Big Think (videos of May 2017)

source: Big Think 
7:26 Good Communication 101: Mirroring, Jargon, Hifalutin Words | Alan Alda Communication is more than a string of words that gets across static information. The language we use to converse does more than give facts—it can actually offer understanding. Take it from Alan Al...
2:35 Hey Bill Nye, Do You Believe In Free Will? Author, orator, and all-around ‘science guy’ Bill Nye has been asked a lot of questions in his 30 years on the air. But this time around, Bill gets asked a question almost Biblical in nature: is th...
5:05 How Lexicographers Think About Language | Kory Stamper If you’ve ever used “y’all” in a business setting, you might be get an odd look from your colleagues but you might actually be helping the word get into the dictionary. Mirriam Webster’s Kory Stamp...
4:20 Consciousness Is a Narrative Created by Your Unconscious Mind | Dean Buonomano American neuroscientist Dean Buonomano believes that your brain might be processing the world around you in a totally different manner than how you think you’re perceiving it. We’d like to believe ...
13:12 Why Don’t Humans Live for More than 100 Years? | Physicist Geoffrey West Who wants to live forever? It’s a question that mankind has been asking itself for eons; how to extend our lifespans. Theoretical scientist Geoffrey West has an interesting proposition of we could ...
7:06 “Made in Prison” Is the New “Made in China” | Liza Jessie Peterson Should companies provide a ‘Made In an American Prison’ label if the product is made in an American jail? Over the last few decades there has been a huge surge of products made in prison factories ...
7:15 Good Investors Make Money. Great Investors Create Value. | Mihir Desai People have a bad impression of finance, and that's mostly worrying because its often justified, says Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai. The sector is in dire need of rehabilitation, an...
8:36 Why Controlling the Masses Through Media No Longer Works | Jordan Greenhall When television took over from print and radio as the dominant media in the second half of the 20th century, a hierarchy evolved in which the privileged few with TV camera access spoke to the masse...
2:20 Study Science, Think Abstractly, Change the World | Bill Nye What do you do if you're a diehard science lover who dreams of one day donning a lab coat professionally, but you're struggling with the work at school? That is Caitlin's predicament—but that's not...
5:31 AI Can Now Self-Reproduce—Should Humans Be Worried? | Eric Weinstein Those among us who fear world domination at the metallic hands of super-intelligent AI have gotten a few steps ahead of themselves. We might actually be outsmarted first by fairly dumb AI, says Eri...
4:04 Time Paradox: Why Pleasure Is Fleeting and Pain Endures | Dean Buonomano Read more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: So I think som...
5:41 Are We Living in a Massive Computer Program? Or a Simulation? | Joscha Bach Read more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: Could we be li...
6:00 Can You Spot a Liar Just by Someone's Looks? | Alexander Todorov Not long ago, most people would probably judge how trustworthy you were based entirely on your physical appearance. More specifically, the pseudoscience of physiognomy claimed that a person's facia...
9:45 The Science of Optimism: How Gender, Age, and Race Affect Your Outlook | William Magee Optimistic people tend to live longer than pessimistic people. That's true whether you're rich or poor, young or old, and no matter your race, says sociologist William Magee. As part of a five-year...
3:18 Religion Is Nature's Antidepressant | Robert Sapolsky Of all the strange things that humans have come up with, almost none is stranger—nor more pervasive across separate cultures—than religion. Why this meta-magical thinking evolved is easy to underst...
2:07 Bill Nye: Would Humanity Make Peace with Aliens—or War? Finding an alien civilization will change humanity dramatically, but not so much in the obvious ways. Will we interact, trade, learn from one another's technology, or start intergalactic wars? None...
3:15 Political Correctness Can't Beat Having Good Taste | Jeff Garlin Fake news used to be called propaganda, and being politically correct once meant being eloquent. Words change meaning, but there's still no replacement for good taste, says Garlin. The Second City ...
2:47 Stopping Psychopaths in Their Developmental Stage | James Fallon "I'm a very lucky psychopath," says neuroscientist James Fallon, who discovered he had borderline psychopathy while using his own brain scans in a double-blind study. Upon reflection it made a lot ...
6:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Life on Europa, Jupiter's Moons, Ice Fishing and Racket Sports Where there is water, there is life—and Europa’s got water alright: scientists believe it has twice the volume of Earth’s oceans swirling beneath its kilometers-thick ice crust. A moon in Jupiter’s...
2:18 Evidence of God Isn't Necessary to Live a Good Life | Bill Nye Can God exist out there in space-time? Do the laws of nature support the idea of a divine creator, or do they rule it out? At the moment, the existence of a god is a deep question for theologists a...
4:24 Embrace Contradictory Ideas to Reach New Intellectual Heights | Eric Weinstein We know that "humans only use 10% of their brains" is a myth, but there might be a function of your mind that you're neglecting to use: its sandboxes. Eric Weinstein borrows this term from computer...
6:41 Are Humans Hardwired to Be Cruel to Each Other? | Robert Sapolsky Robert Sapolsky has a bone to pick with oxytocin, or rather the public's perception of oxytocin. It is the love hormone, we've surely all read by now. It helps us bond to our parents, then to our l...
11:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science, Abraham Lincoln, Immigrants, and the Fading of America In 2017, science is a political tennis ball being served hard and fast. It's a buffet from which people on the left and right cherry pick their information. It's something to be believed in or doub...
3:05 Mental Time Travel: Your Brain Is Literally a Time Machine | Dean Buonamano Humans have thrived like no other species on Earth. We have established habitats on all the continents, mastered agriculture, invented technology, and we are unique in having culture. All that can'...
4:50 Is It Really Possible to Change Someone's Beliefs? | Barbara Oakley Read more at BigThink.com:
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It’s hard to know how you ...
5:08 Is Moral Disgust Just Bad Evolution? | Robert Sapolsky
Have you ever witnessed something that made you sick to your stomach? Have you listened in on a story so evil that you felt you might faint? Humans are different from other animals because we have ...
7:09 Truth Isn't Black and White: 3 Requirements Every Fact Should Meet | Katherine Maher The chances are good that you've used Wikipedia to define or discover something in the last week, if not 24 hours. It's currently the 5th most-visited website in the world. The English-language Wik...
5:23 Genius Is Not about Excelling at Something—It's about Doing Things Differently | Eric Weinstein We want our surgeons to be excellent. We wants our classical music performers to be excellent. But do we really want excellence everywhere? This is the provocative line of thought economist and mat...
5:51 Is Hope for Weak People? One Man's Journey through Life with MS | Richard M. Cohen When Richard M. Cohen visited the Big Think studio, he came in carrying a quote by Virginia Woolf. It was printed in large font, which seems an odd choice unless you know that Cohen is legally blin...
4:56 Transgender People Should Use the Bathroom of Their Choice | Elijah Nealy Read more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: Yes, I think ...
2:33 Bill Nye: Is the Multiverse Theory Paradoxical, or Can We Test It? The idea of a multiverse as we conceive of it was first mentioned by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1952, who warned a lecture hall full of people that this may "seem l...