About me
International award-winning mangaka and 2009 TED Fellowship member, Sara E. Mayhew is a Canadian writer and illustrator striving to produce manga that promotes skepticism and critical thinking. Canada's prestigious graphic arts magazine, Applied Arts, featured her in the ... More »
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More about me
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I'm passionate about
manga, storytelling, character design. I love creating worlds and the characters that live within them. I want to tell stories that promote skepticism and portray critical thinkers as role models.
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An idea worth spreading
Manga and anime are forms of sequential art and animation with broad appeal that captures the attention of audiences that might otherwise elude the traditional western forms--including a wide range of female readers, from preteens to young women. My storytelling uses the emotional appeal of manga to connect readers to the wonder and value of scientific and critical thinking. The characters of these stories are role models who demonstrate the importance of secular humanism--empathy, compassion, equality, free inquiry, respect towards all people and valuing humans based on their own merits, free from dogma or superstition--and also demonstrate the dangers in giving ideology, intuition and preconceptions free reign over our lives. We can begin to make the world a better place when we learn to apply critical inquiry to our endeavours: http://tedfellows.posterous.com/follow-our-bliss-skepticism-as-a-better-idea
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Talk to me about
storytelling, character design, manga, astronomy, Legend of the Ztarr, skepticism,
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People don't know that I'm good at
Public speaking, figure skating, ju jitsu, goju karate,
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My TED story
TED 2009 Fellowship member!
http://www.ted.com/fellows/view/id/25
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Favorite themes
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Comments
See all of Sara Mayhew's comments »
TEDCred score: +137
TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A comment on Conversation: Why do you think depression is on the rise in college students today?
So, are today's college students more depressed, or were more of yesteryear's college students going undiagnosed?
My next guess would be that a higher percentage of the population is attending college than in the past--the higher rate could be due to a bigger sample of people and not necessarily anything to do with college.
A comment on Conversation: Should Governments start to measure what really matters to people - their happiness? Or should they stay out of such a private matter?
A reply on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?
If you're investigating a claim in a manner where you're attempting to reduce bias, then you are doing science. Science is a verb. Science is critical thinking. It's really quite that simple. Wishy washy post-modernism need not apply.
I thought it was pretty clear in the original question what denying science meant; relying on personal experience and preconceptions to decide what is true and lacking the ability to accept disconfirming evidence.
Debating what science is and how useful it may be isn't the topic at hand. Assume science is the only method we have to obtain accurate information about the world--can you/how do you educate people who deny this approach?
A comment on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?
What's missing in our education is learning about skepticism; the many ways in which we fall prey to self-delusion through cognitive errors. If you can show people how unreliable personal experience is and the many ways in which our minds can deceive us, then they can be less prone to "denialism".
You can't reason someone out of a position which they didn't reason themselves into. It's much easier to fix ignorance than misinformation. Perhaps a start is to teach students about cognitive bias and logical fallacies using examples which they are either ignorant about or already accept as true. If they can begin to see how others are fooled by self-delusion and irrationality then it may lead to them questioning themselves as well.
Does that make sense? It may be too difficult to tackle issues they are emotionally invested in, but if they can be shown how confidently self-deluded others can be they might think "If it happens to them, it can happen to me" and begin to question their own views.
You might not be able to change what people think, but if you can change HOW they think, there might be hope.
A reply on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?
Appealing to the argument that everything is subjective is simply a way to rationalize denying facts that don't agree with our preconceptions. Science never claims absolute certainty about truth, so to claim otherwise is a straw man. What science does is tell us what is unambiguously untrue.
So no, we don't really have to define what denying science is. It's a derailment of the topic and only serves to justify our desire to believe in what is objectively untrue.