During this school closure and this rampaging pandemic, I have rekindled my love for math. I have been trying to keep up with the news related to the COVID-19 outbreak and I have been monitoring the data of the number of cases in the U.S, New York, and Albany. As I have said before in my past journals, I know this topic is not directly related to natural medicine, but I still think it is still really vital and relevant information for myself to learn. Over the past year of researching medicine, I think just recently I have finally discovered one of my motives for pursuing this: I want to alleviate myself of ignorance as much as possible. The more I am informed about my choices of medicine and prevalent diseases, the better I can protect myself. For that reason, I chose to review Bill Gates' TED Talk called “The next outbreak? We’re not ready.” since it points out our world’s ill-preparedness for an unavoidable outbreak. I thought that Mrs. Gergen’s choice, “The danger of a single story” by Chimamanda Ngozi, would best fit with mine because it also addresses the perils of not fully investigating a topic.
Gates has ethos due to his credibility as a very successful man who created a computer and computer software and philanthropic work where he donates and helps people who are in less fortunate situations around the world. However, Gates mainly uses logos to support his arguments with statistics and visual models. In his talk, he addressed how unprepared the world is for an epidemic. There is no global response system to address an outbreak at all. There is no team of epidemiologists and doctors ready to go at a moment's notice. There is no one ready to find for possible treatments, run diagnostics, or could formulate a game plan to prevent the spread. He pointed out how we spend so much money on our military and defense but don’t realize that there is a bigger threat than war; disease. If we prepared for disease as much as we did war, we would be ready for an outbreak. He used kairos by talking about Ebola and how lucky they were that only 10,000 people died, that the disease never got into cities, and that the disease wasn’t airborne. However, the next outbreak of disease will likely be much more contagious and deadly. He then showed a visual model to show the spread and predicted deaths of an outbreak of a disease like the Spanish flu. 33 million people would die and the disease would reach all corners of the world in months. The World Bank predicted that the world economy could lose three trillion dollars. His train of thought, data, models, and reasoning are laid out for the audience. Unfathomable numbers attached to subjects like death and debt resonate with the viewers and open their eyes to the absolute destruction that could easily become a new reality. The devastation of Ebola was very real which makes it hard for someone to refute his claim. Gates’ armor of data is impenetrable.
On the other hand, Ngozi uses mainly pathos to relate with her audience by telling a series of personal stories. She starts with smaller anecdotes and then branches out to talk about stories that occur in bigger settings. They range from different points in her life to show how books, news, and other media will always influence our impressionable brains. For example, she talks about how her mother always described a family they knew as poor, and that when she finally visited the family, she was amazed to see that they had nice things like a colorful, woven basket. She also tells a story of how when she visited Mexico during the immigration debate in the U.S.; she felt thrown off to see Mexicans laughing and enjoying themselves in a market when she only imagined them as immigrants fleeing the border and getting arrested. However, the difference between these two points in her life is that when she was older and she realized she was mistaken for thinking this way, she was ashamed since she knew her mistake. She points out that although it is easy to be gullible to a single story, as adults we can learn to look deeper into the story and to find the complete story, not just the partial truth. These accounts at different points in her life coupled with stories about being confronted with stereotypes in university, all are used by Ngozi to convey to the audience how everyone regardless of age, nationality, and culture, are all victims of the incomplete pictures that the media paints. She uses her personal life to her advantage to make the audience empathize with her because they may have been in similar situations as she has. Her presentation makes the viewer stop and ponder about all the times they have been susceptible to judging someone without knowing enough about them. In a way, throughout the presentation, she becomes more approachable as she talks about her experiencing something that a lot of people experience in different ways.
Though the two TED talks had different topics and types of support for their claims, they did have some things in common with their presentations. Both their talks addressed the ignorance of people and the consequences when people don’t take the time to learn more about something. For Gates, when people don’t prepare for a virus-like COVID-19, it can have horrendous effects, and for Ngozi, when someone doesn’t research all perspectives and aspects of a topic, a person is prone to misjudge someone else. The presenters also both used humor at some point in their presentation. Gates mentioned the popular movie Contagion admitted that there isn’t a group of handsome epidemiologists on-call while Ngozi made the audience laugh with her snappy comebacks when people in her life made assumptions about her. Plus, like Ngozi, Gates talked about the media as well. He mentioned how the coverage and reports on Ebola were not accurate and delayed so thus people had an incorrect idea of what Ebola was and how to react to it.
These two TED Talks were some of the most persuasive presentations I have seen in a while. For my symposium, I plan to incorporate data and maybe my calculations and graphs as well as the recounts of my personal growth over this past year and in my life. I usually try to incorporate humor in a presentation depending on the type of audience I have. I always want to lighten the mood and engage everyone; it makes everyone’s time more enjoyable. For the symposium, I want to use the TED talk style although I don’t know if it is possible to present slides from home. I have high hopes nonetheless. I don’t know if I will be as good as Gates or Ngozi but I will try my best.
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