Stefan.
@paradeevic • 5,750 subscribers
Control the flow of your thoughts.
Videos
A BBC interviewer asked a Nobel physicist the simplest question in the world: why do two magnets push each other apart. He refused to answer it. What he did instead is the best seven minutes on thinking ever filmed. The man is Richard Feynman, at home in 1983, no blackboard, no notes, sitting in an armchair. He does not dodge because he cannot answer. He dodges because he wants you to see what the question is actually asking. So he takes an ordinary sentence, that a woman slipped on the ice and broke her hip, and starts asking why, and every answer opens another why, until the ground gives way. Then he turns it around on the interviewer with a question about ice that sounds trivial and is not. The point he arrives at is the uncomfortable one. Every explanation is only a translation into something you already accept without explanation. Magnets have no such translation. There is nothing more familiar than magnetism to reduce magnetism to, which is why every answer you were given at school was a picture, not a reason. It matters more now than it did in 1983. Any tool will hand you a fluent answer in a second. Knowing which questions actually have a bottom is the part that is still yours. One question. Seven minutes. It is in the video.
Stefan.3,004,536 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Tom Hanks was handed the Oxford Union and 18 minutes. He refused to give a speech. He made the entire room say the same 8 words out loud instead, over and over, until people who had never acted in their lives were visibly doing it wrong in front of him. Is there something I can do for you. That is the whole lesson. And he tells them, standing there, that he has never taken an acting class in his life. He is running an exercise he only ever heard other people describe. The exercise has 1 rule. It is not the rule anybody guesses, and it is the only reason the thing works at all. Then he starts feeding the room circumstances. The first is harmless. By the 4th he is saying something into a microphone at Oxford that no publicist alive would have signed off on, and the room says the line anyway. They get it wrong once. He stops them and fixes it in 6 words. I did not expect the best moment of the night to be a correction. A drama student named NicholasDoucet says he took more out of these 18 minutes than out of his last 6 months of training. 351 people agreed with him. mccloysong caught the thing almost nobody catches the first time: the man is audibly unwell that night, he could have called it off, and he stood there and taught anyway. 568 likes. Around the 16 minute mark he stops the exercise completely, looks into the audience and says a name out loud. Then he asks the room not to go looking for her afterwards. Most people treat sincerity as a feeling that either arrives or does not. He treats it as a procedure, and a procedure can be rehearsed by anyone willing to sound stupid in front of a room for a while. 18 minutes. 8 words. 1 rule nobody guesses.
Stefan.901,890 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
In 1983 the BBC put a reporter in front of a man who spent his lunch breaks in a pub he did not drink in. He went for the arcade machine. He beat each new game within 2 or 3 days, and the pub only changed them once a month, so he went home and worked at the keyboard 20 to 40 hours a week, frequently straight through the night. The programme called these people addicts. Watching it now, the label is the least interesting thing in it, because 1 of the 3 people interviewed accidentally explains the entire mechanism. His name is Graham Hawker, and he is asked a simple question. What is the actual thrill of playing against a computer. His answer is the only real piece of psychology in the film. The machine is perfect. It never makes an error. Therefore anything that goes wrong is unambiguously yours, and you are not playing a game at all, you are trying to prove you are as flawless as the thing opposite you. That is a textbook description of a variable schedule of reinforcement married to a system that never gives you an excuse. Skinner showed decades earlier that unpredictable rewards produce far more persistent behaviour than reliable ones. What Hawker adds is the part Skinner's pigeons could not: an opponent so consistent that blame has nowhere to go except inward. There is no bad referee, no unfair bounce, no bad day. Every loss is evidence about you. The first man is asked whether he will ever use the program he is spending 6 months of his life writing. His answer starts with 2 words that make the reporter laugh. Asked why he is doing it then, he replies in 6 words, and it is a question, not an answer, and it is the oldest defence there is for doing something useless extremely well. His wife is sitting there for all of this. She describes lying half awake at 5 in the morning and hearing a sound from the spare room. She reproduces the sound out loud. Then she says a sentence about a room of his own that is far heavier than anything the reporter manages in 8 minutes. The third person is a woman running a sweet shop, and she produces the turn that makes the film worth the time. The computer collapsed 4 or 5 hours of nightly paperwork into seconds. What she did with the recovered hours is not what anybody expects, and she lays the evidence out on the shop counter for the camera. By the end of 1982 there were roughly 700 thousand of these machines in British homes, and salesmen were selling them on the grounds that they would help children with schoolwork. The reporter closes on the thing the salesmen were leaving out. 42 years later it is the only prediction in the film that landed.
Stefan.486,085 Aufrufe • vor 14 Tagen
A Stanford professor stood in front of a full lecture hall and told them that depression has almost nothing to do with sadness. Then he wrote two words on the whiteboard that nobody in the room could define. Anhedonia. Psychomotor retardation. That, he said, is the actual illness. The man is Robert Sapolsky, the neurobiologist who built his career following wild baboons across Kenya to measure what stress does to a living body. What makes the video worth 52 minutes is not the subject. It is the method. No slides. No notes he ever glances down at. One camera, one whiteboard, and a man taking depression apart the way a neurologist takes apart a stroke. He is doing something deliberate, and it takes a while to catch. Every time the material could soften into sympathy, he hauls it back into biology. Hormones. Neurotransmitters. Genes that do nothing whatsoever until life goes wrong, and then decide everything. Somewhere in the middle he says one sentence about depression that viewers have been pulling out of this lecture for 16 years. It is 5 words long. It reads like a contradiction until he unpacks it. Under the video, sleepy_and_caffeinated quoted that exact sentence and wrote two words beneath it. That got me. 4.3 thousand people agreed. Johnny_boy777 said it from another angle. The best thing about the internet, he wrote, is that any ordinary person can sit in on this without ever enrolling at Stanford. 2.6 thousand likes. 16 years old. 6.2 million views. 9410 comments. One of 25 lectures in the Stanford course Human Behavioral Biology, and every one of them is free. Most people assume they understand depression because they have felt bad. 52 minutes is enough to learn they were describing something else entirely. 52 minutes. 5 words. It is in the video.
Stefan.651,467 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
A pilot put a passenger jet down on a river and got every person on board off alive. Within days, investigators were asking him what he had eaten for lunch. He told them a tuna sandwich. Then they asked whether he had had a candy bar. Whether he had had a soda. That is not small talk. There is a precise reason those 2 questions could have ended his career, and Tom Hanks lays it out in about 4 sentences. The pilot is Chesley Sullenberger. Hanks played him, spent time with him first, and says the man walked him through the entire script telling him which parts never happened. As Hanks was told it, the stake was money. If the board could establish that the pilot did 1 thing wrong, the insurance on an airplane he puts at 17 million dollars would not have to be paid out. Every question in that room was built for that. It went on for the better part of a year. In the film it takes days, because films cannot afford a year. What was happening to him has a name in psychology. Baruch Fischhoff described it in 1975 and called it creeping determinism. Once you know how something ended, the ending looks like it was always coming, and every road you did not take looks like it was sitting right there, clearly marked, the whole time. Which is why the question "why did you not do this instead" is close to unanswerable. It is asked by people who know the ending, to a person who did not have it. There is a second effect underneath, well documented in aviation and in medicine. The person at the centre of the investigation frequently comes out of it in worse condition than the people he saved. Researchers gave that person a name. He is the second victim. Hanks is 67 when he says this, and what he admires is not the landing. It is a distinction he makes in 1 sentence near the end, and it is the whole reason he told the story at all. He saved everyone on that plane. Then he spent a year proving he had not eaten a candy bar.
Stefan.210,938 Aufrufe • vor 18 Tagen
A Stanford physicist walked into a lecture hall in gym shorts, with no notes, and spent 70 minutes explaining what happens inside a black hole. He is the man who spent 20 years arguing with Stephen Hawking about this exact question, and who eventually won. The man is Leonard Susskind, one of the founders of string theory. And the way he does it is what makes the video worth it. The argument that started it was simple enough to state at a dinner table. Hawking said that when something falls into a black hole, the information about it is destroyed forever. Susskind said the universe cannot forget. If it can, physics itself stops working. That disagreement ran for two decades. Hawking eventually conceded. The part that stays with you is what Susskind says happens to you at the edge. From your own point of view, you cross it and notice nothing unusual. From someone watching outside, you never cross at all. You slow, stretch, and burn at the boundary. Both descriptions are correct. Neither one is a trick. He explains why with no equations and almost no props, from memory, in front of a room where somebody in the front row is eating a sandwich. The comments spend more time on the shorts than the physics, which is its own kind of proof of confidence. Nothing that falls in is gone. The universe keeps a copy of everything, including you. 70 minutes. It is in the video.
Stefan.95,617 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
A Stanford neuroscientist has spent thirty years arguing that you have never made a decision. Not one. Every choice you are proud of and every mistake you still think about was the output of biology you did not pick and cannot see. He teaches an entire course on why, and it is free. The man is Robert Sapolsky, who spent decades in Kenya living among wild baboons. He opens with a man who woke up one morning as somebody else. Same brain, same family, same job. One gene had changed. He describes the case and leaves it unresolved, because the point is not the answer. The point is that you already reached for one. Then he goes after the way we reach. His argument is that every explanation you have ever heard for why a person did something is broken in the same way. It is genetic. It is cultural. It is hormones. It is childhood. Each of those is a bucket, and the buckets do not exist anywhere in nature. They exist because universities have separate departments and separate corridors, and the corridors decided what counts as an explanation. Nothing interesting happens inside a bucket. Everything interesting happens where two of them touch, and almost nobody is trained to look there. He asks the room about free will, about God, about evil, about whether biology explains who becomes religious, and whether things that happened before you were born shape your politics thirty years later. Then he refuses to answer any of it, and tells them what they will be able to judge for themselves in ten weeks. The lectures run through aggression, depression, language, schizophrenia, sexuality, and why any of it differs between two people at all. Twenty five hours. One lecture hall. Free.
Stefan.71,712 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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