Be suspicious of stories | Tyler Cowen | TEDxMidAtlantic

The best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they're 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, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories.

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's a Gabriel García Márquez memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, that we use stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people. N... See more

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like "this" [a journey] instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be.

There's a book by Christopher Booker, he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There's 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.

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 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 you hear ... See more

As a good rule of thumb, "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!" That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking more in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess.

Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more with comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good.

This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and 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!

Pull back and say, "What are the messages, and what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" and start telling yourself those, and see if any of your decisions change. That's 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... See more