6 ms·

The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR

by waprin 4y ago

The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work. Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans are naturally drawn to listen to stories, so by framing facts as a sequence of events, it gives them momentum that can make even the most boring of facts more interesting and engaging. As I listened, he elucidated by talking about a man waking up and walking around his house. While nothing in his story happened, the way he told it was very suspenseful, which did make me much more curious as to what Ira was going to say next. I think Ira makes a great point, and even if you are just trying to educate people on a topic matter, framing the facts you're trying to convey as a sequence of events makes it much more likely you will succeed at conveying the information you intend to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI

jschveibinz 4y ago
Good link. Thank you.
theturtletalks 4y ago
Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  > Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes. I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling" by T Auvinen, 2013, cited 110 times, says "Even Plato stated that those who tell stories rule society (Fisher, 1985)". So I looked at that paper, WR Fisher's "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning" (1985), which doesn't contain that quote or anything like it! It does say, in its one paragraph about Plato: "[Plato's] “contribution” to the transformation of logos was to technologize it, to make it a term appropriate to only philosophical discourse. The effects of his thought were to create “experts” in truth, knowledge, and reality; to establish the rational superiority of philosophical (technical) discourse; to relegate mythos to myth (meaning fictional); and to downgrade rhetoric and poetic. Dispensations were made for rhetoric and poetic; they had a place in the life of the community but they were not to be considered serious intellectual arts. They were to be controlled or informed by philosopher-kings." Which is vaguely in the right ballpark - although more like its opposite. Tentative conclusion: Plato didn't say that.
  - throwaway14356 4y ago
    imho that story should have ended like: "I didn't say that" - Plato
    - yesenadam 4y ago
      It's been done to death already. e.g. https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-board-print/Plato-I-Didn-t-Say-This-by-wearphilosophy/38371077.TR477 https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-board-print/Plato-I-Didn-t-S... Some variants: Einstein https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Einstein-quote1.jpg https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Eins... Lincoln https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/quote-abraham-lincoln-quote-internet-fake.jpg https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/quot... Buddha https://superaalifragilistic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/new_banner_3.jpg https://superaalifragilistic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/new...
      - mwcremer 4y ago
        Or Yogi Berra https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/30/yogi-didnt-say/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/30/yogi-didnt-say/
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    I think the quote must have come first: T Auvinen wanted to use the quote, which they'd seen online, but needed a reference, so searched for something mentioning Plato, stories, and rulers, and found this paper. That seems very likely. I think there's no way you could get the quote from the paragraph, but they share the same elements.
enriquto 4y ago
> Instead, you start with an anecdote This also works in math. Best professor I had, he spent half of the lesson explaining the life and motivations of some mathematician (Riemann, Fourier, Weierstrass, ...), and why he was so obsesed with such and such problem. He surely added a lot of salt and pepper to his story. Then, once everybody was craving for the technical details, he stated the main result and told us just a couple of crucial details in the proof. The complete, formal, proof was given as a handout, and you really worked through it in the afternoon. An unusal teaching method, but very engaging.
- namaria 4y ago
  I find this especially effective for teaching maths, because schools have been trying to de-contextualise and impart the mechanics of algebra for decades. This completely misses the point, because every advance in the history of mathematics has been towards solving some specific and well formulated problem.
woolion 4y ago
That style has became ubiquitous for TED-style talks and most American non-fiction books (even technical ones). The chapter uses an anecdote, if possible name-dropping a known case or famous person, then shortly expands supporting research to the general principle. That style is very persuasive but unscientific. It is precisely designed to lower psychological defenses against the idea, which can leave the spectators dumbfounded that they did not find any counter-arguments when they heard it. I suspect this is also while this style has high short-term information retention but a poor long-term one. A strong idea is one that withstands all attacks (coincidentally there is also "Cargo cult science (1974)" on the front page).
- feoren 4y ago
  I think it's less about lowering the listener's defenses to the idea so that they're easily persuaded, and more about giving them the impression that they're actually learning something of substance, when they're actually not. In a week they'll be completely unable to articulate any of the important ideas from the talk, not because it's a poor learning style, but because there were never any important ideas to begin with. "You just have to watch it." It's like thought junk food. It's instantaneously satisfying but provides no actual mental nutrition.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Can you name any ideas, strong or otherwise, just any one, that would actually stand up to the kinds of misinformation and bad faith arguments that are common on the Internet though? If TED was, instead of being intellectual entertainment for the wealthy, but instead tried to portray itself as a serious scientific conference where papers are presented, it would stoop to "fighting with pigs", as it were, and open itself up to all sorts of stupid arguments. Like viruses don't cause disease, level of conversation, backed by faith-based arguments. TED isn't a scientific conference with papers, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's there to drum up interest from the wealthy in the speakers and their projects. If you present there and Bill Gates hears your moving speech on, say, a better cure for malaria, he, and others with that kind of wealth, are liable to invest. But if your speech makes it sound like you're unsure and don't know what you're doing and are just fumbling around, hedging your bets, then you and project might end up langushing in obscurity. (Which, imo, a properly scientific presentation would consist of, because there are no guarantees, just probable possibilities vs improbable impossibilities.) "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry TED sells yearning for the sea, and not how much wood to gather in order to build the ship. There are other, better forums for that. What you're looking for wouldn't fit neatly into their format. Still, if you're wealthy and see a TED talk, and then want to invest in the person in the basis of a good TED talk, I'll just close with a link to Elizabeth Holmes' convincing talk. I encourage you (or a hired scientist) to do your due diligence on a particular idea. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8geEtCYjw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8geEtCYjw
5tefan 4y ago
About everything starts with an anecdote. And it works. But I am so sick of it and also stop reading or listening. I don't want any anecdote.
feoren 4y ago
I hate that this style is shoehorned into absolutely everything, though. I can barely stand to read most nonfiction books anymore, even highly regarded ones about subjects I'm interested in. The part of my brain that likes a good story is very different than the one that's ready to refine my model of the universe, and it's jarring to have Malcom Gladwell artificially stitching together unrelated events, people, and ideas in order to form his pet narrative. I guess he does it to cover the fact that he has absolutely no useful insights about the world and is just trying to give the reader the impression that they're getting smarter, but even people with meaningful things to say end up copying that style. I find myself neither learning anything nor being engaged in the story, because it's much more boring than an actual novel where the story is the point. I really just don't get why so much non-fiction is this way now.
- namaria 4y ago
  Non-fiction is a vast universe and Malcom Gladwell is a famously superficial writer. The torrent of books getting to market each years is never high in average quality. But I never had a problem finding good factual content to read.
  - azeirah 4y ago
    A good counterexample is Robert Sapolsky. He uses a lot of storytelling and anecdotes in his scientific teachings and lectures. His writing is amazing, his lectures even more so. Here's an example lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk
  - smcin 4y ago
    Has anyone attempted to analyze the NYT hardback and softback lists for superficiality, by year? As Po Bronson remarked, I fear we are getting superficial, but maybe even worse, we're (intentionally?) losing touch with any compass to objectively assess that. A lot of these titles feel like massaging people's egos to feel okay about doing bad or arbitrary things, while telling them how smart they are. Seems there's a growing market for that. One example of massively overrated MBA-school schlock: "Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life" - Stuart Diamond (2012).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
WA 4y ago
And yet, the author of the article teaches board games by not telling a story, but by explaining the winning condition. Imho, storytelling in a business/teaching/problem-solving context is overrated.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  The way I see it, the author of the article teaches board games by arranging the explanation according to narrative principles of good storytelling, arguably making the explanation more effective that way. Though it would be more effective to directly read and apply pedagogical research instead of pulling in vaguely similar stuff from the field of writing and theater as the author does. For example, much of what the original article says matches pedagogy literature e.g. if I look at 'Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom' by Svinicki chapter 7 about goal-oriented motivation for learning or 'Making Learning Whole' by Perkins chapter 7 about reasons and ways to 'put the learner in driver's seat' then this seems to say similar things as this article only in more detail and with some evidence basis. There is no need to reinvent the wheel - we have a whole discipline of science dedicated to researching what works best for learning and instruction, it just needs to be applied.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  In board games, it kind of makes sense. There's basically only a handful of ways to win anyway. A common joke at my board game night when teaching a game is to start by saying "In this game, the winner is the person with the most points." everyone playfully gasps "Stop the presses!" "Shocker!" ...because it's just so common in the games we play. Now how you get the most points will come in the details, and the end game scoring might not be elaborated on until near the end of the explanation. But starting with 'winner is the most points' or 'winner is first over the finish line' or 'you win if you achieve X' is usually a good way to start the explanation. Most games victory condition is usually either 'most points', a race, or achieving some binary condition, and even those last two can be thought of as 'the winner scored 1 point and the losers score 0 points'. That's how BoardGameArena handles it.
smcin 4y ago
The NPR/TED school of (audio) stories is really 'audio clickbait' for audiences with short attention spans and lower barriers to clicking away/skipping/changing the channel/losing interest; unlike book or print readers who already have more sunk cost. Moreover the audio clickbait school often cater to a middle-class, college-graduate audience; and their predilections (dating, career, social issues). It would be a brave person who would talk to that audience about (say) their passion for taking their kid hunting. Not every concept needs to be sold welded to an anecdote, and not every anecdote needs to dominate the piece, not every anecdote must be happy or even self-complete, and not every story needs to be affirming inspiration porn. One TEDSalon piece that really hits all these low notes of over-the-top self-congratulation success porn is Amy Webb's "How I hacked online dating" (TEDSalon NY2013 [1]), which boils down to merely combining a few fairly obvious pragmatic quantitative steps then drowning it all in unnecessary gallons of aw-shucks sentimentality and humblebragging and missteps (10:14..15:53). It's important to stop and introspect if/whether/why we're more likely to click on/listen to a title "How I hacked online dating" instead of "How to find someone genuinely compatible with you, in online dating", and if so to fight that tendency. Webb only really ends the preamble at 07:10 of a talk that's 17:14 long. Her thesis is 7:28-7:57. 11:23 is just overkill, can reverse-engineer these things just by asking other people what profiles they swipe on. It really is time to take out the Gatling gun on the overuse of audio clickbait, or at least the people pushing its worst traits to 'maximize engagement', which oftentimes means spinning a 30-second truism into 10/15/20/30/60 minutes, which is diluting the density of concepts by 20-100x. Brevity shouldn't be a crime, either, although for advertising-supported media it is. On NPR: Ira Glass is good, and 'The Moth' Story Hour is often pretty good, but then again 'Hidden Brain' with Shankar Vedantam is also good, in a more dry way that doesn't need to pile-drive emotional anecdotes to establish interest. As to Kamphey, it feels like does have something to tell under it all, but his Medium post is laboring in very stilted LinkedIn 'broetry' (short staccato sentences, rhetorical questions, smug, sometimes infantile narrative). It's not thoughtcrime to have a thought that spans an entire paragraph, old-school, >300 characters. [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...
j7ake 4y ago
I loved that video (watched it a long time ago). The great thing about that video is that Ira Glass talks about storytelling / broadcasting, but he speaks at a level that is deep enough to connect to anybody in a creative field (e.g. writing, science, art). His discussion about the need to produce a volume of work, killing your good but not great ideas, and persistence in failing over and over are keys to success in any creative endeavor. Note in that video he speaks of two building blocks: one is anecdote as you mentioned, but also the other is questions / reflections. Both are needed for a successful story.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
croo 4y ago
At another part of the globe at uni they teach this style as the "American" style of writing.

by waprin 4y ago

jschveibinz 4y ago

Good link. Thank you.

theturtletalks 4y ago

Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.

yesenadam 4y ago
> Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes. I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling" by T Auvinen, 2013, cited 110 times, says "Even Plato stated that those who tell stories rule society (Fisher, 1985)". So I looked at that paper, WR Fisher's "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning" (1985), which doesn't contain that quote or anything like it! It does say, in its one paragraph about Plato: "[Plato's] “contribution” to the transformation of logos was to technologize it, to make it a term appropriate to only philosophical discourse. The effects of his thought were to create “experts” in truth, knowledge, and reality; to establish the rational superiority of philosophical (technical) discourse; to relegate mythos to myth (meaning fictional); and to downgrade rhetoric and poetic. Dispensations were made for rhetoric and poetic; they had a place in the life of the community but they were not to be considered serious intellectual arts. They were to be controlled or informed by philosopher-kings." Which is vaguely in the right ballpark - although more like its opposite. Tentative conclusion: Plato didn't say that.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  imho that story should have ended like: "I didn't say that" - Plato
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    It's been done to death already. e.g. https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-board-print/Plato-I-Didn-t-Say-This-by-wearphilosophy/38371077.TR477 https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-board-print/Plato-I-Didn-t-S... Some variants: Einstein https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Einstein-quote1.jpg https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Eins... Lincoln https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/quote-abraham-lincoln-quote-internet-fake.jpg https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/quot... Buddha https://superaalifragilistic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/new_banner_3.jpg https://superaalifragilistic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/new...
    - mwcremer 4y ago
      Or Yogi Berra https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/30/yogi-didnt-say/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/30/yogi-didnt-say/
- yesenadam 4y ago
  I think the quote must have come first: T Auvinen wanted to use the quote, which they'd seen online, but needed a reference, so searched for something mentioning Plato, stories, and rulers, and found this paper. That seems very likely. I think there's no way you could get the quote from the paragraph, but they share the same elements.

enriquto 4y ago

> Instead, you start with an anecdote This also works in math. Best professor I had, he spent half of the lesson explaining the life and motivations of some mathematician (Riemann, Fourier, Weierstrass, ...), and why he was so obsesed with such and such problem. He surely added a lot of salt and pepper to his story. Then, once everybody was craving for the technical details, he stated the main result and told us just a couple of crucial details in the proof. The complete, formal, proof was given as a handout, and you really worked through it in the afternoon. An unusal teaching method, but very engaging.

namaria 4y ago
I find this especially effective for teaching maths, because schools have been trying to de-contextualise and impart the mechanics of algebra for decades. This completely misses the point, because every advance in the history of mathematics has been towards solving some specific and well formulated problem.

woolion 4y ago

That style has became ubiquitous for TED-style talks and most American non-fiction books (even technical ones). The chapter uses an anecdote, if possible name-dropping a known case or famous person, then shortly expands supporting research to the general principle. That style is very persuasive but unscientific. It is precisely designed to lower psychological defenses against the idea, which can leave the spectators dumbfounded that they did not find any counter-arguments when they heard it. I suspect this is also while this style has high short-term information retention but a poor long-term one. A strong idea is one that withstands all attacks (coincidentally there is also "Cargo cult science (1974)" on the front page).

feoren 4y ago
I think it's less about lowering the listener's defenses to the idea so that they're easily persuaded, and more about giving them the impression that they're actually learning something of substance, when they're actually not. In a week they'll be completely unable to articulate any of the important ideas from the talk, not because it's a poor learning style, but because there were never any important ideas to begin with. "You just have to watch it." It's like thought junk food. It's instantaneously satisfying but provides no actual mental nutrition.
zamnos 4y ago
Can you name any ideas, strong or otherwise, just any one, that would actually stand up to the kinds of misinformation and bad faith arguments that are common on the Internet though? If TED was, instead of being intellectual entertainment for the wealthy, but instead tried to portray itself as a serious scientific conference where papers are presented, it would stoop to "fighting with pigs", as it were, and open itself up to all sorts of stupid arguments. Like viruses don't cause disease, level of conversation, backed by faith-based arguments. TED isn't a scientific conference with papers, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's there to drum up interest from the wealthy in the speakers and their projects. If you present there and Bill Gates hears your moving speech on, say, a better cure for malaria, he, and others with that kind of wealth, are liable to invest. But if your speech makes it sound like you're unsure and don't know what you're doing and are just fumbling around, hedging your bets, then you and project might end up langushing in obscurity. (Which, imo, a properly scientific presentation would consist of, because there are no guarantees, just probable possibilities vs improbable impossibilities.) "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry TED sells yearning for the sea, and not how much wood to gather in order to build the ship. There are other, better forums for that. What you're looking for wouldn't fit neatly into their format. Still, if you're wealthy and see a TED talk, and then want to invest in the person in the basis of a good TED talk, I'll just close with a link to Elizabeth Holmes' convincing talk. I encourage you (or a hired scientist) to do your due diligence on a particular idea. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8geEtCYjw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8geEtCYjw

5tefan 4y ago

About everything starts with an anecdote. And it works. But I am so sick of it and also stop reading or listening. I don't want any anecdote.

feoren 4y ago

I hate that this style is shoehorned into absolutely everything, though. I can barely stand to read most nonfiction books anymore, even highly regarded ones about subjects I'm interested in. The part of my brain that likes a good story is very different than the one that's ready to refine my model of the universe, and it's jarring to have Malcom Gladwell artificially stitching together unrelated events, people, and ideas in order to form his pet narrative. I guess he does it to cover the fact that he has absolutely no useful insights about the world and is just trying to give the reader the impression that they're getting smarter, but even people with meaningful things to say end up copying that style. I find myself neither learning anything nor being engaged in the story, because it's much more boring than an actual novel where the story is the point. I really just don't get why so much non-fiction is this way now.

namaria 4y ago
Non-fiction is a vast universe and Malcom Gladwell is a famously superficial writer. The torrent of books getting to market each years is never high in average quality. But I never had a problem finding good factual content to read.
- azeirah 4y ago
  A good counterexample is Robert Sapolsky. He uses a lot of storytelling and anecdotes in his scientific teachings and lectures. His writing is amazing, his lectures even more so. Here's an example lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk
- smcin 4y ago
  Has anyone attempted to analyze the NYT hardback and softback lists for superficiality, by year? As Po Bronson remarked, I fear we are getting superficial, but maybe even worse, we're (intentionally?) losing touch with any compass to objectively assess that. A lot of these titles feel like massaging people's egos to feel okay about doing bad or arbitrary things, while telling them how smart they are. Seems there's a growing market for that. One example of massively overrated MBA-school schlock: "Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life" - Stuart Diamond (2012).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

WA 4y ago

And yet, the author of the article teaches board games by not telling a story, but by explaining the winning condition. Imho, storytelling in a business/teaching/problem-solving context is overrated.

PeterisP 4y ago
The way I see it, the author of the article teaches board games by arranging the explanation according to narrative principles of good storytelling, arguably making the explanation more effective that way. Though it would be more effective to directly read and apply pedagogical research instead of pulling in vaguely similar stuff from the field of writing and theater as the author does. For example, much of what the original article says matches pedagogy literature e.g. if I look at 'Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom' by Svinicki chapter 7 about goal-oriented motivation for learning or 'Making Learning Whole' by Perkins chapter 7 about reasons and ways to 'put the learner in driver's seat' then this seems to say similar things as this article only in more detail and with some evidence basis. There is no need to reinvent the wheel - we have a whole discipline of science dedicated to researching what works best for learning and instruction, it just needs to be applied.
cableshaft 4y ago
In board games, it kind of makes sense. There's basically only a handful of ways to win anyway. A common joke at my board game night when teaching a game is to start by saying "In this game, the winner is the person with the most points." everyone playfully gasps "Stop the presses!" "Shocker!" ...because it's just so common in the games we play. Now how you get the most points will come in the details, and the end game scoring might not be elaborated on until near the end of the explanation. But starting with 'winner is the most points' or 'winner is first over the finish line' or 'you win if you achieve X' is usually a good way to start the explanation. Most games victory condition is usually either 'most points', a race, or achieving some binary condition, and even those last two can be thought of as 'the winner scored 1 point and the losers score 0 points'. That's how BoardGameArena handles it.

smcin 4y ago

The NPR/TED school of (audio) stories is really 'audio clickbait' for audiences with short attention spans and lower barriers to clicking away/skipping/changing the channel/losing interest; unlike book or print readers who already have more sunk cost. Moreover the audio clickbait school often cater to a middle-class, college-graduate audience; and their predilections (dating, career, social issues). It would be a brave person who would talk to that audience about (say) their passion for taking their kid hunting. Not every concept needs to be sold welded to an anecdote, and not every anecdote needs to dominate the piece, not every anecdote must be happy or even self-complete, and not every story needs to be affirming inspiration porn. One TEDSalon piece that really hits all these low notes of over-the-top self-congratulation success porn is Amy Webb's "How I hacked online dating" (TEDSalon NY2013 [1]), which boils down to merely combining a few fairly obvious pragmatic quantitative steps then drowning it all in unnecessary gallons of aw-shucks sentimentality and humblebragging and missteps (10:14..15:53). It's important to stop and introspect if/whether/why we're more likely to click on/listen to a title "How I hacked online dating" instead of "How to find someone genuinely compatible with you, in online dating", and if so to fight that tendency. Webb only really ends the preamble at 07:10 of a talk that's 17:14 long. Her thesis is 7:28-7:57. 11:23 is just overkill, can reverse-engineer these things just by asking other people what profiles they swipe on. It really is time to take out the Gatling gun on the overuse of audio clickbait, or at least the people pushing its worst traits to 'maximize engagement', which oftentimes means spinning a 30-second truism into 10/15/20/30/60 minutes, which is diluting the density of concepts by 20-100x. Brevity shouldn't be a crime, either, although for advertising-supported media it is. On NPR: Ira Glass is good, and 'The Moth' Story Hour is often pretty good, but then again 'Hidden Brain' with Shankar Vedantam is also good, in a more dry way that doesn't need to pile-drive emotional anecdotes to establish interest. As to Kamphey, it feels like does have something to tell under it all, but his Medium post is laboring in very stilted LinkedIn 'broetry' (short staccato sentences, rhetorical questions, smug, sometimes infantile narrative). It's not thoughtcrime to have a thought that spans an entire paragraph, old-school, >300 characters. [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...

j7ake 4y ago

I loved that video (watched it a long time ago). The great thing about that video is that Ira Glass talks about storytelling / broadcasting, but he speaks at a level that is deep enough to connect to anybody in a creative field (e.g. writing, science, art). His discussion about the need to produce a volume of work, killing your good but not great ideas, and persistence in failing over and over are keys to success in any creative endeavor. Note in that video he speaks of two building blocks: one is anecdote as you mentioned, but also the other is questions / reflections. Both are needed for a successful story.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

croo 4y ago

At another part of the globe at uni they teach this style as the "American" style of writing.