Daniel Everett has spent over twenty years studying a language spoken by a small tribe of only a few hundred people living in the depths of the amazon. In this fascinating lecture he talks about how wonderfully different their concept of the universe is from ours. No left no right, no numbers, no tomorrow or yesterday, no god, total acceptance of death as part of life. Not surprisingly they are a much, much happier peoples then ours. It is so sad that we loose a language and with it a unique culture every few weeks...

Fora.tv : The Long Now Foundation : Daniel Everett: Endangered Languages and Lost Knowledge

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This is not a battle between the west and islam
this is a battle between atheism and religiosity.

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That which does not kill me, makes me stronger
Twilight of the Idols Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Brilliant talk by Daniel Kahnemanan a psychologist and Economics Nobel laureate, about how the peculiar structure of our memory biases how we think of happiness.

Our memory tells us stories, that is what we get to keep from our experiences, is a story.

...

We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant.

After the talk in Q&A he talks about how a big study has shown above US$60k annual income people do not become experientially any happier, though their "remembering self" remembers them as happier...

Reading through his biography it is fascinating that even though he is a psychologist he got a Nobel prize in Economics, for inventing behavioral economics.

TED : Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

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Sam Harris talks against religion, an interesting talk but you really need to substitute "Judaism-Christianity-Islam as it is today" for where he says "Religion" since that is what he is speaking against. He does not talk at all about Buddhism, Shinto, etc. Pulling lots of examples from the old testament he ridicules it thoroughly. Interesting, especially if you are living in uber-christian U.S.A., however less relevant to those who want to look at the bigger picture of what religion is, whether it is needed for human societal and individual well-being. I agree with him that Judaism/Christianity/Islam are not the religions to take us through the 3rd millennium, but I think that we will need something that is equally engaging and just as viral in order to displace them. Atheism is not a rich enough replacement for religion.

Fora.tv : Aspen Institute : The Clash Between Faith and Reason

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Daniel Gilbert talks about human cognitive bias when evaluating options. Our minds are tuned to differences, we are really bad at evaluating the absolute value of things. That is why a menu always has a very expensive bottle of wine at the top, so the one below it looks reasonable in comparison... Unfortunately classical economics does not take this into account at all - it is just at odds with basic human nature!

I like that he highlights how mass-media makes us even more foolish by constantly focusing and highlighting the rare but spectacular events. Fact of the matter is we are all much more likely to die in a car-crash or drown in a swimming pool then to die in a plane crash or a terrorist accident (for Europeans & N.Americans in any case). Yet we do not fear cars and swimming pools anywhere near as much...

TED: Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations

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Benjamin Wallace goes through trying the most expensive foods, Kobe-Beef, white truffles, the most expensive of wines, US$30,000/night hotel rooms, US$800 jeans, nano-particle soap... As you might expect it turns out most of them are not that special. What I think he misses though is that when you buy expensive stuff it is mostly for personal feeling of status, you are buying the overall experience not really the actual product.

Still a humorous look at how foolish human status seeking is when you look at it rationally.

TED: Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness

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A thought provoking look at what justice is, as looked at from a philosophical point of view. Without a doubt al the issues he raises are worth thinking about, and any value system considering itself complete must be able to address them.

Outrage is anger at injustice.

He raises a very salient point about how "market-capitalism" has creeped into becoming the basic value system of western society.

What are the moral limits of markets?

He talks a lot about the "outsourcing" of war, child-birth, etc., describing it as the market reaching into spheres it was not in before, I don't think this is historically true - if you look at ancient times, all armies were effectively paid-professionals, schools used to be all private as well. Perhaps we are just shifting back to what is natural.

FORA.tv : The RSA : Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

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...imprinting brain genes can influence the behavior of children, and this behavior can be beneficial to mothers or fathers. Mothers have to spread limited resources among all their children, and so favor offspring with moderate demands. If a mother spends all her time nursing and caring for one child, any other children she has will suffer.

Fathers, meanwhile, can boost their reproductive success if they pass to their children genes that cause them to get more resources from their mothers. The children may nurse more, for example, or demand more attention. Imprinting and silencing those genes can benefit mothers, because they can blunt the demand. Fathers could also silence brain genes for their own evolutionary benefit.

Genetics is such a wonderfully complex and beautiful thing, the more we discover the more interesting it is!

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb is our times most important thinker/philosopher on decision making under un-certainity. The "Black Swan" is a must read for anyone who aspires to be an educated thinker. As an added bonus the book is written in an erudite but very playful style. Nicholas Taleb has personality and humour in buckets.

The basis of his thesis is that humans evolved in a world which is a "Mediocristan", an environment statistically ruled by the bell curve. A simple example is taking 1000 people and weighing them, adding any one more person will not change the average significantly at all, even the heaviest possible human is not enough to swing the total much. But now so much of our lives are ruled by the enviroment of "Extremistan" a domain where just one observation can make a huge impact on the total... Take those thousand people again and look at the average salary, now what happens if you add Bill Gates to the group? Everything changes dramatically! Unfortunately our thinking, and especially economic and business planning is deeply founded in "Mediocristan" which is why we regularly end up with crashes as we did a year and a half ago.

In this talk he goes over the foundation of the ideas he presents in the book, and how to apply them to our decision making. Great talk, nevertheless I recommend reading the book to get the real depth!


FORA.tv : The Long Now Foundation : Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Crazier Future

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