Forum: Two Videos with Discussion (facilitated by Jeff Justice and Carl Angotti)

The two videos this Sunday are "Is the World Getting Better", and "Happiness: What Your Mother Didn't Tell You".

We will watch the above videos of talks by distinguished professors from Harvard University. Then we will spend some time discussing each one for about 10 to 15 minutes.

The videos are:

1. Steven Pinker's Ted talk "Is the World Getting Better or Worse?". It's 18 minutes long. See:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ&t=37s

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

2) Dan Gilbert from Harvard University: "Happiness: What Your Mother Didn't Tell You" (2018 WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium). It's 21 minutes long. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Y2Z1BGwno

Professor Gilbert is interested in how human beings navigate the complexities of time and social life. The first of these interests motivates his research on affective forecasting (how, and how well, do people predict the emotional consequences of future events), inter-temporal choice (when and how people sacrifice for the future), and other topics in judgment and decision-making.

Both of these videos give us a lot to stimulate our thinking, get a discussion going.

Come join us to discuss these two great videos, and join in for lunch afterwards to discuss them further.