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greg dahlen

Alumnus, academy of achievement

TEDCRED 20+

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If you were to give a TED talk what would it be about? What points would you make about your topic?

Interested to hear what matters to people.

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Closing Statement from greg dahlen

Well, it wasn I saw that people have interesting ideas for TED talks. One wonders if everyone in the world has an interesting talk in them?

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    Fritzie Reisner 100+

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    Feb 22 2013: Some possibilities: 1) Excellent strategies for cultivating inquiring and thoughtful minds and the disposition to think and learn independently and creatively. 2) How to understand big problems well enough to set the stage for creative solution.

    (I have another area I am working on but would not yet be qualified to speak about it).

    How about you, Greg?

    • greg dahlen 20+

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      Feb 23 2013: Fr, what are strategies for understanding big problems well enough to set stage for creative solution?

      I myself seem to be something of a generalist, I like knowing a little bit about many fields and flit from interest to interest. So I might not be prepared to do an expert talk on any subject. Maybe if anyone ever starts an org for "flitters"........
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        Fritzie Reisner 100+

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        Feb 23 2013: It's too big a topic to get into here. But one thing people tend to do, I notice, is to assume they know exactly what a problem is about, but their specific diagnosis is often full of assumptions that simply are not valid. The combination of extreme confidence in assumptions that people don't bother to test and extreme faith in ideology-based solutions looks nothing like critical thinking about finding solutions to problems. It's skating on the surface. It works for social banter but not for more.

        • reine des violettes

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          Mar 3 2013: so perhaps we need a talk, then, on the skill of asking questions?
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        Fritzie Reisner 100+

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        Mar 3 2013: @reine. There may be talks about asking the right questions. It's a key part of critical thinking. There was a TED presentation by an intelligence researcher at the 2013 conference that suggests that, thanks to the change toward cultivating more abstract and critical thinking in schools over the course of the twentieth century, at least in parts of the world, people are getting much smarter at it. I expect that an unwillingness to scrutinize firmly held beliefs is a personality trait and therefore variable across populations. I suspected even before hearing the researcher speak that many people blame schooling for choices that actually come down to the individual's choices and dispositions. Critical thinking is a focus of schools, but many people reject it later in their lives, it seems.

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