Tyler Cowen argues in a TED talk (~15 min) that stories pervade our mental lives. He thinks they are a major source of cognitive biases and, on the margin, we should be more suspicious of them - especially simple stories. Here's an interesting quote about the meta-level:
What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? ...Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen, and now I think less in terms of stories". ...You could also tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
My thought wasn't that he wouldn't have anything true to say. It was that if he's still defending good and evil as obviously existing, in that context, he's far enough behind me on the issue that I can safely assume that he doesn't have anything major to teach me, and that what he says is untrustworthy enough (because there's an obvious flaw in his thought process) that I'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time checking his logic before using even the parts that appear good - time that would be better spent elsewhere.
Many people here appear to have a similar epistemic immune response to people who bring up God in discussions of ethics. I'm surprised it's considered an issue in this case.
It is often worthwhile to listen to intelligent people, even if they are fantastically wrong about basic facts of the very subject that they're discussing. One often hears someone reasoning within a context of radically wrong assumptions. A priori, one would expect such reasoning to be almost wholly worthless. How could false premises lead to reliable conclusions?
But somehow, in my experience, it often doesn't work that way. Of course, the propositional content of the claims will often be false. Nonetheless, within the system of inferences, substructu... (read more)