The Importance of Diagnosis

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think of the categories as being used to define when an insurance payment should be made. It takes a lot of people who have very, you know, mixed traits or not things that I would call a disorder and it labels them in a way that is stigmatizing. But at the same time, in some cases, a diagnosis can be comforting. Sometimes a diagnosis means to a person, ah, I am not the only one. There's hope. The older British culture of sinophile scholars, overrated or underrated. Impossible to to overrate. Okay. What kind of cyborg would you like to be? I would certainly like to have a far better memory than I do. And

As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she’s often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone’s head: to see what they see and to think how they think.

In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded December 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Follow Larissa on Twitter
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.