experiment

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Eric Seidel presents Sky, an experimental open-source framework for writing mobile apps in Dart with fast development cycles and 60Hz UI. Sky later became Flutter.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

A four-minute TED talk in which Derek Sivers argues that announcing your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. He cites psychology research going back to the 1920s.

Black musician Daryl Davis tells how a chance encounter led him to befriend Ku Klux Klan members and seek the source of racial hate. He argues that sitting down and talking with people can change them.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, about the default settings of the mind, choosing what to pay attention to, and what we end up worshipping.

An excerpt of the 2005 Harvard debate in which Steven Pinker gives his prepared case on biological sex differences and the under-representation of women in science. It covers cross-cultural patterns in preferences and abilities and the overlap between male and female distributions.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.

Johann Hari's TED talk arguing that addiction is driven largely by disconnection and environment rather than chemical hooks alone. He draws on his personal experience with addicted relatives and on research and policy examples from around the world.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in this TED talk that abundant choice makes people more paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier.

Eduardo Briceno gives a TEDx talk on mindset, contrasting fixed and growth views of ability. He argues that believing abilities can be developed encourages challenge, deliberate practice and grit.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Moral philosopher James Flynn explains the Flynn effect, the steady rise of IQ scores across the 20th century. He argues the shift reflects a move toward abstract, hypothetical thinking as cognitively demanding professions grew.

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

Simon Sinek's 99U talk on why leaders earn trust by putting their team's safety ahead of their own, drawing on biology and anthropology. It distills the ideas of his book Leaders Eat Last into about 46 minutes.

Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Yapko draws on forty years of practice and research to explain skills that help people recover from, and even prevent, depression. He emphasizes cognitive and social factors beyond medication.

A short video of David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' commencement speech about awareness and choosing how to think. It argues that the most obvious realities are the hardest to see, using the fish-in-water parable.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

Dan Pink's TED talk argues that traditional carrot-and-stick rewards often fail for creative work, drawing on the candle problem and social science research. He points to autonomy, mastery and purpose as better motivators.

A Google Tech Talk by Sebastian Deterding on gamification. It looks at what points and badges get wrong and what lessons game design offers for non-game applications.

BJ Fogg of Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab argues that lasting change comes from tiny habits, such as flossing one tooth or doing one pushup, anchored to things you already do.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

Kathy Sierra's Fluent 2015 keynote on the one metaskill for developers: the ability to come up to speed quickly and stay there. She covers how people learn, cognitive resources versus willpower, and building skill.

Stephen Duneier describes a decision-making approach that took him from struggling with simple tasks to achieving ambitious goals. The talk centers on breaking goals into small marginal adjustments.