The talks are here, including one by yours truly on the limits of story-based thinking. I was happy to meet Sonja Sohn. One thing I learned from this experience is that if you follow professional entertainers, the "status rub-off" effect dominates the "suffer by comparison" effect. The audience is primed to be sympathetic to you and many of them do not actually know which of the speakers are truly the high status people. Perhaps the talk has to meet some minimum quality standard, or involve some minimum level of self-confidence, for the rub-off effect to hold.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.
Excellent talk! As coherent and penetrating as any contemporary philosophy I can remember — the scepticism and anti-dogmatism: t’is well done.
Good story. (If you watch the video, you will understand the irony.)
I’ve noticed the rub-off effect as well. I once had to present immediately after the brilliant Simon Singh (very well known here in the UK – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh), and the audience was great. I jokingly complained to them about having to follow such a superstar, and they clearly went out of their way to be attentive and engaged. But I think that this was helped by the fact that I am a confident and fairly engaging presenter. There’s only so much help an audience can give you.
Great talk. Have you read Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock? It argues that Plato was saying pretty much the same thing. I read it around the time I read Create Your Own Economy and have been noticing partial analogies ever since (by coincidence, I gave a talk on it last night).
Is it really true that Toyota is making more money from selling luxury cars than from selling cheap cars? I’m thinking that selling lots of cheap cars can give you a higher overall profit than selling relatively few expensive cars.
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