course the smart thing is in charge of the stupid thing. But it isn't so. The less logical part of our brain that uses instinct, intuition, and most importantly previous patterns is what motivates most of our behavior. The prefrontal cortex tells stories about it afterward. This is groundbreaking if you've never heard it, but it's hardly controversial.
I think back to an old acquaintance of mine who evaluated this TED talk negatively. She studied theater. She was familiar with a long list of classical fiction in both in film and novel. She had a close relationship with stories. I suspect she felt like this talk of Cowen's was an attack on stories, so she felt like she had to defend them. She didn't have any criticism of what Cowen actually said, rather she just went on about how good and important and fulfilling stories could be, which is nothing Cowen or I would disagree with.
It's hard to reason people out of the story-telling mindset. I guess one has to do it with a better story. But rational people are stubborn in that they're always trying to reason people out of their positions, even if they know the literature on how poorly reason accomplishes persuasion. This makes me think they're not rational after all, but rather they've built a more complicated infrastructure of stories to better hide the fact that they're just like everyone else.
