A compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness.

Are we born to be optimistic, rather than realistic? Tali Sharot shares new research that suggests our brains are wired to look on the bright side -- and how that can be both dangerous and beneficial.

Tali Sharot studies why our brains are biased toward optimism. Full bio »

Salon: "TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism"

"Smart people can take something complex and express it faithfully in different, especially simper, terms. They can interpret and reinterpret. If you want to make something smart, it’s tempting to do smartness to your topic until you’ve condensed it into some admirably lucid interpretation, then hand that to the audience and wait for the applause. Sometimes this is what’s needed. But it isn’t how to make smart things. A smart thing is something for a smart person. However many interpretations you put in it, however fertile they are, you leave room for more.

You do this because you respect what you are interpreting and you do it because you respect your audience. It’s a lot like being considerate. And that’s how you make smart things."

Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

まとめ

非常有味道的TED照片

"Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates."

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

"The default politics of TED, then, are an amalgam of Clintonian neoliberalism and techno-utopianism (the likes of which Evgeny Morozov has ably critiqued), with a philanthro-capitalist approach to social issues (an approach brilliantly taken apart in Alix Rule’s “Good As Money,” which ran in Dissent a few years back). The New Inquiry recently published a longer critique of TED, which featured a fine tweet by Mike Bulajewski: “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”" via Anne (Twitter)