With all the scientific progress we’ve made over the past centuries, there’s still a massive, unknowable amount of information that we have yet to comprehend. In many cases, we haven’t figured out even basic truths about our world: what is the force of gravity, really? How does human consciousness actually function? In this brief, animated and humorous skewering of the cult of knowledge, the BBC producer John Lloyd argues that for all our striving for intelligence and information, what matters most is learning how to conduct our everyday lives better.
From the RSA
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoEthics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes
videoEcology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes
videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
videoChildhood and adolescence
‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child
4 minutes
videoHistory of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
14 minutes
videoLanguage and linguistics
Do button-pushing dogs have something new to say about language?
9 minutes
videoComputing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes
videoEthics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes