Jed Cohen » new yorker summit http://jedcohen.com A Few Thoughts Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:25:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The New Yorker Summit http://jedcohen.com/the-new-yorker-summit/ http://jedcohen.com/the-new-yorker-summit/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 03:33:53 +0000 Jed http://jedcohen.wordpress.com/?p=55 I went to The New Yorker Summit today.  It was pretty great.  The Summit began with a keynote by Malcolm Gladwell, and then featured panels focused around three areas – “The Economy and Financial Markets”; “Priorities: Health, Education, Energy, and the Environment”; and “Foreign Policy: Defense and Diplomacy.”  Gladwell started the day discussing the problem with experts – how experts in a given field (he used the financial markets) are much more likely to both be miscalibrated when it comes to their own skills and knowledge and suffer from the illusion that they control random events.  This did set the tone a bit for the rest of the day (which I suppose is what a good keynote should do), but the conversations ranged across many topics.  My favorites included Nassim Taleb and Robert Shiller’s panel on the economic crisis; Geoffrey Canada’s talk on how to create scalable, lasting educational programs for disadvantaged children; and Seymour Hersch’s conversation with David Remnick on foreign policy and some of the scary things he knows.  But don’t just take it from me – why don’t you read The New Yorker’s coverage of………itself.  How very meta.

Anyway, maybe more later after it all sinks in and I have a chance to review my notes?

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