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.
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).
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.
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.
TED is also a laundry for the wealthy. It’s a knock-off of Davos (also PR, because the WEF itself doesn’t have power) that isn’t overtly evil, and it’s also more accessible, insofar as anyone who wants to attend probably can if they make the effort.
The WEF is a weird brand of expensive deadpan satire. The institution itself doesn’t have the power to implement conspiratorial evil, and the attendees can do that anywhere. Davos is more of a meme than it does anything. People who own billion dollar meat companies aren’t actually going to make us eat bugs. TED is a nicer, left-speaking alternative for people who get the Davos joke, and its purpose is to trick the PMCs into thinking they are still in college and that this is actually a mutual aid society where the way things are is just the best humans can do.
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.
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.
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).
No, it's not accidental mediocrity, it's actual malice.
Stuart Diamond's book is stuffed with underwhelming anecdotes teaching people to be pushy and manipulative with people in low-wage, low-security service jobs [in the US], but moreover selling them that this is being a "master negotiator with elite MBA-school skillz", not just super-pushy, annoying, entitled, whiny. Like the 'cure' for empathy. The only thing I took from it was "Wow it must really suck to work a low-wage, low-security service job in the US these days". I used to think "emotional labor" was hyperbole, but this sort of schlock would change my mind. ("one of the world's leading experts on negotiation. His book, has sold more than 1 million copies, making it world's largest selling book on the subject since it was published in 2011."(!?))
This is much worse than merely the empty superficiality that Po Bronson warned about, which seems harmless by comparison.
>No, it's not accidental mediocrity, it's actual malice.
I agree it's there. But there's always been people willing to push out bad books for money. And there's also people putting as much, if not more, effort on quality content. I really don't think content is getting worse on average. There's a lot of fluctuation in the noise levels.
But maybe the signal to noise ratio is getting worse. I don't systematically analyze this. Just honestly don't think it's harder to find good books now then 10 or 20 years ago. I did move from a country and language with a fraction of the publication volume you can find in English, and to a country with many high quality physical bookstore that I trust for curation and discoverability of material so I'm biased there.
My point was not that authors like Stuart Diamond exist, but that a garbage book like his made it to the top of any bestseller list, let alone the NYT list, or was widely praised as some treatise on "negotiation", which it clearly wasn't, yet very few reviewers described it for what it actually was. Plus, the outright weird insinuation ("branding!") that this sort of stuff is elite MBA-school wisdom; it isn't, it's normalizing bad behavior, doesn't matter how many letters you have after your name.
Even old-school stuff like "How to Make Friends and Influence People" clearly implies that your behavior in interactions is not some consequence-free zone, the people/organizations on the receiving end of your influencing attempts have memories, and there are social limits on what behavior is too aggressive, greedy, pushy, unreasonable, manipulative.
As well as boosting this sort of manipulative garbage, the NYT also runs articles on customer-service nightmares and dead-end jobs (and (gasp) 'authenticity'), which seems to having their cake and eating it. Maybe they'll empathize with anything, if the price is right.
No, I pay a lot of attention to content which influences the behavior of 100 million people, especially in a destructive way, especially when that influencing attempt is in itself dishonest. And stop with the ad-hominems. It's not about inferring my or anybody's emotions.
It's about 100m people extolling that sort of book as some bible that it isn't.
There's something zeitgeisty to the book and the reception it got, which is why I keep referencing the Po Bronson speech. Diamond's book an apologia for an entire generation being unreasonable and manipulative, which is noteworthy, just as previous books that captured a zeitgeist.
What ad hominem? I'm not refuting anything you said. I just have no idea what is the point you're getting at. Do you want to crusade against bad books? I'm getting a lot of sentiment and no real argument or actionable advice in your comments.
'not actionable' and 'no real argument' seem weird things to say to a critique of a bad book, bad author, genre, bad reviews and bad bestseller list (NYT); each person can make their mind up without needing me or anyone to tell them what to do.
If I was in the business of telling people what to do I'd say "Avoid these things, also learn telltale signs of superficial reviews and groupthink".
On a deeper level I suggested it's worth considering what led to Diamond ever being lauded as a phony expert on negotiation (or, if you think it's self-evident that the NYT is not worth paying attention to and blurbs and Amazon reviews are shilled, then I'd appreciate where you find better book recommendations, other than word-of-mouth.)
> Do you want to crusade against bad books?
I don't see that calling a bad book and author bad constitutes crusading; that seems like twisting a straightforward discussion. Instead of trying to impute motives, I think you're just saying "it seems to me futile to object to superficiality, just ignore it", is that right? (Conversely, do you want to crusade against HN posts which you deem to be non-actionable? Presumably you don't either.)
I did also nod towards a wider ongoing discussion about superficiality vs authenticity as pops up in Po Bronson, Chuck Palahniuk, HN [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=superficial], Susan Cain, Haemin Sunim, Viktor Frankl... that took me a couple of sentences, still not a crusade.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters.
I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-laconic. Elmore Leonard would approve of that.
> Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes.
This is wild speculation.
Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online, which don't have the same width constraints, but which do have similar considerations when it comes to be easy to skim.
Ultimately, paragraphs are just a tool for grouping that's bigger than a sentence. Writers should use whatever groupings makes sense for whatever they're writing. In this case, it seems to be just an expression of the writer's voice. That's probably how they talk in real life.
People like to find reasons to hate "things nowadays", but this isn't one of them.
This writing style was popularised on LinkedIn, and has the unaffectionate nickname "broetry". A quick search serves up this definition:
> Broety is a style of writing, often popular on LinkedIn, that uses line breaks after every sentence to create long posts that tend to drive high views and engagement. These “broems” usually follow a standard formula: A clickbait-style “hook.” Followed by a somewhat unrealistic conversation.
I used to write like that, because I worked for a Japanese company, and most of my stuff was translated.
Doing it that way, allowed the translator to write their translations inline, and it also helped me to “modularize” my thoughts; so each sentence was a fairly atomic thought.
A paragraph break should be heavier than a sentence break. If every idea is its own paragraph, then paragraphs are no longer a meaningful part of your structure. It's exactly the same as if he simply wrote a wall of text in one giant paragraph -- in both cases, he's getting no organizational value from the structure.
Good writers craft paragraphs the same way they craft an overall idea. It's structured, organized thought all the way down. The author of TFA couldn't be bothered to do any of that. He's leaving it up to you do figure out the structure from his -- not wall; soup? -- of text. He's being lazy and a shit writer, and it's vastly detracting from what he has to say.
Of course, the actual message of TFA is "I'm a shit writer so I rely on an overused brain-SEO shortcut to bludgeon my readers into being interested instead of actually writing something that's valuable to them." So I guess the style fits.
Yeah, this is the "And that boy's name? Albert Eintein." writing style that was used by every SEO/SEM/growth hacker account up until recently. It feels dated now.
This post’s writing markedly improved right when it started talking about teaching board games and dropped right when it stopped. I think it’s because the author’s passion for this anecdote about teaching board games distracted them from consciously applying that peculiar staccato style.
I don’t know the reason for the staccato style. Self-imposed onto their content because it’s good for engagement? A technique for generating content when they don’t have any? The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions?
Incredible gear shift into the board games. I bounced right off of the first part but dug in and flowed with the board game part and maybe I also learned something. At the end, I was like why did I dislike this writer to start...
The paragraphs need to be visually formatted correctly. Correct width and spacing and such. Adding more line breaks doesn't help people read. It frustrates them because now they have to skip 5 "paragraphs" to get to the next talking point.
For me, couple-words paragraphs like the above should be reserved for the most profound realisation. I.e., if you manage to nail the essence of some complex and novel thought in a couple of words, then they really deserve to stand on their own, in a separate paragraph. There should at most a couple of these in any given book (at most). But, in practice, books are peppered with them, which, to me at least, is very cringeworthy.
You'll never believe this one weird old tip, but...
I don't think there was a story in this blogpost so much as a humblebrag about a never-fail technique for teaching board games. Certainly it had nothing on the craft of storytelling, which itself is dominated by marketing-message literature of this sort. The relationship between story and teaching is baldly asserted from authority and then never brought up again.
This was a weird, inconsistent, somewhat aimless thought stream. I guess it's okay if you just enjoy reading something like this. Teaching the winning condition first is a good tip.
teaching is instructional - and works best following journalism writing rules:
1. tell/write the most important thing first (in case the reader don't follow further)
2. tell/write the details
3. then tell/write the least important information (so if the reader don't even reach this point, he was already exposed to the most important information)
Yes, I've come to the same pattern after many year of crafting explanations.
If I may add somethig, an initial step 0 that contains a "pitch" or "hook" to motivate reader to read the material. e.g. why what you're learning is important/useful.
I prefer a good bullet tree that breaks down an idea.
This is just my opinion, but I'm sick of stories and other long form content like youtube videos. They take way too long to communicate very little information and are full of ads.
I coin a code comment format long long ago. Over the many years that followed I've never bothered to coin a name for it, until today! I present to the world: Talented Comments!
It was late at night after spending a seemingly absurd amount of time in the coding zone. One of those winning steaks where one writes many walls of code that suspiciously lack the usual bugs and typos, draining one cup of coffee after the other... It struck me all of a sudden that very little remains of the developer after he leaves this world. All we have is the shining diamond but no collective recollection of the man who cut it. Thus Talented comments was born. It takes 3 stages, the first is a story, preferably about your early childhood, the second part is what you've learned that day (from the described experience) and the third and final stage explains to the future reader (even if it is obvious) how that lesson applies to the code below.
And then we wait, hopefully for a hundred years, for someone to find it.
Extra points if one can awkwardly name a function, class or variable to hook into the story. My gut says it will help with preservation.
In fairness, author brings up an interesting counterpoint in teaching board games, because we do not learn games by hearing stories about them, but rather rules, pitfalls, and goals.
What I find frustrating is people who write history and don't put enough thought into telling the story. The word story is right there in the name "history". Instead they put more emphasis on listing a chronology of events, the personalities and a description of the surroundings. That's all well and good, but the story really ties it all together.
For example, I like WW2 audiobooks to fall asleep at night. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer or "The Second World War" by Sir Winston Churchill are pretty standard, but then you listen to "Barbarossa - Hitler’s Fatal Gamble" by Jonathan Dimbleby and notice a big improvement in the story telling that holds your interest. And once in awhile you get really surprised by how good something is (by an amateur no less) such as "Red Road from Stalingrad" by Mansur Abdulin.
Edit: If you want an example of prime, top notch story telling look no further than "Spare" by Prince Harry ghost written by J. R. Moehringer, who has won awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Whether you like Harry or not, the writing is almost flawless and really makes Harry's case I feel.
Thanks, I'll look for it. The backstory of Red Road From Stalingrad is interesting:
Over the following few years, Abdulin worked to complete his memoir while at least some of his comrades, such as Shamrai, were still alive to read it. Some years after its Russian publication in 1991, Artem Drabkin, a Russian popular historian of the Soviet-German War, found a copy and realized it could find an English-speaking audience. He tracked Abdulin down in the town of Novotroitsk, and suggested an English edition. Abdulin's reply was "Why not? Let's give it a try..." The English edition was published in 2004.
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