Statistics About TED Talk

TED Talk Main Ideas

Statistics About TED Talks. The main point of Sebastian Wernicke's TED Talk is how subconscious biases affect our reaction to ideas. In regard to topics, Wernicke notes how ideas that can be easily related to such as happiness and emotions are received more positively, in comparison to subjects more difficult to connect to like war and transportation. The selected four-word phrases indicate how moderate phrases are key for attracting the TED audience. Phrases such as “you don't have to” and “I would like to” are more effective than stronger ones like “you're going to”, or “I'm here to.” Wernicke specifically points out two aspects that affect the ethos of the speaker: appearing knowledgeable and color choice. Although admitting

Dan Ariely warns people that subconscious motivations have an impact on our actions; we often do not realize our emotional conflicts of interest. He notes how a burn department chairman was eager to treat him with a procedure that would give the appearance of hair in his burnt areas. Furthermore, he felt unusually guilty about rejecting this procedure. Ariely suggests that the chairman, needing a third patient for a research paper, was subconsciously motivated by the paper and thus invested emotion into finding a patient. Likewise, he also mentions a time where he himself had an emotional conflict of interest. In a research paper, Ariely almost excluded an outlier from an intoxicated person that was contradictory to their hypothesis. However, his research group realized that they would not have excluded the outlier had it supported their theory. Ariely aims to show how subconscious bias caused by nearly invisible conflicts of interest have a tangible

Peter Donnelly warns about the misuse of statistics, and uses example problems to show that humans are poor at interpreting uncertainty in his TED Talk, “Stats Fool Juries”. Donnelly asks mathematical questions to the crowd and any viewers in order to show individual fallacies. The first question involves the occurrence of a certain sequence of coin-flips appearing over another sequence. The human mind is biased in believing that the two sequences are equally likely to appear over the other, but the true probability is that one is twice as likely to occur over the other. He then continues onto an application of Bayes' theorem to show how our minds cannot deal with numbers well: if there is a test for a disease that is 99% successful, a positive test result does not necessarily mean that the person has a 99% chance of having the disease. A real life example follows the two ones directed at the crowd. A British woman was convicted for murder on an alleged 1 in 73 million chance, which was created by a false assumption of two crib deaths being independent events. Donnelly emphasizes both the fact that an alleged expert made a crippling flaw while focusing on a field he was not in, and that the jury blindly heeded this person with no questioning whatsoever. His key point is that humans should not blindly follow others, or even