The best lectures

These days I am following an on-line course about “English for Teaching Purposes” and I was fortunate to come across TED from several different sources at more o less the same time. This is a platform of great talks that can be watched with on line videos. It seems to me that the four best of these are:

-This one on how statistics change, and how our beliefs about developing countries are dominated by prejudices, and also about the great diversity between countries and inside countries.

-This one about how knowledge is positively correlated with ignorance. Perhaps it can be summarized as knowledge leads people to a better ignorance: the more we know, the better questions we ask.  

-This one, on how our intelligence has adapted to technological changes, and how we have evolved from thinking about the concrete to thinking about the hypothetical. 

-This one about bad science, and how fads are propagated and the difficulties of protecting people from interested lies.

All these speakers have very different styles, but all of them are great communicators. Above all, it shows that reason and science are not incompatible with emotion and excitement, In the web page, there are many other talks, so I’m sure that you will also find your own favourite video.