{"id":131,"date":"2008-02-07T21:58:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T05:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=131"},"modified":"2008-02-07T21:58:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-08T05:58:00","slug":"famous-philosophers-and-stickiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/famous-philosophers-and-stickiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Famous philosophers and stickiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know, it’s amazing. \u00a0Back in high school I took a philosophy class and started telling people – half jokingly – that the famous philosophers got famous mostly because they promoted their particular idea to the point of\u00a0absurdity. \u00a0Now I’m reading Made to Stick<\/span>\u00a0(by Chip & Dan Heath) and they are making the case that this is exactly right – ideas that “stick” lastingly do so primarily because their promoters focus on a single core argument, subsuming the details and excluding all other arguments.<\/p>\n

In high school, the absurdity of the philosophers’ prose became readily apparent because of the juxtaposition of viewpoints that we would read, sometimes in a single homework assignment. \u00a0Philosopher A would say “X absolutely must be true; for these reasons there is no way I could possibly be wrong.” \u00a0Then Philosopher B would come along and say “here is why X is completely impossible; there is no way it could possibly be true.”<\/p>\n

Philosophers A and B obviously could not both be correct. \u00a0Yet both sounded 100% confident that they were. \u00a0Thus I concluded that all famous philosophers stuck with an idea and sounded 100% confident about it.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, Made to Stick<\/span> refines this observation considerably. \u00a0It’s not usually enough just to have an elegant core argument and sound authoritative; there are other important features such as “unexpectedness” and “concreteness”. \u00a0Looking back, the philosophers did these things pretty well too.<\/p>\n

So I guess my saying remains half joking – but really only half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know, it’s amazing. \u00a0Back in high school I took a philosophy class and started telling people – half jokingly – that the famous philosophers got famous mostly because they promoted their particular idea to the point of\u00a0absurdity. \u00a0Now I’m reading Made to Stick\u00a0(by Chip & Dan Heath) and they are making the case that … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Famous philosophers and stickiness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}