Talks at TEDx Midatlantic

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.