Infection
The Secret to a Great TED Talk
Recently I learned from two separate people how the Obama campaign won the 2008 presidential election and it’s fascinating. Basically everyone who was a part of it learned the “campaign narrative” structure and delivered their personal message to spread the gospel:
- The Story of Me: why I’ve personally been inspired by this campaign
- The Story of We: why we (me speaking and you listening) are united and inspired by this campaign
- The Story of Now: why it’s urgent that you take action now; the train is leaving and you can jump aboard or be left behind
If you think about it, this is a very powerful narrative for creating grass-roots action of any sort. Having just spent the last week watching many dozens of TED talks (and having watched hundreds of them over the past few years), I’ve been thinking about the fact that the great ones all follow a shared structure, which I will share with you now:
- The Story of
Best Talk of Pop!Tech '08
The reason I like this talk so much (besides that it’s well-presented) is that it introduces us to the idea of invisible etiology. Such a powerful concept, one that I feel has the power to help us solve so many mysteries, once we take it seriously.
Something that I’ve been thinking about lately: does homelessness have an invisible etiology (or etiologies), and if so, what is it?…
Behavior and Emotions as Virus
We’ve talked about obesity as a virus and violence as a virus, both well-supported by the research. Now there’s happiness as a virus. Hardly a surprise, but I guess for new paradigms to become the accepted basis for organizing scientific thinking, they first have to become banal. So let’s bring it on, what’s the next human behavior or emotion that will be featured in a “surprising”study showing a viral etiology?
hat tip: Daniel Horowitz…
Invisible Etiology
One of the most poignant moments of this year’s Pop!Tech for me — which, BTW had many — was Gary Slutkin’s talk on the idea of violence being a virus. You may have heard about his work in stopping violence in Chicago in a NY Times Magazine cover article earlier this year. The premise is simple: if you throw out what you think you know about violence and just look at the etiology of how it manifests in the world, you find incredible similarities to the etiology of microbial viruses. This includes not only how it spreads from person to person, but also the larger epidemiological patterns, and importantly, how it can be stopped via interventions which logically follow from the hypothesis that violence is a virus. Not that violence is caused by those invisible critters we call viruses, but rather that violence itself is a virus.…
Cancer Research Surprises
Many people would admit to not understanding cancer well, but fewer people would admit to not understanding evolution well. Here are some challenges to our understanding of both.
Starvation may help cancer treatment. “As little as 48 hours of starvation afforded mice injected with brain cancer cells the ability to endure and benefit from extremely high doses of chemotherapy that non-starved mice could not survive.”
Seeing Sigmoids
One of the most basic but misleading heuristics that the human mind uses is that of linearity. If we see a progression (say 0, 1, 2), our first instinct is that the next step follows linearly (namely 3). But there is no a priori reason to prefer the linear interpretation to any other, say quadratic (which would suggest the next step in the sequence is 4). For whatever reason – probably due to the relative simplicity of linearity – our brains seem wired to prefer linear explanations to non-linear.…
Try This Experiment
For one full day, whenever you are in physical proximity to another person, be they friend or stranger, look them in the eyes, hold their gaze and smile.…