TED Community » Sara Mayhew

More About Me

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.

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

Talk to me about

storytelling, character design, manga, astronomy, Legend of the Ztarr, skepticism,

People don't know that I'm good at

Public speaking, figure skating, ju jitsu, goju karate,

My TED Story

TED 2009 Fellowship member!
http://www.ted.com/fellows/view/id/25

Comments

• TEDCred score: +137.60 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?

  Feb 19 2011: First, I would ask if rates of depression in college students is rising because more of them really are becoming depressed or if the rate is due to better diagnosis. Improving medical knowledge leads to people being diagnosed when the might not have been a decade or more ago. i.e., long ago, many people with depression, bi-polar, and anxiety disorders would be lumped into "schizophrenia". Similarly, rates of autism appear to climb because of better diagnosis and the recognition that it is a spectrum, while the actual prevalence of the disorder in the population has remained the same.
  
  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.
• +4

  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?

  Feb 19 2011: I don't like the sound of it. Wellbeing and prosperity involve more than just feeling happy. In other words, though it may not sound nice, there are more important things than being happy. Anyone who's read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World will understand the dangers of a society that places comfort and happiness as its highest priority.
• +7

  A reply on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?

  Feb 19 2011: Mark,
  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?
• +4

  A comment on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?

  Feb 18 2011: This is great topic and so important to ensuring the safety and prosperity to our scientific and technologically dependent society.
  
  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.
• +10

  A reply on Conversation: Can people who deny science be educated? How?

  Feb 18 2011: The act of using science is removing the lens of our own bias and errors in cognition. We cannot distinguish between what is true and what we want to be true without using the scientific method.
  
  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.

• A reply on Talk: His Holiness the Karmapa: The technology of the heart

  Sep 26 2010: There are "cafeteria" followers of any religion, who cheery pick what to believe and what not to.
• +9

  A reply on Talk: Brian Cox: Why we need the explorers

  Jun 3 2010: It's not an "either/or" problem. Any lack of funding to solve Earthly problems isn't due to funds being diverted to science. Americans spend more money every year on cigarettes than they do on NASA.
• +3

  A reply on Talk: James Randi: Homeopathy, quackery and fraud

  Jun 1 2010: There is no plausible mechanism for homeopathy. The entire concept goes against basic chemistry. Positive results are due to weak studies. If you truly are open minded, you will ask yourself what evidence would it take to convince you that homeopathy doesn't work.
  
  If the answer is "nothing", then you have before you the definition of close minded.
• +3

  A reply on Talk: James Randi: Homeopathy, quackery and fraud

  Apr 20 2010: If a treatment can be shown to work, it's called medicine. Alternative medicine, by definition, is treatments that don't work.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: James Randi: Homeopathy, quackery and fraud

  Apr 20 2010: Homeopathy has no effect. But give it to children to protect/treat malaria and they die. It's just water.