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David Cowhig   高大偉's avatar

Thanks. Very helpful, especially for people trying to figure out how to understand, how to create a necessarily simplified mental model of a steadily changing reality/system. I think of economics that way too -- not that the old guys were all that far off -- it is just that what they wrote fit their world better than ours. While the talk is tailored for an academic audience and their constant problem of optimizing their reading lists I think many non-academics will enjoy it as I did.

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Observer1's avatar

Frankly, this is hopelessly bad. The problem, I think, is you are trying (and keep trying to in varying contexts) to condense your 600 page book into a 30 or 60 minute lecture. It doesn't work. Unfortunately, you don't have time to tear it up and start over. (As the famous quote goes, "This letter would have been shorter if I had had more time to write it.")

Couple of narrow points:

I agree with TLH that:

-- The summa and 1/500,000,000 paras. come across as crass. (In a way, disrespectful to the memory of the lecture's namesake.)

-- This condensation of your book is indeed likely to come across as stuffed with a lot of what is not much more than name dropping. You know what you mean, and readers of Slouching already know what you mean. Others get subjected to a mind-numbing index.

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