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."

Related To:  The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet and Missed Distinctions 

Megan McArdles blogs an interview with Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth.  I'll let anyone who is interest read the whole thing, but here's some interesting excerpts:

About a month ago I committed myself to an anti-akrasia resolution, inspired by Yvain and ZM.  I won't repost the resolution here, but if you want to see it, click the first link.  The essence of my resolution was to commit myself to practice math to prepare for graduate school in the fall.  The resolution was valid from June 18 to 28 - I ended it there because the next day I was on a plane to Orange, CA to start an internship (in experimental economics, if anyone's interested).  Now, I'm going to provide a lot of anecdotal evidence and speculation.  Please do not fall prey to the typical mind fallacy.  The structure of my brain may be sufficiently different from yours that nothing I say here generalizes.  I also could be deluding myself.  This is only anecdotal evidence, and I have no real way of knowing whether or not my perception of what happened is biased.

I posted this comment in reply to a post by David Henderson over at econlog, but first some context.

Mathew Yglesias writes:

...From an outside perspective, what seems to be going on is that economists have unearthed an extremely fruitful paradigm for investigation of micro issues. This has been good for them, and enhanced the prestige of the discipline. No such fruitful paradigm has actually emerged for investigation of macro issues. So the decision has been made to somewhat arbitrarily impose the view that macro models must be grounded in micro foundations. Thus, the productive progressive research program of microeconomics can “infect” the more troubled field of macro with its prestige...

...But as a methodological matter, it seems deeply unsound. As a general principle for investigating the world, we normally deem it desirable, but not at all necessary, that researchers exploring a particular field of inquiry find ways to “reduce” what they’re doing to a lower level....