David Foster Wallace’s speech is a fairly unique commencement speech in which he discusses the point of education and the harsh reality of life. He expands on the often heard “We are teaching you how to think” statement. He explains what that really means is that we’re learning how to control our thinking and how to choose our meaning of events.
One of the things he talked about that I particularly enjoyed was the “default settings” of us as people. He claims our default settings are set to have us self centered and selfish. I’ve heard several things supporting this such as how people mostly enjoy talking about themselves in a given conversation, and the psychological principal called “Actor-observer bias” where one mistakenly attributes someone’s actiosn to their personality rather than thinking about if their current situation has caused the action (the example David used was the person driving the SUV).
nice connection to psychology!
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