Many speakers, especially novice speakers, are better off the cuff than speaking with prepared remarks. Everyone sounds like a human when they speak off the cuff, but it takes practice to sound like a human when giving prepared remarks. I suffered through a 20-minute long speech by a CEO-finance type, full of platitudes like "we invest for the long term" and "a good leader makes smart decisions." Then the session was opened up for questioning and he became much more interesting, fielding questions about hiring, his company's position in Yahoo, his current investment strategy, etc. I'm not sure if he noticed the difference.

This is troublesome because if a speaker has an open format, he can choose to give a speech any way he wants. The question-and-answer format is a subset of the open talk. But when you give people an open format they will choose to deliver a boring speech.

I note that TV profiles usually have the guest responding to questions but with the questions edited out. The other solution may be tojust pick arbitrary, specific parts of your story or your company and talk about those. As usual, getting more specific leads to better results.

So the next time you have to present something, just talk! It's scary at first, there will be a lot of ums, and you might forget to mention some stuff, but it's okay because you actually sound and look like a human being. And don't forget to end your remarks before you actually think you should.

Addendum: No one I know plans out conversations, but they can go on for hours, just thinking of things to say as they pop into your head.

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Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. He has a knack for finding great stories about people or firms that back up his points. But I object to his style of argument - in short, tell a story, tell another story, tell another story, make some point about some unique thing that all three stories have in common.

I took three things away from the book:

1) Most successful people are lucky (Bill Gates had early frequent access to a computer, hockey players with January birthdays are older, outshine their later month peers).

2) The longer and harder you work at something, the better you become at it.

3) If you are willing to work longer and harder than others, you'll have more success than they will. Everyone has to work; there are no examples of genius musicians that succeed with a fraction of the practice of others.

Maybe these points are groundbreaking to a mass audience but they were not new to me. Gladwell also includes a chapter on airplane crashes and respect for authority that's unrelated to the rest of the book, and would make a great expository essay in the New Yorker but is out of place here.

The stories are good and it's a quick read, but don't expect groundbreaking material here.

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As a society, we tend to use an argument's simplicity as a heuristic for its strength. When faced with two arguments, the simpler argument has a decided advantage. As a result we're constantly pushed to make arguments shorter and more memorable. TV heads try to deliver 5 or 10-second sound bites to sell a policy position. Movie advertisers won't sell a movie they can't make a convincing case for in a 30 second commercial. Politicians use frames as one-word arguments: pro-choice vs. pro-life; protectionism vs. food security; the "death tax."

When humans lived in tribes I can imagine that this heuristic served us well. Economies and societies were simpler. There was no government, and not a whole lot of complex interaction between sectors of an economy. Simple arguments were best for the tribe.

In today's world simple arguments can wreak devastating damage. Better phrased, arguments cannot be ruled out because they are complex.Price controls are a great example of a simple, deadly argument. The argument is that when prices for basic goods are too high the government should set a lower price so that people can afford the good. Conversely, if prices are too low have a price floor so that producers don't lose money. It sounds dangerous to let prices float around unsupported, and let industries shrink and expand at the market's will. But the free market has been shown time after time to be the best system for economic growth that we know. The arguments for price controls, supports, "gas tax holidays," central planning and such are economic losers, but they remain popular because the rebuttals to each argument are more complicated.

There are two possibilities; either free marketeers will continue to fail because the arguments for free trade, against price restrictions, windfall taxes, and "gas tax holidays" are more complex than the arguments against them. Or, our society will move away from using an argument's simplicity as a heuristic for its strength, at least where the economy is concerned. I'm not hopeful.

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We generally associate rationality with wanting to know more about our biases. Generally we associate learning about human bias with learning more in general; rational people are truth seekers. However, there are some instances when ignorance is a rational strategy. Off the top of my head:

1) The placebo effect

2) The role of God in everyday life - people who pray and attend church are happier, at less risk of a major catastrophic health incidentthan those who don't.

3) What our spouse/significant other is thinking about, in real time

4) Whether or not we carry a Huntington's disease-type gene

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#1: Keep doing all of the good things I was doing last semester.

#2: If someone proposes a venture, plan, pickup game or trip, say "I'm in" every time. For this I turn to Paul Graham. "If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it."

#3: Learn how to cook. I used to be an extremely picky eater (the word extremely is a gross understatement). Now I eat most foods but I still avoid the kitchen when I can. I am going to meet with my good friend and outstanding chef Julia at Occidental, and she is going to help me whip up some delicious meals. I plan on living overseas over the summer - it would be great to achieve proficiency in cooking by that point.

#4: Spend less time around negative people and people I don't enjoy being with, and spend more time around fun people.

#5: Lengthen my attention span. I would rather do sequential tasks well than concurrent tasks poorly. This will mean printing out most long-form articles and reading them like books. It will also mean turning off the Internet and trying to have only one application running at a time.

#6: Various "number" goals, which I generally enjoy doing but don't find time for - hike at least once a month, lift weights four times a week, get at least one phone number a day, male or female. The idea is to leave conversations with something besides "goodbye." Plus, when you receive someone's phone number it's a small, positive signal of interest; a building block. I am friendly with many people at CMC but I generally fail to ask them for their phone number. I also want to visit at least two new countries in 2009.

My most important goal this semester: to acknowledge and maintain a positive impression of my own worth in the absence of feedback, and affirm it in the face of negative feedback.

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Nate Silver's speaking at Claremont McKenna in April. Nate invented PECOTA, the MLB player evaluation system, and runs the election blog FiveThirtyEight.com. I requested a few speakers last September and Nate was one of them. But I didn't know CMC had booked anyone until I saw the schedule a few hours ago.

So, this is pretty cool. Of course being able to do things like this entails significant cost - CMC is the 14th most expensive college in the country.

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Currently about 8 percent of people are left handed. Have levels of left-handedness always been this low or is right hand dominance a recent trend? In the Middle Ages left-handedness was a "sinister" sign, indicating that you were marked by the devil. Before machinery I can't see any advantage to conforming to a societal norm for handedness. We live in a left-brain dominated world which might help explain why there are so many righties out there.

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Nearly 95% of restaurants have menus that are too long. There are three problems with big menus:

1. Quantity hurts quality - the more dishes the restaurant will cook, the less likely the restaurant is good at cooking any of them.

2. In general people feel twice as much pain when losing something as they do joy at making a positive choice. Thus when more options are presented, the diner will feel more pain for all the items he didn't choose to eat. This increases the chances the diner won't enjoy his/her meal.

3. In general (by my own experience) people make selections based on the choices in front of them - obviously people pick a type of restaurant like Mexican or Chinese, but rarely fixate on a specific menu item. In fact, if the menu is shorter the odds of creating a memorable dish (and repeat customers) increases.When was the last time you remembered an item you picked from a menu of more than 40 items?

Putting more items on the menu may be an attempt to cast the net as wide as possible. But it's not a good idea; it increases diner anxiety and decreases the chances of making a memorable dish. In N Out has thrived with exactly three menu options: Hamburger, Cheeseburger, and Double-Double. Momofuku Ko opened with a focus on just one idea and one dish, making the best noodles in New York City.

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When giving talks to student crowds he likes to sum up his entire approach to life as a two-step process: “(1) Get started; (2) Keep going.”

From Study Hacks. There's no substitute for doing.

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I'm taking a course in macroeconomics this semester. The teacher began the class by taking roll and then asking everyone what they thought were some important issues in macroeconomics. Other students mentioned that market efficiency, GDP, and international trade were important issues. I wanted to raise my hand to say that determining whether macroeconomists know anything is an important issue in macroeconomics. But it was the first day of class, so I refrained.

Tyler Cowen told me that "You need to start somewhere" in learning about the global economy. I don't think that's a great answer and I'm skeptical about learning things from a group of people whose collective opinion on the subprime crisis and the 2008 economy was wildly incorrect.

Every macro class starts with a simple overarching model of the world, then explains why the model's wrong and looks at more complicated models. But from the beginning, macroeconomists are trying to explain every facet of the economy.

Contrast that with the field of robotics, which I'm starting today as well. First-time robotics students build small robots with limited abilities. Potential class projects include building a robot that's able to use an elevator, one that can navigate the hallways around the classroom by itself, or one that can pick up soda cans and deposit them into trash cans. Robot people have very lofty goals, however, including fielding a soccer team of 11 robots that could beat Brazil's best team, and replicating the human brain in computer software. But they're building from the bottom up; starting by solving low-level human functions and gradually making more complicated robots as we better understand the problems and ideas involved.

Macroeconomists want to understand the global economy; robot people want to understand the human brain. These are incredibly complicated systems but the approaches are totally different.

If macroeconomists were trying to understand how the human brain works, I feel like they would start by building a giant processor, giving it an initial set of instructions, then continually tinkering the instructions to make the processor more like a human. I estimate it would take around a thousand years of tinkering to produce something resembling the human brain.

If robot people were trying to understand the economy, they'd start by breaking down and trying to fully understand the components - each firm, the decisions facing each worker, and compiling those into a model of the economy as a whole. This would be a long process - but shorter than starting with the whole system and slowly tinkering.

Better to break a system into parts, understand the parts and build back up than to try to understand the whole system.

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