Reminder: Final draft of "Blink Response Response" essay due Monday night 5月24日 at 22:00, to Google Docs. Please make sure your English name is in the title somewhere.
Read: They Say / I Say 129-137 ("But Don't Get Me Wrong: The Art of Metacommentary")
Read: Black Swan Chapters 5-7 (50-99)
I will begin the class by trying to answer the helpful questions that Doll and Kim posted from last week.
43 (Peter). Find one "metacommentary" move in Moneyball and two in Black Swan. (And copy them for us here.)
44 (Ting). Find one "metacommentary" move in Blink, and two in Black Swan. (And copy them for us here.)
45 (Aaron). Define confirmation bias (according to Taleb) and offer two new examples - anything that isn't discussed in Black Swan is OK.
46 (Jenny). Define narrative fallacy (according to Taleb) and offer two new examples - anything that isn't discussed in Black Swan is OK.
47 (Esther). Do you feel that Taleb's unique writing style (irregular organization, use of fictionalized characters, use of autobiography, use of historical comparison, declarations of arrogance) makes Black Swan easier to understand, or more difficult? To put it another way, Taleb sometimes describes battles with his editor... if you were the editor, would you help him or fight back?
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46 (Jenny). Define narrative fallacy (according to Taleb) and offer two new examples - anything that isn't discussed in Black Swan is OK.
ReplyDeleteThe definition of "narrative fallacy" in "The Black Swan":
"We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters. ... The [narrative] fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. [It] is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event." (63)
"The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense." (63-64)
In other words, "narrative fallacy" is about human's nature of fabricating a reason, logic or explanation for something in order to remember or understand more easily.
The first example I came up with is the paparazzi! They take a series of photos and use them to make up a scandalous story of those celebrities which looks reasonable with those photos.
The second example I have is the "montage" technique used in movies. At one scene, you see a actor suddenly looking with shock, and then the next cut is a speeding car with a shrill braking voice. Then the audiences would conclude that the car is going to bump into the character.
In Black Swan:
ReplyDelete1.Think of the terrorist attack of September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter palnes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. (p.xix)
2.The Frebch, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion-Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned precision. (p.xxi)
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In Moneyball:
The failure of baseball people to acknowledge that fact in their statistics led to exactly the sort of moral corruption Hebry Chadwick, in creating them, had sought to eliminate. The many little injustices and misunderstandings embedded in the game's records spawned exotic inefficiencies. Baseball strategies were often wrongheaded and baseball players were systematically misunderstood. Chadwick succeeded in creating a central role for statistics in baseball, but in doing it he created the greatst accounting scandal in professional sports. (p.71)
This is Esther's answer for Q47:
ReplyDeleteFrankly speaking, I love the content of this book as well as its writing style soooo much!!! But as for the question of whether I advocate this way of writing or not－ if I were the editor－ it depends on the position that the author locate himself and his audience.
As we can see, both Taleb and Gladwell are those writers who have silver tongues to be eloquently express their thoughts; and both of them tend to jump their storytelling by filling examples one after another. This method is quite impressive when the readers can catch up the path of the author's leaping thoughts－it makes the concept that the author tries to convey being easier to be understood/accept, for the use of continuous examples; however, this detour sometimes will be the obstacle for readers because a talkative writer always diverges too far :p (sometimes they just cannot stop themselves to provide further instances). Once readers deviate the orbit, it's easier to make them feel annoyed－ they cannot figure out the real meaning for the author to write so－ and ignore those important messages which the author wants to express.
Reading Taleb's words so far, I personally think that he actually doesn't care about the feeling of those people who cannot catch up his "flying thoughts." He has a strong thought of Social Darwinism, for we can see in the book it seems that he classifies many categories of careers into the relatively lose position easily. Although it's partly resulted from his living background as well as his career; but he indeed develops the custom of rating. It makes no difference for him if those he classifies into the loser basket do not understand what he says.
Therefore, from the side of publisher, the editor should avoid Taleb uses this way (if people cannot figure out what he is talking about, they won't buy the book); but from the side of a friend or I (Esther) myself, the editor will encourage his writing style.
Aaron Chen said
ReplyDeleteConfirmation bias means a person just notices the evidence that support his or her own thought, ingoring other other possible evidence.
First example: Peter's computer is broken. His friends and roomates sugget him that he should check the motherboard. However Peter insists that he is talent for computer. He finds the computer monitor is a little dark, so he thinks the main problem is on computer monitor. Poor Peter spends whole day checking computer monitor,he ignores the other possible causes. If the main problem really happened in motherboard. He will ingore the motherboard is burning, waste many his time and doesn't find the main problem.
The other example: A girl broke up with her boyfriend. She asserts that it's her fault. She blames herself for doing wrong thing and always being annoyed to her boyfriend. However, maybe this is not the major problem, her boyfriend jsut doesn't love her anymore without any reasons, so she is wasting her time for blaming herself.
Black Swan
ReplyDeleteBy domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what evolutionary psychologists call the "domain" of the object or the event. (P.53)
Once again, I warn the reader that I am not focusing on dopamine as the reason for our overinterpreting; rather, my point is that there is a physical and neural correlate to such operation and that our minds are largely victims of our physical embodiment. ... (P.67)
Blink
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves. (P.16)
So I find out that the previous Blink example doesn't really count as metacommentary, here is another example.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of books that tackle broad themes, that analyze the world from great remove. This is not one of them. Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives - the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. (P.16)