There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.
Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends? | The New Yorker - 0 views
-
-
education, which they believe is a form of domestication
-
The issue here is one of overreach: taking an argument that has worthwhile applications and extending it further than it usefully goes. Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true. After all, it’s not as if the idea that we send signals about ourselves were news; you could argue that there is an entire social science, sociology, dedicated to the subject. Classic practitioners of that discipline study the signals we send and show how they are interpreted by those around us, as in Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” or how we construct an entire identity, both internally and externally, from the things we choose to be seen liking—the argument of Pierre Bourdieu’s masterpiece “Distinction.” These are rich and complicated texts, which show how rich and complicated human difference can be. The focus on signalling and unconscious motives in “The Elephant in the Brain,” however, goes the other way: it reduces complex, diverse behavior to simple rules.
- ...11 more annotations...
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page