My Guatemala Interviews

Last month I visited Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and gave a series of talks and interviews.  The two interviews are available, in high definition video:

• An 11 minute interview with Luis Figueroa, on medicine.
  
• A 70 minute interview with Carlisle Johnson, on everything.

This second interview is by far the most far ranging interview I've ever had or likely will ever have, out of 200 media mentions.  Quite a credit to Mr. Johnson. 

Comments

[Different Jeff]

Interesting interview. I'm printing off your paper with Tyler to try to get the jist of the forthcoming book.

[Mike Kenny]

1. I like the bit about fiction being a good way of getting across an idea, if not discovering truths. I wonder if a college department might benefit from hiring novelists to novelize the ideas of the members of the department, for publicity!

2. I do think fiction gets a little beat up on though in the interview. Isn't the activity of hypothesizing basically 'fiction writing' of a sort. A good imagination could help create many frames through which a research project could look, helping to overcome cognitive-frame-blindness. Of course, the actual collecting of data wouldn't be a process of fiction-writing.

3. I recall in your interview with Russ Roberts mentioning you liked to take many different pieces of data and try to craft a theory out of them as a whole rather than creating piecemeal theories for each datum. I thought during the this interview "Is there some unifying principle that explains your myriad interests?" :)

[Robin Hanson]

Mike, I presume there is, though I'm too close to myself to be a good judge. I suppose I like big neglected topics where I can use modestly formal techniques to make a clear contribution.