full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of simple stories


Unscramble the Blue Letters


I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often, the more nervous I get. (Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is that they are a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter is that it always leveas the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories. There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town." There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he clmais there are really just seven tyeps of stories. There is monster, rags to riches, qeust, voyage and return, comedy, tadrgey, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again. There was a study done, we asked some people— people were asked to describe their lives. When asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people said "mess". (Laughter) It's probably the best awensr, I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple shnttergs. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." (Laughter) But again, we're imposing oerdr on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the stroy about George wshngiaton and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that is exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not oiuobvs that that is exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically promagmerd to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They cecnnot us to other people. So they are like a candy that we're fed when we cunosme political iaoirfmontn, when we read novels. When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories. Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories. So what are the problems of relying too hvielay on stories? You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple, for the point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you can present in a sennecte or two. When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. I know some things actually are good versus evil, we all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten pontis or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself prnisseg a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more. Another set of stories that are popular— if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a cnorascpiy, ppolee plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or cpelomx human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So when you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching miveos, this, again, is roaesn to be suspicious. As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think: "Wow, that would make a great movie!" (Laughter) That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should sratt thinking in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess. Another cmomon story or srnitoyle is the calim that we "have to get tough". You'll hear this in so many contexts. We have to get tguoh with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions. We need to get tough with some other crntuoy, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with. Again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly. When we don't really know why something hpaneped, we blame someone, and we say: "We need to get tough with them!" As if it had never occurred to your predecessor, this idea of getting tough. I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness. It's a simple story you tell: "We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough." Usually, that is a kind of warning signal. Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime. So your stories are snievrg too many purposes. For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not. And you know what? That story works. It gets me out of bed. It's a kind of self-deception, but the plrobem comes when I need to change that story. The whole pnoit of the story is that I grab onto it and I hold it, and it gets me out of bed. So when I'm really doing something that is actually just a waste of time, in my mess of a life, I'm too tied into my story that got me out of bed, and ideally, I ought to have some very complex story map in my mind, you know, with combinatorials and a matrix of computation, and the like, but that is not how stories work. Stories in order to work have to be simple, elisay grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will sevre dual and cicnlnfiotg purposes, and very often they will lead us astray. I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys. I used to think that! And probably, I was wrong. Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some isseus, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys." I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story. One itsnireetng thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the blnik book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is that we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. Why don't these bkoos tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cniitvgoe bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of tamlasin, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'." (Laughter) It's like people want to hear the wrost, so psychologically, they can prarepe for it or defend against it. It's why there is such a maekrt for pesmiissm. But to think that by buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some finicanal literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people who realize they don't know anything at all, that end up doing pretty well. A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, asdtenirivg works on all of us. So if you're too athaectd to stories, what will happen is people slelnig products come along, and they will bundle their pourcdt with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story!" And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together. (Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here. Let's consider two knids of seotris about cars. Story A is: "Buy this car, and you will have buuiatefl, ranoitmc partners and a fascinating life." (Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial inntecvie to promote that story. But, say, the alternative story is: "You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate. What you usually do is look at what your peers do and copy them. That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a totoya." (Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less menoy off the cpaeehr cars. So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up hreaing the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I'm telling you, don't tsrut them. There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say: "What are the magesses, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" Start telnlig yourself those, and then see if any of your dnociseis change. That is one simple way. You can never get out of the patetrn of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions. So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wodnering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from teylr Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. (Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" (Laughter) And you tell your story. (Laugther) Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in trmes of stories (Laughter) but then I hared Tyler Cowen (Laughter) and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will rmemeebr, you can tell to other people, and again, it may sctik. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories." (Laughter) So, today, which is it? Is it like quest, ribtreh, tragedy? Or maybe some combination of the three? I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and trohw out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There is a gieabrl Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use mroemy in stories to make sesne of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to elssbatih connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision. Should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories, very often, that you like the most, that you find the most riwrdnaeg, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended cenuoqnseecs of hmuan action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy. (Laughter) As an alternative, at the mrgian - again, no burning of Tolstoy - but just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary - I htaestie to use the word - glory but that it's fun for me? Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, "I am agnostic about religion, or politics." It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? (Laughter) Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they are totally dogmatic in that, so pig-headedly unreasonable, that you think, "How can they possibly believe that?" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally ralosenabe about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness. (lugaehtr) [Think about] this idea of hoerving, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, [and how] not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway, I'm happy to be itviend, and thank you all for listening. (Laughter) (Applause)

Open Cloze


I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often, the more nervous I get. (Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is that they are a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter is that it always ______ the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories. There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town." There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he ______ there are really just seven _____ of stories. There is monster, rags to riches, _____, voyage and return, comedy, _______, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again. There was a study done, we asked some people— people were asked to describe their lives. When asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people said "mess". (Laughter) It's probably the best ______, I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple _________. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." (Laughter) But again, we're imposing _____ on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the _____ about George __________ and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that is exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not _______ that that is exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically __________ to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They _______ us to other people. So they are like a candy that we're fed when we _______ political ___________, when we read novels. When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories. Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories. So what are the problems of relying too _______ on stories? You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple, for the point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you can present in a ________ or two. When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. I know some things actually are good versus evil, we all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten ______ or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself ________ a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more. Another set of stories that are popular— if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a __________, ______ plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or _______ human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So when you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching ______, this, again, is ______ to be suspicious. As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think: "Wow, that would make a great movie!" (Laughter) That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should _____ thinking in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess. Another ______ story or _________ is the _____ that we "have to get tough". You'll hear this in so many contexts. We have to get _____ with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions. We need to get tough with some other _______, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with. Again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly. When we don't really know why something ________, we blame someone, and we say: "We need to get tough with them!" As if it had never occurred to your predecessor, this idea of getting tough. I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness. It's a simple story you tell: "We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough." Usually, that is a kind of warning signal. Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime. So your stories are _______ too many purposes. For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not. And you know what? That story works. It gets me out of bed. It's a kind of self-deception, but the _______ comes when I need to change that story. The whole _____ of the story is that I grab onto it and I hold it, and it gets me out of bed. So when I'm really doing something that is actually just a waste of time, in my mess of a life, I'm too tied into my story that got me out of bed, and ideally, I ought to have some very complex story map in my mind, you know, with combinatorials and a matrix of computation, and the like, but that is not how stories work. Stories in order to work have to be simple, ______ grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will _____ dual and ___________ purposes, and very often they will lead us astray. I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys. I used to think that! And probably, I was wrong. Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some ______, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys." I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story. One ___________ thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the _____ book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is that we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. Why don't these _____ tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your _________ bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of ________, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'." (Laughter) It's like people want to hear the _____, so psychologically, they can _______ for it or defend against it. It's why there is such a ______ for _________. But to think that by buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some _________ literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people who realize they don't know anything at all, that end up doing pretty well. A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, ___________ works on all of us. So if you're too ________ to stories, what will happen is people _______ products come along, and they will bundle their _______ with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story!" And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together. (Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here. Let's consider two _____ of _______ about cars. Story A is: "Buy this car, and you will have _________, ________ partners and a fascinating life." (Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial _________ to promote that story. But, say, the alternative story is: "You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate. What you usually do is look at what your peers do and copy them. That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a ______." (Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less _____ off the _______ cars. So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up _______ the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I'm telling you, don't _____ them. There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say: "What are the ________, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" Start _______ yourself those, and then see if any of your _________ change. That is one simple way. You can never get out of the _______ of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions. So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm _________, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from _____ Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. (Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" (Laughter) And you tell your story. (Laugther) Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in _____ of stories (Laughter) but then I _____ Tyler Cowen (Laughter) and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will ________, you can tell to other people, and again, it may _____. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories." (Laughter) So, today, which is it? Is it like quest, _______, tragedy? Or maybe some combination of the three? I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and _____ out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There is a _______ Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use ______ in stories to make _____ of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to _________ connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision. Should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories, very often, that you like the most, that you find the most _________, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended ____________ of _____ action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy. (Laughter) As an alternative, at the ______ - again, no burning of Tolstoy - but just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary - I ________ to use the word - glory but that it's fun for me? Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, "I am agnostic about religion, or politics." It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? (Laughter) Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they are totally dogmatic in that, so pig-headedly unreasonable, that you think, "How can they possibly believe that?" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally __________ about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness. (________) [Think about] this idea of ________, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, [and how] not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway, I'm happy to be _______, and thank you all for listening. (Laughter) (Applause)

Solution


  1. talisman
  2. storyline
  3. pessimism
  4. conflicting
  5. worst
  6. decisions
  7. information
  8. establish
  9. memory
  10. complex
  11. interesting
  12. gabriel
  13. quest
  14. connect
  15. beautiful
  16. money
  17. pressing
  18. heavily
  19. tyler
  20. prepare
  21. romantic
  22. rewarding
  23. issues
  24. tragedy
  25. hovering
  26. reason
  27. market
  28. happened
  29. points
  30. human
  31. serving
  32. pattern
  33. blink
  34. obvious
  35. reasonable
  36. types
  37. people
  38. terms
  39. incentive
  40. sentence
  41. rebirth
  42. toyota
  43. sense
  44. kinds
  45. selling
  46. telling
  47. common
  48. invited
  49. cheaper
  50. financial
  51. hesitate
  52. throw
  53. story
  54. consume
  55. programmed
  56. product
  57. start
  58. books
  59. serve
  60. attached
  61. leaves
  62. strengths
  63. point
  64. country
  65. consequences
  66. margin
  67. cognitive
  68. conspiracy
  69. answer
  70. problem
  71. wondering
  72. tough
  73. stories
  74. order
  75. advertising
  76. hearing
  77. remember
  78. easily
  79. claim
  80. trust
  81. movies
  82. stick
  83. heard
  84. washington
  85. laughter
  86. messages
  87. claims

Original Text


I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often, the more nervous I get. (Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is that they are a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter is that it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories. There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town." There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There is monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again. There was a study done, we asked some people— people were asked to describe their lives. When asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people said "mess". (Laughter) It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." (Laughter) But again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that is exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that is exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they are like a candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories. Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories. So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple, for the point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you can present in a sentence or two. When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. I know some things actually are good versus evil, we all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more. Another set of stories that are popular— if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So when you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching movies, this, again, is reason to be suspicious. As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think: "Wow, that would make a great movie!" (Laughter) That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess. Another common story or storyline is the claim that we "have to get tough". You'll hear this in so many contexts. We have to get tough with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions. We need to get tough with some other country, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with. Again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly. When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say: "We need to get tough with them!" As if it had never occurred to your predecessor, this idea of getting tough. I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness. It's a simple story you tell: "We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough." Usually, that is a kind of warning signal. Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime. So your stories are serving too many purposes. For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not. And you know what? That story works. It gets me out of bed. It's a kind of self-deception, but the problem comes when I need to change that story. The whole point of the story is that I grab onto it and I hold it, and it gets me out of bed. So when I'm really doing something that is actually just a waste of time, in my mess of a life, I'm too tied into my story that got me out of bed, and ideally, I ought to have some very complex story map in my mind, you know, with combinatorials and a matrix of computation, and the like, but that is not how stories work. Stories in order to work have to be simple, easily grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray. I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys. I used to think that! And probably, I was wrong. Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some issues, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys." I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story. One interesting thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is that we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. Why don't these books tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'." (Laughter) It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It's why there is such a market for pessimism. But to think that by buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people who realize they don't know anything at all, that end up doing pretty well. A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, advertising works on all of us. So if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story!" And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together. (Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here. Let's consider two kinds of stories about cars. Story A is: "Buy this car, and you will have beautiful, romantic partners and a fascinating life." (Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial incentive to promote that story. But, say, the alternative story is: "You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate. What you usually do is look at what your peers do and copy them. That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a Toyota." (Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less money off the cheaper cars. So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up hearing the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I'm telling you, don't trust them. There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say: "What are the messages, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" Start telling yourself those, and then see if any of your decisions change. That is one simple way. You can never get out of the pattern of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions. So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. (Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" (Laughter) And you tell your story. (Laugther) Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories (Laughter) but then I heard Tyler Cowen (Laughter) and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories." (Laughter) So, today, which is it? Is it like quest, rebirth, tragedy? Or maybe some combination of the three? I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use memory in stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision. Should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories, very often, that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy. (Laughter) As an alternative, at the margin - again, no burning of Tolstoy - but just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary - I hesitate to use the word - glory but that it's fun for me? Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, "I am agnostic about religion, or politics." It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? (Laughter) Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they are totally dogmatic in that, so pig-headedly unreasonable, that you think, "How can they possibly believe that?" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness. (Laughter) [Think about] this idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, [and how] not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway, I'm happy to be invited, and thank you all for listening. (Laughter) (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
people plotting 3
ten points 2
tyler cowen 2
feel good 2



Important Words


  1. accident
  2. action
  3. adopt
  4. advertising
  5. agnostic
  6. agree
  7. allied
  8. alternative
  9. answer
  10. applause
  11. area
  12. areas
  13. asked
  14. astray
  15. attached
  16. bad
  17. banks
  18. basically
  19. battle
  20. battles
  21. beautiful
  22. bed
  23. bias
  24. biases
  25. big
  26. bigger
  27. biologically
  28. bit
  29. blame
  30. blink
  31. book
  32. booker
  33. books
  34. bought
  35. bow
  36. bundle
  37. burn
  38. burning
  39. button
  40. buy
  41. buying
  42. camp
  43. candy
  44. capitalism
  45. car
  46. cars
  47. categories
  48. central
  49. change
  50. cheaper
  51. cherry
  52. christopher
  53. claim
  54. claims
  55. cognitive
  56. combination
  57. combinatorials
  58. comedy
  59. comfortable
  60. coming
  61. common
  62. complex
  63. computation
  64. conflicting
  65. connect
  66. connections
  67. consequences
  68. conspiracy
  69. consume
  70. contexts
  71. copy
  72. cost
  73. country
  74. cowen
  75. dangerous
  76. day
  77. days
  78. decision
  79. decisions
  80. deep
  81. defend
  82. describe
  83. design
  84. detail
  85. dictator
  86. dogmatic
  87. drawing
  88. dual
  89. dvd
  90. easily
  91. easy
  92. economist
  93. economists
  94. empowering
  95. epistemological
  96. essentially
  97. establish
  98. evidence
  99. evil
  100. extent
  101. extra
  102. fact
  103. fall
  104. fallacy
  105. fascinating
  106. fed
  107. feel
  108. fiction
  109. fighting
  110. filter
  111. finally
  112. financial
  113. find
  114. fit
  115. focus
  116. follow
  117. forces
  118. foreign
  119. form
  120. free
  121. fun
  122. fundamentally
  123. gabriel
  124. garcia
  125. general
  126. george
  127. give
  128. glamor
  129. glory
  130. good
  131. goodness
  132. grab
  133. grasped
  134. great
  135. guy
  136. guys
  137. habit
  138. happen
  139. happened
  140. happy
  141. hard
  142. hear
  143. heard
  144. hearing
  145. heavily
  146. hesitate
  147. heuristic
  148. hold
  149. hovering
  150. human
  151. idea
  152. ideally
  153. ideas
  154. identify
  155. imagine
  156. important
  157. imposing
  158. improve
  159. incentive
  160. inclined
  161. income
  162. incompleteness
  163. information
  164. inspired
  165. inspiring
  166. instance
  167. institutions
  168. intellectually
  169. intent
  170. intention
  171. interesting
  172. invited
  173. iq
  174. issues
  175. job
  176. journey
  177. journeys
  178. kind
  179. kinds
  180. labor
  181. laughter
  182. laugther
  183. laziness
  184. lead
  185. learning
  186. leave
  187. leaves
  188. left
  189. liberating
  190. life
  191. lifetime
  192. list
  193. listening
  194. literacy
  195. live
  196. lives
  197. lot
  198. lots
  199. love
  200. lowering
  201. luxury
  202. major
  203. making
  204. man
  205. manipulate
  206. map
  207. margin
  208. market
  209. marquez
  210. matrix
  211. meaning
  212. memoir
  213. memory
  214. mental
  215. mess
  216. messages
  217. messiness
  218. messy
  219. michael
  220. mind
  221. minutes
  222. mistakes
  223. money
  224. monster
  225. morning
  226. move
  227. movie
  228. movies
  229. multiple
  230. narrative
  231. narratives
  232. nazis
  233. neat
  234. needed
  235. negotiating
  236. nervous
  237. nice
  238. novels
  239. nudge
  240. observe
  241. obvious
  242. occurred
  243. oliver
  244. opportunity
  245. opposing
  246. oppressive
  247. order
  248. ordinary
  249. outsiders
  250. part
  251. partners
  252. pattern
  253. patterns
  254. paul
  255. peers
  256. people
  257. person
  258. pessimism
  259. pick
  260. play
  261. player
  262. plots
  263. plotting
  264. point
  265. points
  266. political
  267. politics
  268. pop
  269. portfolio
  270. possibility
  271. possibly
  272. power
  273. predecessor
  274. prepare
  275. present
  276. pressing
  277. pretty
  278. problem
  279. problems
  280. product
  281. products
  282. programmed
  283. promote
  284. psychologically
  285. pull
  286. purposes
  287. quest
  288. quests
  289. quickly
  290. rags
  291. reaction
  292. read
  293. readily
  294. reality
  295. realize
  296. reason
  297. reasonable
  298. reasons
  299. rebirth
  300. religion
  301. relying
  302. remember
  303. remembered
  304. respond
  305. return
  306. revere
  307. rewarding
  308. riches
  309. romantic
  310. rule
  311. screw
  312. seduced
  313. seductive
  314. selling
  315. sense
  316. sentence
  317. serve
  318. serving
  319. set
  320. show
  321. shows
  322. signal
  323. simple
  324. single
  325. smarter
  326. soaks
  327. social
  328. specifically
  329. spontaneous
  330. start
  331. stick
  332. stories
  333. story
  334. storyline
  335. stranger
  336. strengths
  337. strip
  338. stubbornness
  339. study
  340. subject
  341. summed
  342. suspicious
  343. sway
  344. talisman
  345. talk
  346. taught
  347. telling
  348. ten
  349. tend
  350. terms
  351. thinking
  352. throw
  353. thumb
  354. tied
  355. ties
  356. time
  357. today
  358. told
  359. tolstoy
  360. totally
  361. tough
  362. town
  363. toyota
  364. tragedy
  365. trap
  366. tree
  367. trickiest
  368. triumph
  369. true
  370. trust
  371. trustworthy
  372. turn
  373. tv
  374. tyler
  375. types
  376. unintended
  377. unions
  378. unreasonable
  379. view
  380. voyage
  381. wanted
  382. warning
  383. washington
  384. waste
  385. watching
  386. ways
  387. weird
  388. wondering
  389. word
  390. work
  391. works
  392. worse
  393. worst
  394. wrong