Hans Rosling is back! This time with a talk about relationships between religion and birth rates.
He concludes we have reached peak fertility, while we are still arguing about peak oil.
The most exciting part for me is that plan boxes are more influential and memorable in giving us his message than the animating graphs on the screen!
The talk argues math is about:
Posing the right questions
Turning the questions into maths
Computation
Verification
Computation is what computers can do more efficiently than humans. The other steps cannot be done by computers. Yet math teaching is primarily about computation.
The talk argues math education should shift focus to the parts that humans are better than computers at. They are also more useful to the average human.
The speaker manages to combine Moses, Aristotle, alcohol and Tolkien in a single talk, which is also an economics talk. Even more impressively he makes the case for a place for morality in modern economics.
I am not sure how mainstream the ideas are, but it is easy to watch and provides food for thought. It is worth watching just for the use of a flip chart.
One of the comments below the talk reads Happiness is not a goal, it is a driving force.
This is quite a good summary of the talk. It is also demonstrated by the speaker's actions.
This is a 4-part documentary by the BBC. I embedded the last one as it has most conclusion, although the whole history of the ideas being discussed is very interesting.
It suggests that the consumer society was designed. Initially to control irrational behaviour of the masses that could lead to bad events by appealing to the subconscious needs of people. Then it was seen as a way to allow people to express themselves and become individuals.
More recently it was seen as a way to give people power, a way to have democracy in modern society.
The conclusion is quite open. An obvious one is that the attention of people has been taken away from important or long-term decisions to insignificant ones, because those help win political campaigns.
I wonder how other societies were built around the same time. I also wonder how more modern events and trends fit into the particular view of the documentary.
Explanation of why the protect IP bill is bad.