The Australian Skeptics run a monthly event in the pub where they get speakers on topics vaguely related to movement skepticism or that will at least be found interesting by their membership. A friend of mine is on the AS committee and I suggested to her a few months ago that I might want to give a talk.
I had noticed that speaking seemed to be an important part of the career of a writer – book launches and writing festival panels, maybe even speaking at the opera house. I also have an interest in speechwriting in particular – I considered writing speeches for my Master’s major work – as perhaps a more effective way of communicating and persuading. So I thought the experience of speaking in the pub would be good for me.
I discussed a few possible topics with my friend and we settled on ‘Critical Thinking in Economics’ as the best bet. I delivered the talk last week and seemed to be received positively.
The talk revolved around three ‘lessons’ that I had learned over the course of my interest in economics:
— That technical questions like the outcomes of various courses of policy were being conflated with ethical-political questions of values.
— That the incentives facing every agent in the transmission of economic knowledge needed to be considered, most importantly politicians. I brought up here the question of who wanted house prices to rise, i.e. homeowners, investors, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and the politicians who want their votes and donations. While only renters want prices to go down.
— And that economic science itself faced a number of intractable limitations to certainty. The complexity of economic phenomena, the infeasibility of experiments due to factors like recessions being uncontrollable etc. Here I brought up Real Business Cycles as an example of theory divorced from reality.
The slides I used are here.
As for the experience, I was extremely nervous before giving the speech. It is a level of anxiety that is an altered state of consciousness. I couldn’t focus on anything; my mouth was dry; I considered making a run for it. I’ve never had an actual panic attack, but I can certainly see how they would occur.
It is a premise of the cognitive-behavioural framework of anxiety that experiencing an anxiogenic environment without engaging in safety behaviours should teach the body that the situation is not threatening and thus lessen the feelings of anxiety in similar, future situations. But I’m not sure this has happened for me. I am perhaps just better at throwing myself into situations that I know will produce these unpleasant feelings and that I can continue and survive – maybe even succeed – even given those feelings. I would still like it though if I didn’t get quite so anxious.