Chaos Attraction

Improvised TEDx

2016-05-01, 6:21 p.m.

So on Sunday Mom and I went to the local TEDx lectures for the season. I... probably wasn't that into most of them because I'm not much of a do-gooder type, but I did think a few were memorable to my interests, and I liked the performers at the event.

The first fellow up was Michael C. Webb, a professional recruiter who starts out talking about how after he won an award for "our employees are our best asset," he got laid off 9 months later and learned that all staff are temporary.

In his experience, great communicators are the ones who get hired. His friend in the same business told him that he will find a candidate who has every single requirement for the job--and then dig up someone working at the local mall and put both of them up for the job and the mall employee will get hired instead. "Buyers are liars," they won't necessarily hire the person who ticks off all of the boxes. Why? Because people hire based on emotion, not logic. Hiring managers hire based on fear. Great communicators are less risk and can be taught.

Job Search Rule 1--resumes don't get jobs, people do. If you get to the interview, they already want to hire you. You lose the job by saying or doing something stupid.
Communication is the multiplier of knowledge.
Mentions that his kid had autism and they got her to do well.
Belief + effort = success.
He mentions at some point that his father in law was a big deal chemist and oh, Just Happens to have some uranium around the house...he finishes his talk with being interrupted in a meeting because he has to go home and talk to the FBI about having uranium in his house!

Anyway...while I don't think that works for getting jobs in my organization--I know for a fact they DO want every single box checked out--it was interesting.

The other lecture I was into was by an economist named David Lang who was talking about how economics predicts our behavior by what we choose to do and how we're predictable given basic parameters.

Objectives:
goal: maximize your utility subject to your constraints

Key assumptions:
Rationality--people will do what is in their best interests given the information before them
Constraints--money/resources, time, intellect/mental capacity.

Defining parameters:
time preferences, risk aversion, allusion.
We make choices where cost/benefits play out over time
Time preferences are about relative weight on now vs. later.
Many decisions involve risk/uncertainty. Consider the tolerance that someone has for taking on risk.
Tradeoffs/benefits to us vs others, and the relative weight that has.
Why should we care? Economists are predicting/explaining human behavior.

As for the entertainment, I liked the Taiko Dan show--seriously, that stuff was dance music, and I don't just mean the dancing around drummers on stage. Cool stuff. But of course my favorite was the Birdstrike Theatre troupe, who decided to give their own TEDx talks. I desperately want to do this at improve school sometime because that was sweet and very good at character building, which is something that we're going into at this level.

Anyway, they based their talks off of the following audience suggestions:

"Kanye West and the philosophy of the 21st century,"
"too many lemons on my lemon tree,"
"Jeb!"
"parallel universes"
"death and laughter."

Jeb!--started out with discussing how much waste a bowel can hold, and what does this have to do with the election? "I'll get there." Jeb! "He is a normal human, born to other humans."

Parallel universes--how many parallel universes could I have been in where I could have done better? Even though this girl kinda ran out of steam on this idea, that's kind of reassuring to know that some other version of me is doing better than this.

Death--"Looking at all your bright and lovely faces, I can only think of death." Then he talked about eating a worm friend of his to get it through security and how it was dissolved in his stomach, so he created a stomach liner for that...

Kanye: This girl analyzed the soul searching lyrics of "Gold Digger" and repeated, "You give them Kanye's best." Then she started a foundation, United in Kanye. Check under your seats for shoes and an invitation (or something like that, at least the shoes).

The best one ended up being the lemons one--the Birdstriker introducing everyone said she was a witch, so she went with it. She had an English accent, said she flew across the pond on her broom, and is the leader of the Witches Civil Rights Movement. She had 307 lemons on the tree, how could she use them since "Lemonade" is already taken by Beyoncé? So "I burned the tree" and set off a plague and the FBI is after her and this is her last talk. Chant "FreeWitch2016!"


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