Tyler Cowen writes the Marginal Revolution blog. The godfather of this blog claims that you are likely to get a better education out of reading Marginal Revolution and Overcoming Bias everyday than bothering with school.
In this TedX talk, he talks about the danger of buying into stories. We have a biological urge to make sense of things by putting them into a narrative. This is both useful and dangerous. We have a limited array of threads or ways of thinking that we are familiar with, and so try to fit every new experience to. This is useful because it gives us a short cut to understanding things. It is dangerous because it feeds our biases.
I like stories, and I love story telling. I guess the art is to enjoy it but not get seduced by it. To be a little cynical and to try listen to stories that don't mesh with your normal thinking. Or, if you are a super-uber-rational-being, perhaps you can discard stories altogether and accept the glorious mess that is the world.
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