Why capitalism entails a moral obligation to share your wealth | Ken Lagone"A rising tide lifts all boats," says Ken Langone, one of the co-founders of Home Depot as he makes his case for capitalism being the being the best economic model. He co-founded The Home Depot with his friends Arthur Blank, Bernard Marcus, Pat Farrah, and Ron Brill back in 1978, and today it's a multibillion-dollar company. And while he agrees that capitalism has its downsides, he says that he can point to 3,000 people who started out with an entry-level position at a Home Depot that rose through the ranks and are now millionaires.
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Very simply, I could not have accomplished what I’ve accomplished, including my own net worth and including job creation, if I was raised in a country where free enterprise was not encouraged and free enterprise was not the order of the day. It wouldn’t happen.
There are people who legitimately can say they’re self-made, they did it all themselves.
I went out of my way in the book to point out the exact opposite, in my case and only my case, that I was anything but self-made.
I can think back all the way to my childhood to the people that were there that helped me, that encouraged me, that stimulated me, that motivated me, that picked me up when I was down, and maybe sat on me when I got a little too full of myself.
So I make reference to “self-made” as it relates to me and me alone. I am not self-made. That is not false humility, that’s just the truth.
I think a good start is: define self-made. That’s a good start. And I don’t want to go there because we could spend five hours arguing what it means.
In my case I know that, where I am today, without question, only happened because along the way I had any number of episodes in my life where if it weren’t for the intervention of somebody else, where it weren’t for the encouragement, whether it was my mom and dad, whether it was my wife, whether it was a professor, whether it was the guy that ran the liquor store in Roslyn, I can go on and on and on, I know each of those episodes was a building block for where I am today.
And I go out of my way not to determine who is self-made and who is not; I think that’s for each person to decide themselves.
I’m very comfortable saying that I have literally hundreds of thousands of people – you look at Home Depot, for example, I’m one of the cofounders. Why are we so successful? We’re so successful principally because when you go to a Home Depot store you feel wanted, you feel “I can get help”, you feel like these people care about you. There’s 400,000 of them! They all helped to make me successful.
Without them Home Depot would not have been the successful it is, and probably I wouldn’t have been known, and probably I wouldn’t have written the book.
Look, I’m not stretching, I’m saying I look at the thing objectively, but again I swear off saying who is “self-made” and who’s “not self-made”. That’s all.
Well, I think capitalism will always do better than everything else for a variety of reasons. One, there is a downside, in other words nothing is certain and there’s a price to pay in failure in capitalism. You lose your business, your business doesn’t succeed, whatever.
The other thing is capitalism I think is a dynamic effort that can result—Bernie, Arthur and I and Pat Farrah founded Home Depot. Our hard work, our creativity, our ability to raise the money to start the company, all those things has resulted in 400,000 people having great jobs today.
But a better number for me: we have 3000 kids—and by the way, so nobody gets offended I’m 82, if you’re under 82 you’re a kid—So we have 3000 kids who started working for us fresh out of high school, didn’t go to college, pushing carts in, that’s the entry-level job, pushing carts in from the parking lot, we have 3000 kids today who are multimillionaires. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. It’s a shared effort and the results should be shared.
I happen to think we all live better—the old saying a rising tide lifts all boats, I happen to say all of us live better in this country because we have a capitalistic system, a capitalistic system underpinning the whole nation.
I would say that most of us that have benefited mightily by capitalism I think there’s a moral obligation on our part to make sure we bring as many people to the party with us as we can.
Now, this is not judgmental, I’m not suggesting for a minute that what I do is the “right thing” and what everybody else does is the “wrong thing”, what I’m saying is simply this: I feel a strong moral imperative to share my wealth.
Can you be happy all the time and still grow as a person? | Benjamin HardyProblems can be overcome by just thinking about them differently. Often, says Benjamin Hardy, people think problems are going to be far worse than they actually are. It's like hesitation before jumping into a pool. You forget that you can adapt quickly and learn to enjoy, and focus on the negative. It's a small change in your outlook, but a big change in your brain.
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Benjamin Hardy: So basically for most of psychology’s history the focus has been on what’s negative about people, on diagnosing illnesses, on depression, on problems, and since like the late ‘90s there’s been a huge emphasis on “positive psychology”, on studying what’s “right” about people, on studying human flourishing.
And kind of the fundamental root of most of positive psychology research is the assumption of what’s called hedonism, which is basically the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain.
And so there’s a lot of researchers in the positive psychology space or there’s a few who feel like positive psychology research is very limited because basically what one of the core assumptions is is that positive emotions lead to positive outcomes.
And that kind of goes against a lot of different types of philosophies, philosophies like Stoicism or Buddhism or even more spiritual practices that talk about how sometimes actually negative experience, sometimes negative emotions produce some of the best outcomes. And so solely avoiding negative, challenging, difficult emotions is probably actually one of the worst things a person can do who’s seeking growth.
There’s a really good poem by Douglas Malik and he says—he’s talking about trees but he says—“Good timber does not grow with ease / the stronger the wind the stronger the trees / the further sky the greater length / the more the storm the more the strength.”
And so essentially strong trees, they require difficult circumstances, they require strenuous environments that force them to adapt deeper roots and so if you’re always avoiding negative or challenging emotions there’s obviously going to be some problems internally. You’re not dealing with things - so I think there’s a lot of problems with positive psychology and kind of the fundamental assumptions.
Anticipation is a huge component of psychology. Basically what most people – most people anticipate that an event or a thing is going to be more intense than it actually is.
It’s why people wait a long time to jump into a swimming pool is because they think that it’s going to be an intense experience. And so if you anticipate that a task is going to be difficult you’re probably going to procrastinate it or you’re going to put it off or you’re going to have emotional challenges going into it.
But if you just recognize that you’re going to adapt to it very quickly, once you actually get into it motivation kicks in. So that’s another one of the things that holds people back is that they feel like they have to be motivated first, when basically motivation happens once you start doing something.
Action precedes motivation.
So basically a Harvard researcher, and I forget his name off the top of my head, but he says that it’s a lot easier to act your way into feeling than to feel your way into acting.
And so if you spend a lot of time anticipating an event it’s going to hold you from doing it, but if you just actually start doing it motivation will kick in, you’ll start to actually get accustomed to it, you’ll start to develop a capacity, you’ll adapt to it. So I think it can hold people back, but obviously a positive anticipation can be a great thing.
So there’s like this idea that you’re always changing but that doesn’t mean you’re always growing.
So if you want to grow you must change, but just because you changed does it mean you grew or you became better.
So you could obviously change your habits, and I think that as human beings we’re always adapting and changing based on what’s around us.
So we’re always replacing old habits with the new ones, but that doesn’t mean that you’re creating positive habits.
If you want to create positive habits—I mean it doesn’t always have to be hard, but I think generally it’s going to be somewhat difficult, it’s going to take growing out of that.
So yeah, I would say yeah, you can change habits through a hedonistic perspective, it doesn’t mean that you might be developing the ones you want.
Comics belong in the classroom | Gene Luen YangComic books and graphic novels belong in every teacher's toolkit, says cartoonist and educator Gene Luen Yang. Set against the backdrop of his own witty, colorful drawings, Yang explores the history of comics in American education -- and reveals some unexpected insights about their potential for helping kids learn.
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How to start a conversation about suicide | Jeremy ForbesIs there someone in your life dealing with anxiety, depression or thoughts of suicide -- but is too ashamed to talk about it? Jeremy Forbes saw this happening around him, and now he's on a mission to teach people how to start a conversation about it. In this deeply personal talk, Forbes shares his approach to helping a group of traditionally silent men in his community open up about their struggles. "We can all be life preservers," he says.
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How to turn a group of strangers into a team | Amy EdmondsonBusiness school professor Amy Edmondson studies "teaming," where people come together quickly (and often temporarily) to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges.
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How I made friends with reality | Emily LevineWith her signature wit and wisdom, Emily Levine meets her ultimate challenge as a comedian/philosopher: she makes dying funny. In this personal talk, she takes us on her journey to make friends with reality -- and peace with death. Life is an enormous gift, Levine says: "You enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back."
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Does your job match your personality? | Jordan PetersonRead more at BigThink.com:
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It’s not that easy to categorize jobs but here’s a categorization scheme that’s kind of general but that’s actually accurate.
Okay, so the first dimension is complexity. Jobs range from simple to complex. A simple job is one that you can learn and then repeat. You don’t need high levels of cognitive function for a simple job. If you have high levels of cognitive function you’ll learn the job faster, but once you learn it you won’t necessarily do it better.
Now, a complex job is one where the requirements change on an ongoing basis. So most managerial jobs are like that, and all executive jobs are like that. And that requires a high level of general cognitive ability. That’s the best predictor of success in complex jobs. Okay, so that’s axis number one.
Axis number two is creative/entrepreneurial versus managerial/administrative. Okay, so for creative/entrepreneurial jobs you need people who are high in the personality trait “openness to experience,” Big Five personality trait that’s associated with lateral and divergent thinking. Those are creative types.
And for managerial and administrative jobs, and those are jobs that are more algorithmic—So imagine the guardrails. You’re a train on a track and you want to go down the track fast. You don’t have to be creative to go down a track that’s (already laid down) fast. You have to be conscientious. And so the best personality predictor for managerial and administrative jobs is trait “conscientiousness”.
Okay, so there’s a tension in organizations between lateral and divergent thinking and efficient movement forward.
Now if you know what you’re doing, what you want is conscientious people. Because if you know what you’re doing you should just do it as efficiently as you can. But the problem is is the world changes around you unexpectedly.
And so if you don’t have people who can think divergently when the marketplace shifts on you—which it most certainly will—then you don’t have anybody who can figure out where to lay new tracks. Now it’s really, really difficult for people, for corporations to get the balance between the entrepreneurial/creative types and the managerial/administrative types correct.
And what I think happens—and I don’t know this for sure and the research on this isn’t clear yet—What seems to happen is that when a company originates the creative/entrepreneurial types predominate, and they have to be flexible and move laterally to get the company established to begin with and take risks and break rules and do all sorts of things that conscientious people are much less likely to be able to tolerate (let alone think up).
But as the company establishes itself the managerial/administrative types pour in and take over. But if they take over too much then the company gets so rigid it can’t— it has no flexibility.
Okay, so the first thing you need to do to manage a large enterprise is to understand that these are actually different people.
So first of all everyone is NOT creative. That’s a lie.
So we established this measurement instrument called the creative achievement questionnaire which is very widely used in creativity research now. And what you see – so what it does is it breaks down creativity into 13 dimensions – entrepreneurial, architectural, literary, dramatic, inventions, et cetera, business, you can imagine—Painting, et cetera.
You imagine the 13 potential dimensions of creativity. And then it ranks order levels of creativity from “Zero, I have no training or talent in this area,” to “Ten, I have an international reputation in this area.”
And then we plotted the scores. This is the distribution. It’s not a normal distribution. Sixty percent of the people who take the creative achievement questionnaire score zero. A tiny minority have high scores, and that’s a pareto distribution. It’s a classic distribution of human productivity. So you always get a pareto distribution, not a normal distribution when you’re talking about productivity. Creative people are a distinct minority. They’re a different kind of person, and they’re a pain. They’re a pain because you can’t evaluate them. It’s like, how the hell do you evaluate a creative person? Because they keep changing the rules of evaluation! So they’re a handful to manage, and they’re always trying to play a new game. Well that’s a real pain if you want to get somewhere fast.
The shocking danger of mountaintop removal -- and why it must end | Michael HendryxResearch investigator Michael Hendryx studies mountaintop removal, an explosive type of surface coal mining used in Appalachia that comes with unexpected health hazards. In this data-packed talk, Hendryx presents his research and tells the story of the pushback he's received from the coal industry, advocating for the ethical obligation scientists have to speak the truth.
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What it's like to be the child of immigrants | Michael RainMichael Rain is on a mission to tell the stories of first-generation immigrants, who have strong ties both to the countries they grew up in and their countries of origin. In a personal talk, he breaks down the mischaracterizations and limited narratives of immigrants and shares the stories of the worlds they belong to. "We're walking melting pots of culture," Rain says. "If something in that pot smells new or different to you, don't turn up your nose. Ask us to share."
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Where joy hides and how to find it | Ingrid Fetell LeeCherry blossoms and rainbows, bubbles and googly eyes: Why do some things seem to create such universal joy? In this captivating talk, Ingrid Fetell Lee reveals the surprisingly tangible roots of joy and shows how we all can find -- and create -- more of it in the world around us.
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On the show "Friends", why a harassment claim was dismissed from court | Nell ScovellRead more at BigThink.com:
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Nell Scovell: So in 2006 an assistant who worked on Friends, a writer’s assistant, sued the show for harassment. It wasn’t physical/sexual harassment. I think it was verbal harassment. And what that show was able to prove to the judge was that all that lewd talk in the room did sometimes lead to story ideas.
I think there was a story where Ross is like masturbating when one of the women walks in, and he switches the channel so it looks like he’s masturbating to a shark video. And that starts a whole thing, and that came out of people in the room talking about jerking off. So in that sense the TV writers’ room isn’t like most workplaces, and that’s I think sometimes hard for people outside to understand; that it can get personal and it can get weird and sexual, and sometimes all three things at the same time.
But the judge said that the assistant had not been in any danger and that they could justify this language.
People have, I think, misread that in Hollywood to mean “you can say anything you want in the room,” which is not true.
And I think if you want to have a non-hostile work environment you obviously have to be aware of other people’s feelings and levels of comfort and making sure that everybody, you know, feels that the show is mission-based and you’re all working hard to make the best, funniest episode you can.
When you’re on a set you know the difference when a crew member brushes by you because you’re in some tight cranny and when a crew member presses up against you in a sexual way. And I feel the writers’ room it’s the same thing.
I know when someone I work with is making a joke—is just commenting on a woman’s body in order to make a joke or a man’s body in order to make a joke—and when it gets threatening.
So I’ve gotten more vocal as I’ve gotten older at going to people outside the writers’ room and saying, “Okay, that made me feel uncomfortable.”
Now the problem with that is Hollywood is one of those places where if someone acts inappropriately and you call them on it, YOU’RE the asshole. So that’s one of the things that I would love to see change, where you could tell someone, “That made me feel uncomfortable,” and instead of them being defensive and saying, “I was joking,” they just went “Oh, well thank you for telling me. I’ll be more aware of that in the future.”
What duck sex teaches us about humans, incels, and feminists | Richard PrumDid you know that male ducks often force sex on female ducks that aren't their mates, to the point where female ducks' genitalia has evolved to try and counteract what biologists have politely termed "forced copulation"? The lady ducks have found a way to shut out sexual predators. In other words: the power of the female's choice has literally advanced the species.
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Richard Prum: According to aesthetic evolution, animals are agents in their own evolution; that is, through their choices they end up shaping their own species.
One of the implications of this idea is a new perspective on what happens when mate choice is infringed or violated by sexual violence or by coercion in animal species.
One prominent example of this, from our own research, is on duck sex.
Ducks are unusual among birds in having both a typical mate choice situation—where male and females pair up on the basis of display and preferences—and simultaneously other individuals that force copulations on female ducks as they approach reproduction.
So what that means is that as the eggs are being laid, females have to defend themselves from forced copulations by males. Now “forced copulation” is the word that biologists use now, but for over a century biologists used the word “rape” in biology.
Now that was abandoned back in the 1970s in response to the feminist movement and Susan Brownmiller and her work Against Our Will, proposing and articulating a specifically social context for rape in humans.
This led to the creation of a euphemism, “forced copulation,” in biology.
Unfortunately, articulating sexual violence in the animal world with these euphemistic terms has led to scientists losing track of the fact that forced copulation is against the will of the ducks.
And by taking the aesthetic perspective and trying to understand what it is that individual females—in this case ducks—want we have arrived at a new perspective on what it means when they don’t get what they want. So in some ways using socially sensitive euphemisms has led to imprecision or fuzziness in the science.
In the case of duck sex what we find is that males can force themselves on females because they’re among the few birds that still have a penis. And what we find in ducks is, as a result of female resistance and male sexual violence, we find a co-evolutionary arms race between male capacity to force and female resistance.
In this case it takes place in the form of a genital arms race: the males evolve more elaborate and more elaborately armed penises, and the females evolve convoluted vaginal morphologies that exclude the penis during forced population.
So among the many weird things of duck penises is that they’re counter-clockwise coiled. Well, the female vagina (in ducks that have high rates of resistance) actually coils in the opposite direction, so they have literally evolved an “anti-screw” device in their vaginal tract that obstructs the intromission of the penis during forced population.
What that means is that what that tea party Senate candidate Todd Akin from Missouri said about women “have a way of shutting that whole thing down” in reference to rape is actually true of ducks.
But in a way that exposes something fundamentally new and interesting about evolutionary biology, which is that sexual autonomy matters to animals.
Freedom of choice is not merely a political concept discovered by suffragettes and feminists in the 19th and 20th centuries, but is actually an evolved feature of the social and sexual lives of other species, especially in ducks.
How does this work? Well if the female mates with the male she prefers, that is she gets the green head and the “quack, quack, quack,” that she likes, and then her male offspring will share those traits and be sexually preferred by other female ducks who have coevolved those same aesthetic preferences.
But if she’s forcibly fertilized, then her male offspring will either inherit a random trait or one that she specifically rejected, which means that her offspring will be less attractive to other females.
So anything the female duck can do to prevent forced fertilization, through physical resistance or behavior, will evolve because she will be rewarded with more grandkids.
So what this means is that aesthetic norms, the shared ideas about what is beautiful among ducks, gives female ducks the evolutionary leverage to advance their freedom of choice in the environment of persistent sexual coercion and sexual violence. This is really stunning.
3 ways America is doing politics all wrongWhen was the last time the U.S. saw meaningful innovation in its political system? Economist and author Dambisa Moyo thinks politics needs to keep up with every other industry and evolve. She outlines three proposals that would help American politicians be better at their jobs, drawing on examples from Singapore, the U.K., Mexico and Brazil. First up, Moyo suggests—brace yourself—that American politicians earn higher salaries and receive bonuses based on metrics like increased life expectancy and GDP growth. The U.S. president earns $400,000 a year. In comparison, the prime minister of Singapore earns $1.4 million. Moyo's second recommendation is to set minimum standards for entry into politics: experience in sectors beyond politics should be more heavily valued. And lastly, she recommends longer terms in office to avoid the perils of short-term thinking and counterproductive voter appeasement.
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So I am an eternal optimist about how and why we should continue to innovate every aspect of our lives. And that’s science and technology imbuing more efficiencies in how we run businesses, but also how we deliver healthcare and education. So as far as I’m concerned I’ve adopted this same lens as we think about the political process.
So just to give you some flavor for some of the proposals, on the politician side I consider the argument that we should perhaps increase the pay of politicians and actually force them to justify their compensation. Singapore is a great example of this model. In Singapore the head of state, the prime minister earns over $1.4 million a year in compensation. But, to me, what’s even more interesting is that the ministers who are responsible for education and healthcare and infrastructure, et cetera, earn 30 to 40 percent bonuses based on certain metrics and outcomes—So how GDP performs, whether life expectancy increases, whether inflation declines.
I think that that is a very interesting model for us to explore because I think it could impose discipline. By the way a discipline around reward for performance which we already see, and it applies to many of us as we work in the private sector. So certainly worth of a consideration. I think that could actually force politicians to think a little bit more long term.
Another proposal on the politician side is to basically think about minimum standards for politicians. And this is an idea that really, for me, stuck out as I thought about how the British Parliament looked back in the 1950s and 60s.
In that period the average age was higher, on average about 60 years old. But also the skill set was incredibly varied. They had teachers, lawyers, doctors, farmers. And so people had had other careers and had a better understanding of how the economy works because they came to become parliamentarians having experienced different sectors of the economy. Today, some of the citations that I reference in the book, the average age is closer to 40 years old and many politicians actually have no experience except having been professional politicians. And I think that can be quite a disservice in terms of not really understanding the complexity of how an economy works.
A third – I’ll just very quickly give you one more example of what we might consider in terms of politicians is we might think about extending the terms of political office.
This is essentially to get away from this idea of having elections every two years as we do in the United States. Mexico is an example of a country where the president is in office only once for six years. And so I think you get away from this desire of politicians to constantly court or tempt and try to seduce voters with policies that may be short term appealing but over the long term incredibly damaging for the economy (and ultimately for generations to come).
Brazil, the senators have eight- to nine-year terms.
Again it’s really picking on this theme of extending the thinking to better match the economic challenges and economic headwinds that the global economy faces.
"You Found Me" | Helen GilletCellist and singer Helen Gillet mixes her classical training, New Orleans-based jazz roots and free improvisational skills to perform her own eclectic music. In a powerful, melodious performance, she plays her song "You Found Me."
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Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it | Yuval Noah HarariIn a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism -- and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy. Appearing as a hologram live from Tel Aviv, Harari warns that the greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient and capable of control. "The enemies of liberal democracy hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy," Harari says. "It is the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure they don't become weapons." (Followed by a brief conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson)
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Nick Offerman defines good luck—and how to make your ownNick Offerman's new film is Hearts Beat Loud, in cinemas June 8. Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXNOg_SK7Vs
and visit https://www.heartsbeatloudmovie.com for all the details.
To explain what good luck is and how to create your own, Nick Offerman leans on the wisdom of Tom Waits, Socrates, Tom Jefferson and Nick Offerman. Luck is one part preparation and one part opportunity. And contrary to popular notions of luck as fate, both preparation and opportunity are things you can actively create. To achieve either, however, it's important to trust yourself and your abilities, and to take risks that may take you out of your comfort zone.
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What are my feelings about serendipity versus gumption, luck versus elbow grease. When do you give up on your dream? When do you throw in the towel, et cetera?
There’s an old quote that I attribute to Tom Waits but I believe it might go back to Socrates. “Luck is when opportunity meets with preparation.” And I’ve always found that deeply moving because Megan and I talk a lot, my wife and I talk a lot about how lucky we are.
We’re both blessed with whatever it is: She’s beautiful and an incredible actor and smart as a whip and a really talented singer. I can carry a great deal of luggage and I can experience extreme temperatures for a long time without any sustenance. We have our gifts, and somehow our paths have taken us to places where people said “We were looking for someone who can carry luggage. We’re doing a play about a donkey. You’re the guy.”
And so I mean, so much serendipity plays into it. I lived, I chose to live like an asshole for some years and it’s a tough choice. It borders on irresponsibility. I would be just this side of broke. So sometimes I’d run out of money and I’d have to borrow a month’s rent from my friend. But I would then find carpentry work and pay my friend back. So I was just this side of being a deadbeat. I was flirting with deadbeatism.
And it’s a big question in Hollywood, and a lot of people make a lot of money off of people’s dreams.
You can pay a great deal of money for headshots and for acting classes and coaching and life coaching and personal training and all that stuff. And they’ll all tell you – and there are really gross people who claim to have the secret. “Come to my acting workshop and I’ll have three casting directors there from, you know, one of them was an assistant on 50 Shades of Gray Matter.”
And whatever the case may be, it’s a question people wrestle with all the time. Will I ever make it? Is it ever going to happen for me? When should I throw in the towel and move back to Cleveland and see my family and my children and my congregation, because I’m a priest with kids in Cleveland?
And so all I can say is it’s a very personal thing; to each their own. You’ve got to keep working hard. We’ve talked about having a discipline. If acting is your bag, you know, I always tell people if they say “How can I get my kid to where you are?”
I say take up woodworking but also find whatever stage, find the biggest stage you can that you can get onto and perform in front of an audience, whether you’re doing standup or theater or musicals or sketch comedy. Or start shooting stuff. Now we live in an age where you can literally start your own TV channel right now using your gadgets. And just let the world tell you. Shoot videos. Show them to people. And they’ll tell you if you should keep doing it.
And if you’re good, if something’s meant to happen when people see you on stage or they see your videos they’ll say “Holy, you know what? I’m going to somehow help you. That was amazing. You can tap dance, you can play the tuba. That face you make.” Whatever it is. “I’ve never seen anyone drink that much beer in 90 seconds. I’m going to call my friend. He has a show called Jackass. We’re going to get you on your way.” And so I mean I started in the theater. I was terrible at acting. I wanted to be an actor. I thought I had something that I could entertain people, so I got into theater school in Illinois and I was terrible! I couldn’t get cast—with good reason.
How Pakistani women are taking the internet back | Nighat DadTED Fellow Nighat Dad studies online harassment, especially as it relates to patriarchal cultures like the one in her small village in Pakistan. She tells the story of how she set up Pakistan's first cyber harassment helpline, offering support to women who face serious threats online. "Safe access to the internet is access to knowledge, and knowledge is freedom," she says. "When I fight for a woman's digital rights, I am fighting for equality."
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The age-old sharing economies of Africa -- and why we should scale them | Robert NeuwirthFrom rides to homes and beyond, we're sharing everything these days, with the help of digital tools. But as modern and high-tech as the sharing economy seems, it's been alive in Africa for centuries, according to author Robert Neuwirth. He shares fascinating examples -- like apprenticeships that work like locally generated venture capital and systems for allocating scarce water -- and says that if we can propagate and scale these models, they could help communities thrive from the bottom up.
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Why zero gravity is a myth: The amazing science of 'floating' astronauts | NASA's Michelle ThallerWhen we launched our 'Ask an astronomer' series with NASA's Michelle Thaller, one set of questions stood out from the pack. They arrived by way of the curious and clever students at Courthill Infant School, Poole in the south of England. Representing all the aspiring scientists in Dragonflies Class, Joshua, age 4, asks NASA's Michelle Thaller a brilliant question: "Why is there no gravity in space?" Here, Thaller explains that the term 'zero gravity' is actually a misnomer; despite astronauts appearing to float aboard the International Space Station and in outer space, there is, in fact, a small amount of gravity found everywhere in space—which is why microgravity is a more accurate term than 'zero gravity'. Astronauts aren’t actually floating in space, they’re free falling—and so are you and the whole of planet Earth. Michelle Thaller explains the very cool science of how orbits allow astronauts to seemingly defy gravity. You can follow Michelle Thaller on Twitter at @mlthaller.
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Joshua, you ask a really great question, “Why is there no gravity in space?” I bet you’ve seen pictures of the astronauts up in the space station and they’re floating around as if there’s no gravity at all. And this is actually a really interesting misconception about what’s going on with the astronauts. And it gets to one of my favorite questions in all of astronomy, and that is: what is an orbit?
What’s happening when astronauts are orbiting the earth? And why does it appear like there’s no gravity in space?
So to talk about why this is kind of a misconception, the astronauts are about 200 miles above the surface of the earth in the space station. The space station orbits around us about once every 90 minutes. And it’s not that they’re so far away from the earth that there’s no gravity, in fact if you built a skyscraper that was 200 miles tall and you were up on one of those top floors you might weigh a tiny little bit less, but you probably weigh at least about 80 percent what you normally would.
You’re really not that much farther away from the earth. So it’s not that they’re weightless because they’re in space and far away from the earth, they’re actually close enough to the earth to feel the gravitational pull of the earth itself. So what’s going on? Why are they floating around?
Well, this is what an orbit really is. We have to get spacecraft going very, very fast to put them into orbit. That’s why we put them on rockets. Rockets launch spacecraft and get them going very, very fast. And if you’re in orbit where the space station is, you’re traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour.
Now what happens to those astronauts is that they’re going very, very fast but they’re actually freely falling towards the earth.
The earth has gravity, and that gravity is pulling them down just the same as what would happen as if you dropped a ball. If you dropped a ball it would fall to the floor. The same thing is happening to the astronauts; they are falling towards the surface of the earth.
But here’s a cool thing, they’re going so fast they keep missing the earth as they fall. And that’s the definition of an orbit.
Now think about it this way: I talked about dropping a ball and the ball just falls straight down, what would happen if I put the ball in a little cannon and shot it out? The ball would start to drop towards the earth the minute it left the cannon, but the cannon has given it some velocity, and so the ball might go a hundred yards, it might actually go a hundred yards before it fell because the cannon gave it that velocity.
Now let’s take an even bigger cannon, let’s take a huge cannon that can shoot things many, many miles. So you shoot the ball out, the ball is still falling freely towards the Earth all the time, but now it goes farther because you’ve given it more velocity. And maybe with a really big cannon you can shoot a ball a hundred miles.
What about with a rocket? With a rocket you could get something going so fast, up to 17,000 miles an hour, that as it fell freely towards earth, earth would keep curving away under it and it would keep missing it.
That’s what an orbit is, and that’s why you need a rocket to get into orbit. You need to get yourself going so fast that, as you fall back towards Earth, you keep missing it.
So the astronauts are not weightless because there’s no gravity in space; the astronauts are falling the same way a skydiver is falling freely through space, it’s just that they’re going so fast they keep missing the earth.
They are all the time falling towards the earth going fast enough that they keep missing it.
Scientists must be free to learn, to speak and to challenge | Kirsty Duncan"You do not mess with something so fundamental, so precious, as science," says Kirsty Duncan, Canada's first Minister of Science. In a heartfelt, inspiring talk about pushing boundaries, she makes the case that researchers must be free to present uncomfortable truths and challenge the thinking of the day -- and that we all have a duty to speak up when we see science being stifled or suppressed.
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The doctors, nurses and aid workers rebuilding Syria | Rola HallamLocal humanitarians are beacons of light in the darkness of war, says humanitarian aid entrepreneur and TED Fellow Rola Hallam. She's working to help responders on the ground in devastated communities like Syria, where the destruction of health care is being used as a weapon of war. One of her campaigns achieved a global first: a crowdfunded hospital. Since it opened in 2017, the aptly named Hope Hospital has treated thousands of children. "Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others," Hallam says. "We can match their courage by not looking away or turning our backs."
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Why truly successful people don’t wait their turn | Alex BanayanWhat's the difference between making it and faking it? Getting it done. Author Alex Banayan walks us through what actually separates the pros from the rest of the world: it's less about networking and more about finding your way in. Knowing people helps, but it takes a certain mindset to walk into an industry uninvited.
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One of the best pieces of advice I got on this journey was the difference between a linear life and an exponential life.
A linear life is: you get an internship; you get a job; you get a promotion; you save up for a vacation, and you just go step by step slowly and predictively your whole way through.
And again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to be clear with yourself about what you want.
An exponential life is about deciding that you’re not going to wait around, you’re not going to hope someone just hands you what you’re hoping for, it’s about grabbing onto it for what you want.
So over the course of this seven year journey, whether it was tracking down Bill Gates, which took two years, or Lady Gaga, which took three years, in every industry possible—Maya Angelo for poetry, Jane Goodall for science, Pitbull, Quincy Jones, Tim Ferriss, Larry King—they all couldn’t have been more different on the outside. But as I heard their stories and started to dissect how they launched their careers, I realized there was this common melody to everyone’s story.
And the analogy that came to me—because I was 21 at the time—was that it’s sort of like getting into a nightclub.
So there’s always three ways in: there’s the first door, the main entrance where the line curves around the block, where 99 percent of people wait in line hoping to get in.
And then there’s the second door, the VIP entrance where the billionaires or celebrities go through.
And school has this way of making us feel like those are the only two ways in: you’re either born into it or you wait your turn like everybody else. What I’ve learned is that there is always, always the third door, and it’s the door where you jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door 100 times, crack open the window, go through the kitchen, there’s always a way in.
And it doesn’t matter if that’s how Gates sold his first piece of the software or how Lady Gaga got her first record deal, they all took the third door.
So The Third Door isn’t a prescription or a recipe, it’s really a mindset.
So if you look at Steven Spielberg, the way he did it was: he was rejected from film school, so instead of giving up on his dream he decided he would take his education into his own hands.
So the way the story goes, according to Spielberg, is that one day when he was around 19 years old he jumped onto a tour bus at Universal Studios, rides around the lot on this tour, jumps off the bus, hides in the bathroom, waits for the bus to drive away and starts walking around the lot.
And as he’s walking around he bumps into this man named Chuck Silvers who works at Universal Television. And Chuck Silvers sees this kid and says, “What are you doing here?” And Spielberg tells him his dream. And they end up talking for a while and Silver goes, “Do you want to come back on the lot?” And Spielberg goes, “That would be a dream.”
A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate RaworthWhat would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? "Like a doughnut," says Oxford economist Kate Raworth. In a stellar, eye-opening talk, she explains how we can move countries out of the hole -- where people are falling short on life's essentials -- and create regenerative, distributive economies that work within the planet's ecological limits.
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The truth about unwanted arousal | Emily NagoskiSex educator Emily Nagoski breaks down one of the most dangerous myths about sex and introduces us to the science behind arousal nonconcordance: when there's a disconnect between physical response and the experience of pleasure and desire. Talking about such intimate, private moments can feel awkward or difficult, yet in this straightforward talk Nagoski urges all of us to share this crucial information with someone -- judges, lawyers, partners, kids. "With every brave conversation we have, we make the world that little bit better," says Nagoski. (This talk contains mature content.)
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Why diversity and inclusion aren’t about race but everyone thinks they are | Michael BushWhat makes a job a great place to work? A sense of equity and ownership, says Michael Bush, the CEO of the conveniently named Great Place to Work. They're a global consulting and analytics firm that produces the annual Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, the 100 Best Workplaces for Women list, the Best Workplaces for Diversity list, and dozens of other distinguished workplace rankings around the world.
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We choose not to talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. We’re not running from the topic.
We actually feel like we’re addressing it head on using analytics and revenue and profit to drive the conversation versus some moral imperative. And what that means is that it’s not about fairness and equality alone, it’s about equity, which is about people getting – if you treat someone as a person they need a little more of something than perhaps someone else.
And actually if you treat everyone the same you are not going to get the best out of everyone.
So equality can be used, in fact, to exclude people and to make the environment a place that certain groups of people don’t want to be in because you’re treating everyone the same. That’s just not the way humans work.
You know, I have two kids. One of them might need (when they were young) violin lessons. Another one might need dental care. Well the dental care costs a lot more than the violin lessons, but they both got something that they needed but it wasn’t necessarily ever equal. But it’s addressing people where they are.
We also find that diversity and inclusion, once you bring up those words tension goes up in the room, because what happens is when you say that what people think is race but they don’t want to talk about it because they don’t know how to talk about that.
So they awkwardly talk about diversity and inclusion and the problem that needs to be addressed gets diluted. We begin to talk about – we can’t talk about race so then we just say “people of color” and “people majority” because we can’t say “race”.
And then we talk about men and women because that’s easier than race. And then what about the disabled? “Oh well we can’t really bring that up.” And all these buttons go off that stops the conversation.
What we pursue is called a Great Place to Work For All. That’s the way we do it. So we think every employee regardless of who they are, what they are, or what they do for the organization should have a great experience at work. So that includes everyone. It does not separate anyone to say, “One group should have a really great experience and one can have a less great experience.”
It means all.
It turns into something positive, and people then get engaged and they go, “Yeah, it should be a great place to work for me too. Absolutely. For everybody here, so let’s talk about how to do that.”
And you find the whole room starts to lean forward. Rather than “the other topic”, people can’t wait to get out of the room. And talking about the other topic for, you know, I heard that conversation for about 40 years. It hasn’t gotten us very far at all.
What we should want is for everybody to be like it is at the top of an organization. Excited about coming to work and doing something that you really, really care about. You’re paying for it. It doesn’t cost you any more money, so you’re just getting more for what you’re paying for. Most businesspeople get that. They get it and they go okay, what’s getting in the way?
And we have the analytics to help them know what’s getting in the way.
It’s the way they’re being spoken to gets in the way. It’s if you’re listening to them or not, you know.
Are you sincerely caring about what they’re saying and using it to innovate and to make business decisions? We asked, “Does management involve you in their decision making? Do you feel informed about how management makes decisions?” The reason we ask these is so we can understand what a person is experiencing, and we know a certain type of experience that makes people say, “I love it here,” because we asked “Do you plan to work here for a long long time?” and people will say yes.
And you can predict it based on whether people are listening to them, whether people are welcoming them, whether people are rewarding them, whether people are recognizing them, whether people address them personally rather than an employee in mass communications.
You can actually predict these two things, and then you see it in the result of the company in terms of the employee experience the number is very high, and we’ve proven that the revenue growth of the company, we have a hunch it’s going to be higher than others, and we look at the data and, in fact, that is true.
Is human nature evil? Or is the violence of nature to blame? | Steven PinkerWhen we see problems in the world, we're quick to blame someone—anyone—who should be providing peace, love, and harmony: politicians, celebrities, parents, etc. But the universe actually bends toward chaos and decay. That's the second law of thermal dynamics. And the most we humans can do is stave off the inevitability of decline through the organization of resources and information. So next time you're feeling particularly outraged, just remember that it's an uphill battle that civilization is fighting.
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As Bertolt Brecht said, “Grub first, then ethics.”
A lot of people have an expectation that society ought to work in uniform harmony and affluence, and any deviation from that is an outrage that requires identifying which bad people made it possible.
And when I began Enlightenment Now I wanted to really orient the reader in a very different mindset about the human condition. Namely, as we find ourselves in the universe nothing is expected to work in our favor, beginning with what many scientists consider one of the most fundamental of scientific discoveries, namely the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.
Namely, that in a closed system—one that isn’t receiving inputs of energy or information—disorder naturally increases.
The ability to do useful work/life-enabling structure. Just because there are astronomically so many more ways for things to go wrong than things to go right by any definition of things going right. So right from the start we don’t have any right to expect that the universe is going to be particularly kind to us.
Indeed, the universe is not out to get us, but it just doesn’t care about us, and there’s a lot of ways for things to go wrong unless we deploy energy and information to carve out local zones of beneficial order that keep us alive and healthy and happy.
That’s a different way of just thinking about the human predicament, namely we constantly have to expend effort, intelligence, knowledge in order to make things work, and our background expectation should be that things fall apart.
It’s advances in energy capture that lead to the beneficial complexity of life.
Perhaps back to the axial age, the period of about 800 years in the first millennium B.C. which saw the emergence of a number of moralistic philosophies arising in different parts of the world around the same time.
The age of classical Greek philosophy, the age of the Hebrew prophets, of Confucius, of Buddha, a kind of uncanny coincidence seemingly of movements that went from merely propitiating gods and making sacrifices and begging him for victory and better weather and relief from misfortunes to a more universal system of human betterment, human flourishing.
So what led to this development seemingly in different parts of the world at the same time?
According to one hypothesis by a team of scholars including Ian Morris and Pascal Boyer and Nicolette Molnar, there were gains in energy capture in the ability to use the products of agriculture – oil and fiber and calories from food to allow for a priestly cast separate from the people who actually have to scratch out a living from the ground.
And also, once people’s minds are elevated from just putting a roof over their head—or to keeping the wolf at the door, where their next meal is coming from—they have the cognitive luxury to think about, “What’s it all about? Why are we here? What do we strive for?”
And according to this theory it was something as mundane—but really not mundane—as energy capture: Not mundane given that the second law of thermodynamics determines our fate unless we can push it back.
And so perhaps it’s not such a homely pedestrian explanation for how so many civilizations made this leap to further moral horizons.
What it's like to be a transgender dad | LB HannahsLB Hannahs candidly shares the experience of parenting as a genderqueer individual -- and what it can teach us about authenticity and advocacy. "Authenticity doesn't mean 'comfortable.' It means managing and negotiating the discomfort of everyday life," Hannahs says.
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The best teams have this secret weapon | Adam GrantBig stars might get all the attention, but they're not the reason a team succeeds. Organizational psychologist (and host of TED's podcast WorkLife) Adam Grant explains how the real stars -- on the court or at the office -- have one surprising trait in common.
Subscribe to WorkLife with Adam Grant: https://ApplePodcasts.com/WorkLife. In this series, Adam takes you inside some of the world's most unusual workplaces to discover the keys to happier, more productive work. Check out Season 1 on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
A playful solution to the housing crisis | Sarah MurrayFrustrated by her lack of self-determination in the housing market, Sarah Murray created a computer game that allows home buyers to design a house and have it delivered to them in modular components that can be assembled on-site. Learn how her effort is putting would-be homeowners in control of the largest purchase of their lives -- as well as cutting costs, protecting the environment and helping provide homes for those in need.
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What it takes to be racially literate | Priya Vulchi and Winona GuoOver the last year, Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo traveled to all 50 US states, collecting personal stories about race and intersectionality. Now they're on a mission to equip every American with the tools to understand, navigate and improve a world structured by racial division. In a dynamic talk, Vulchi and Guo pair the personal stories they've collected with research and statistics to reveal two fundamental gaps in our racial literacy -- and how we can overcome them.
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Which mental 'deficits' are really hidden strengths? | Heather HeyingThere are many different ways in which the brain is rewired differently than the norm. But Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist and former Professor at The Evergreen State College, is saying that these so-called differences are really strengths.
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Neurodiversity is a pretty new term, and I’m grateful—very grateful for it.
It gets to something that is absolutely real and has been hard to discuss before it existed.
That said, I’m not sure I have a perfect definition. It recognizes a fact that we are not singular, that we are not all identical, that we have a variation of brands, of connectivity, of aptitudes, of weaknesses, of blind spots, and of sensitivities, and of capabilities.
People on the autism spectrum who are very functional, in my experience, tend to have extraordinary analytical skills and also often, actually, insight into social interactions so long as they’re not the ones participating.
And so you have, I’ve had a number of autistic students actually point out to me dynamics that were emerging in classrooms that I hadn’t yet seen, and once they were pointed out I could see, and these are the same students who have a very hard time recognizing when it is or is not time to speak or get up or walk through the middle of the classroom and such.
There are a number of ways to be neurodiverse.
We have names for some conditions that actually represent ends of continuum.
Dyslexia is a big one. These are going to sound like they’re coming out of left field, but color blindness, left-handedness... in each of those cases being what in evolutionary biology we call the non-dominant phenotype.
Sorry. I’m a lefty. That’s the one of those that I belong to as a group. And about ten percent of people across all cultures (that have been studied) are left-handed. It’s a persistent, stable, rare phenotype, which suggests that it’s adaptive, that it’s persistent, it’s complex, and it provides the different wiring of the brain associated with being a left-hander provides benefit in the social group in which left-handers show up.
I mean we can put together analyses for why being a left-hander might allow you to approach a physical problem differently than a right-hander would have a harder time solving, but the different wiring of the brain allows for different approaches as well.
Similarly with color blindness that it might be really easy to say, “Well, okay, that just is going to give you some ability to see past color and to see patterns that aren’t color based,” perhaps, but I suspect that there’s wiring in the brain that is associated with color blindness that also allows for enhanced abilities that are different from those who are color-sighted.
Dyslexia for sure. Dyslexia is obviously a very modern condition because writing is a very modern condition. So as an evolutionary biologist when I say modern I mean thousands of years. So dyslexia is modern in terms of thousands of years, and language was always about sound and never about writing until recently, and so the lessened ability—it’s almost never an inability, but the lessened ability—to process written symbols into meaning in your head looks to me like it’s a trade-off relationship with the ability to engage in real time and speech. And that’s not to say that all of us can’t learn through practice to be better at any number of these skills, but that being born with what the world is calling a deficit is almost always going to exist in a trade-off relationship with some often hidden strength.
Machines playing God: How A.I. will overcome humans | Max TegmarkAI needs thousands of pictures in order to correctly identify a dog from a cat, whereas human babies and toddlers only need to see each animal once to know the difference. But AI won't be that way forever, says AI expert and author Max Tegmark, because it hasn't learned how to self-replicate its own intelligence. However, once AI learns how to master AGI—or Artificial General Intelligence—it will be able to upgrade itself, thereby being able to blow right past us.
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Max Tegmark: I define intelligence as how good something is at accomplishing complex goals. So let’s unpack that a little bit. First of all, it’s a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number like an IQ.
To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the “Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest AQ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics. It’s the same with intelligence.
So if you have a machine that’s pretty good at some tasks, these days it’s usually pretty narrow intelligence, maybe the machine is very good at multiplying numbers fast because it’s your pocket calculator, maybe it’s good at driving cars or playing Go.
Humans on the other hand have a remarkably broad intelligence. A human child can learn almost anything given enough time. Even though we now have machines that can learn, sometimes learn to do certain narrow tasks better than humans, machine learning is still very unimpressive compared to human learning. For example, it might take a machine tens of thousands of pictures of cats and dogs until it becomes able to tell a cat from a dog, whereas human children can sometimes learn what a cat is from seeing it once. Another area where we have a long way to go in AI is generalizing.
If a human learns to play one particular kind of game they can very quickly take that knowledge and apply it to some other kind of game or some other life situation altogether.
And this is a fascinating frontier of AI research now: How can we have machines—how can we can make them as good at learning from very limited data as people are?
And I think part of the challenge is that we humans aren’t just learning to recognize some patterns, we also gradually learn to develop a whole model of the world.
So if you ask “Are there machines that are more intelligent than people today,” there are machines that are better than us at accomplishing some goals, but absolutely not all goals.
AGI, artificial general intelligence, that’s the dream of the field of AI: to build a machine that’s better than us at all goals. We’re not there yet, but a good fraction of leading AI researchers think we are going to get there maybe in a few decades. And if that happens you have to ask yourself if that might lead to machines getting not just a little better than us, but way better at all goals, having super intelligence.
The argument for that is actually really interesting and goes back to the ‘60s, to the mathematician I. J. Goode, who pointed out that the goal of building an intelligent machine is in and of itself something that you can do with intelligence.
So once you get machines that are better than us at that narrow task of building AI, then future AIs can be built by not human engineers but by machines, except they might do it thousands or a million times faster. So in my book I explore the scenario where you have this computer called Prometheus, which has vastly more hardware than a human brain does, and it’s still very limited by its software being kind of dumb.
How to build (and rebuild) trust | Frances FreiTrust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress," Frei says.
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Is tech addictive? It won't be for long. | Joscha BachDo we want to be at the mercy of our devices, or do we want to be fulfilled? Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach explains how the big decision we're coming to in tech ethics will mimic another moment in tech history: the battle of the search engines. In the late 1990s, AltaVista was one of the world's most used search engines—at least until a "small and inconsequential" startup called Google came along. AltaVista served ads, and Google didn't (not back then). For the public, the choice was easy; there's a reason you "Google" the weather rather than "AltaVista" it. We face the same decision now: will we choose tech that harvests our attention and sells it, like highly addictive social media apps; or will we choose tech that is useful to us—products that help us achieve our own goals? "Right now we mostly build applications that utilize the cravings of people, that make them addicted. People start checking their smartphones every few seconds to see if a new email arrived. But this new email is not going to make them more happy and fulfilled." In the long run, says Bach, technology that aligns with what people want wins. As long as we want the right things, the days of addictive tech are numbered. Joscha Bach's latest book is Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures)
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Joscha Bach: I remember when the first search engines came around, and back then AltaVista was a very big thing. AltaVista tried to strike a balance between the inconveniences—in terms of advertising and so on that could put off the user—and the utility had for the user. So it would, for instance, mix search results with advertising.
And at this point Google came along. Google was very small and inconsequential, and nobody really took it seriously. But it did an amazing thing: it did give people exactly what they wanted. It gave them a pretty much ad-free experience. It gave them exactly the search results that they wanted, the best ones, the closest ones to what people wanted to have. And Google dramatically outperformed AltaVista. AltaVista disappeared.
That was an amazing insight, to see that if you are in the dramatically scalable economy, like the Internet, where you have the biggest amount of competition that you can possibly have, you need to build a product that is optimally aligned with the interest of the users—unless you manage to get some kind of monopoly and can drive out other competition.
And so when we build new products in that space we have to think about how to build the most useful product. Not necessarily just the product that is going to make the biggest amount of money, that is going to have the most efficient business model in some sense or the best business case. Eventually, it’s going to be the product that is getting the most use by people. And people will find out that they will use what is most useful to them. In the long run, that’s going to be the stuff that is not addictive, that is hygienic, that serves the actual needs, that makes them more happy and fulfilled. And right now we mostly build applications that utilize the cravings of people, that make them addicted. People start checking their smartphones every few seconds to see if a new email arrived. But this new email is not going to make them more happy and fulfilled. Instead, it takes away their attention.
So I believe the next big movement in how we build technical systems will be hygienic technology. It will be how to build systems that are careful with our attention and how we use it, and that is careful with our way of living and what we want to achieve with the tools that we are building.
Why you don’t like the sound of your own voice | Rébecca KleinbergerYour voice is indistinguishable from how other people see you, but your relationship with it is far from obvious. Rébecca Kleinberger studies how we use and understand our voices and the voices of others. She explains why you may not like the sound of your own voice on recordings, the differences between your outward, inward and inner voices -- and the extraordinary things you communicate without being aware of it.
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To design better tech, understand context | Tania DouglasWhat good is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment to people in Africa if it can't handle the climate there? Biomedical engineer Tania Douglas shares stories of how we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology -- and how a deeper understanding of the context where it's used can lead us to better solutions.
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It's time for the law to protect victims of gender violence | Laura L. DunnTo make accountability the norm after gender violence in the United States, we need to change tactics, says victims' rights attorney and TED Fellow Laura L. Dunn. Instead of going institution by institution, fighting for reform, we need to go to the Constitution and finally pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would require states to address gender inequality and violence. By ushering in sweeping change, Dunn says, "our legal system can become a system of justice, and #MeToo can finally become 'no more.'"
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3 proofs that debunk flat-Earth theory | NASA's Michelle ThallerHey flat Earthers, it's time to put your theory to bed once and for all! A curious stargazer by the name of Oscar has submitted a question to Big Think's 'Ask an astronomer' series with NASA's Michelle Thaller. Oscar wants to know: "What would be the easiest proof that the Earth isn’t flat, that I could come back with whenever I get challenged on this issue?" Thaller sets the record straight.
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So, Oscar, you asked the question, “What are some of the easiest ways that you can prove that the Earth is round?” Because apparently, this is something that we’re debating—I have no idea why.
That’s a hard thing for me to even start talking about because there are so many proofs that the Earth is round, it’s difficult to know where to start. And it’s not okay to think that the Earth is flat. This is not a viable argument.
I have friends who have been on the International Space Station, they have orbited the Earth once every 90 minutes; I've had personal experience with people who have been up in space and can see with their own eyes that the Earth is round. And of course, we‘ve taken all of these amazing pictures from space; they’re so beautiful, all those pictures of the Earth.
So I don’t really know what’s going on right now with this 'Earth is flat' thing, but I will tell you that this is one of the things I really enjoyed teaching my own astronomy class about because there are proofs all around you. It is not difficult to know that the Earth is round. In fact, people have known of this for way more than 2,000 years. The ancient Greeks actually had a number of really elegant, wonderful proofs that the earth was a sphere.
So let’s start from the simple to the slightly more complicated. One of the things you can see yourself, with a pair of binoculars, is if you actually go out to a lake and there are boats on that lake, the farther away a boat is the more the bottom of the boat will disappear, and you’ll basically just see the mast of the boat. And as a boat goes farther and farther away the last thing you will see is the very top of the mast of that boat, and that’s because the boat is actually going over the horizon that’s curved—and that means that as it goes farther and farther away you see less and less of the bottom of it, and more of the top of that. You can see that with binoculars by an ocean, by a lake, it’s really easy. That wouldn’t happen if the Earth were flat—you would simply see the boat getting smaller and smaller and smaller as it went farther away, but you’d be able to see the whole thing with the same proportions.
Now, another way that you can tell that we’re on a sphere is to think about how there’s something called the tropics on the Earth, and the tropics are places near the equator of the earth were sometimes the sun is overhead in the sky. This was actually something that the Greeks used, not only to prove that the Earth was round about 2000 years ago, but they actually measured the circumference of the Earth, accurate to within just a couple percent. 2,000 years ago we’ve known that the Earth was round.
There was a really brilliant Greek scientist called Eratosthenes, and Eratosthenes noticed that there was a town called Syene, and on a certain date the sun would actually shine straight down to the bottom of a well. That meant the sun was directly overhead; you could look down a well and see the sun shining back at you.
And on the very same date, farther away in the city of Alexandria, that didn’t happen. The sun was not directly overhead, it was a slight angle, and all that Eratosthenes did was he measured the difference in the angle of the sun. It was straight overhead in Syene; in Alexandria it was a little bit less than overhead, and he rationed that that change in angle from one city to another was probably indicative of us being on a curved surface, and you could make all kinds of measurements even between those two cities and see that the angles were different—the sun was at a different place in the sky. Using this, he actually measured the circumference of the Earth, and he got it right 2,000 years ago.
So another really simple proof is that on any given date, at different cities and different places around the world, the sun is at different angles in the sky. That wouldn’t happen if the Earth wasn’t round.
How a male contraceptive pill could work | John AmoryAndrologist John Amory is developing innovative male contraception that gives men a new option for taking responsibility to prevent unintended pregnancy. He details the science in development -- and why the world needs a male pill.
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Why tech needs the humanities | Eric BerridgeIf you want to build a team of innovative problem-solvers, you should value the humanities just as much as the sciences, says entrepreneur Eric Berridge. He shares why tech companies should look beyond STEM graduates for new hires -- and how people with backgrounds in the arts and humanities can bring creativity and insight to technical workplaces.
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Right-wing politics has a new secret weapon. Can the Left harness it? | Jeremy HeimansThe election of Donald J. Trump surprised many, most of all the Democrats. Jeremy Heimans, a political activist and the Founder of the online media company Purpose, explains it simply: Donald Trump won the internet, and thus won the presidency.
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The game of politics for many decades has been played as one in which you’re supposed to keep your head down, you’re supposed to be bland, you’re supposed to be uncontroversial; your job is to court as many people as you can in the middle.
Donald Trump from the very beginning took a different posture, everything he did was about unleashing the agency of a small number of intense supporters.
This was going to be a campaign in which you could unleash the things that you’d been thinking—maybe your mad uncle muttering at the television—and suddenly every mad uncle muttering at the television was empowered—was sent a signal by this man that those private thoughts could now be made public.
As Donald Trump’s candidacy unfolded he built and created a symbiotic relationship with what we think of as a vast, decentralized social media army that did his bidding during the campaign.
These were mostly young white men on forums like Reddit and 4chan and they developed a kind of culture of competing with each other, vying with each other, to produce the most creative, the most sticky, the most intrusive meme or message that would penetrate social media and then seep into the mainstream media.
So every day they would do this and in response to the events of the news cycle, be it Hillary Clinton’s latest comments, be it Donald Trump’s latest policy pronouncements, they would go take that moment and elevate it.
The mainstream media were generally confident that Hillary would win the election: she was ahead in the polls fairly consistently and because she had much higher favorables.
While both candidates were unpopular, Hillary’s favorables in public opinion polls were generally about ten points higher than Donald Trump’s.
But the people doing social media sentiment analysis, firms like ForeSee, were tracking and finding something very different. Their job is to track net sentiment on social media in connection to political debates. And what they were finding throughout the campaign was that while Donald Trump’s favorables were about ten points lower than Hillary, his net favorability on social media was about ten points higher than Hillary.
One of the most striking facts we discovered when researching this book was that the day that Donald Trump had the highest net favorability on social media was his darkest day of the campaign. It was the day of the Access Hollywood tape being released. And it was because at that day his supporters, who had such intensity of commitment to him, rallied around him. They surged to his defense.
And even though it seemed in the mainstream media like this was the day that was all losing for Donald Trump, on social media that day Donald Trump actually won.
He was elected because he intuitively understood what we call New Power. And New Power is this ability to harness the energy of a connected crowd.
And while Hillary Clinton had a very traditional relationship with her crowd, Donald Trump had a relationship that reflects what we now know you need to do in order to really build depth of commitment politically.
So the NRA understands intensity in the same way that Donald Trump does.
One of its great strengths is, in addition to its old power brand (the fact that it’s a feared institution that politicians kind of quiver at the thought of), it also has an incredibly powerful New Power arm. And that arm goes beyond just its membership, it actually has been very effective at cultivating the most extreme elements of its support base.
Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven PinkerWas 2017 really the "worst year ever," as some would have us believe? In his analysis of recent data on homicide, war, poverty, pollution and more, psychologist Steven Pinker finds that we're doing better now in every one of them when compared with 30 years ago. But progress isn't inevitable, and it doesn't mean everything gets better for everyone all the time, Pinker says. Instead, progress is problem-solving, and we should look at things like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. "We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one," he says. "But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."
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The fascist philosopher behind Vladimir Putin’s information warfareYale University Professor Timothy Snyder gives a crash course in Ivan Ilyin's philosophy of fascism and explains why this worldview is so appealing to Putin: it defines freedom as knowing your set place in society, asserts that democracy is a ritual and not a reality, and maintains that there are no facts in the world. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this is how new technology—like Facebook—is turning old fascism into political warfare.
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Ivan Ilyin was a fascist philosopher of the '20s, '30s, and '40s, but he’s probably the most important example of how old ideas can be brought back in the 21st century or in a postmodern context.
Ilyin had three very important ideas. The first was that social advancement was impossible because the political system, the social system, is like a body. So you’re a cell, you’re an embryo, you’re an organ, you have a place in this larger body, and freedom means knowing your place. That’s what freedom means.
A second idea that he had is that democracy is a ritual. So we can vote, but we only vote in order to affirm our collective support for a leader. The leader is not legitimated by our votes or chosen by our votes, the voting is just a ritual by which we collectively, every couple of years, endorse a leader who has emerged from some other place, from some—in fascism, a leader is some kind of hero who emerges from fiction, who emerges from myth.
The third idea Ilyin had, which is very useful, is that the factual world doesn’t count. It’s not real. Ilyin says that God created the world, but that was a mistake. The world was a kind of aborted process. The world is a horrifying thing because it’s full of this and that and the other thing, what we call facts, and those facts can’t be unified into some kind of larger whole so the world is actually horrifying, and those facts are disgusting and of no value whatsoever.
So, if you were Vladimir Putin and you’re governing as the head of an oligarchical clan it’s very comfortable to be able to say, “Well, look, freedom consists in knowing your place in society. There’s no possibility for social advance.”
If you’re Vladimir Putin and you don’t have serious democracy or you don’t want to have it, it’s very comfortable to do, as he, in fact, has done, it’s very comfortable to transform elections into a kind of ritual.
And, likewise, if you can’t have the rule of law and if Russians are basically stuck in a certain place economically and politically, the idea that the world is not factual, that the world is just subjective, that it’s just a matter of this opinion, that opinion and the other opinion, is very comfortable.
And Ilyin adds the even more comfortable conclusion that the only true thing is Russian nationalism. The only hope to bring the whole world together is that somehow Russia—which is an innocent victim of the rest of the world—will somehow restore itself in some totalitarian form and then bring order back to the world.
So interestingly—it’s not the only thing which is going on—but interestingly these kinds of ideas help Mr. Putin as he consolidates a certain kind of authoritarianism by spectacle at home and also help him as he broadcasts it abroad.
The fundamental way that Russia works in American politics is by transmitting the idea that’s nothing is real. So it’s true that the Russians did support Trump. It’s true that there were all kinds of very specific interventions in the election of 2016. But the fundamental idea is to take new technology and transmit this old idea that we can’t really trust ourselves, that there aren’t really facts out there in the world, that the only thing that really matters is our preferences, or really our biases, or really our hatreds.
How I turn negative online comments into positive offline conversations | Dylan MarronDigital creator Dylan Marron has racked up millions of views for projects like "Every Single Word" and "Sitting in Bathrooms With Trans People" -- but he's found that the flip side of success online is internet hate. Over time, he's developed an unexpected coping mechanism: calling the people who leave him insensitive comments and asking a simple question: "Why did you write that?" In a thoughtful talk about how we interact online, Marron explains how sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is actually speak with people you disagree with, not simply at them.
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What I've learned about parenting as a stay-at-home dad | Glen HenryGlen Henry got his superpowers through fatherhood. After leaving behind a job he hated and a manager he didn't get along with, he went to work for an equally demanding boss: his kids. He shares how he went from thinking he knew it all about being a stay-at-home parent to realizing he knew nothing at all -- and how he's now documenting what he's learned.
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Aboard the ISS: Why cross-cultural communication is a matter of life or death | Chris HadfieldLook up—you can see the greatest feat of human cooperation orbiting 254 miles above Earth. As commander of Expedition 35 aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield understands the difficulty of cultural barriers in team work, and the life or death necessity of learning to communicate across those divides. The ISS is a joint project between five space agencies, built by people from 15 different nations—and each of them has a different take on what is "normal". Hadfield explains the scale of cultural differences aboard the spaceship: "What do you do on a Friday night? What does “yes” mean? What does “uh-huh” mean? What is the day of worship? When do you celebrate a holiday? How do you treat your spouse or your children? How do you treat each other? What is the hierarchy of command? All of those things seem completely clear to you, but you were raised in a specific culture that is actually shared by no one else." Here, Hadfield explains his strategy for genuine listening and communication. Whether it's money, reputation, or your life that's at stake, being sensitive and aware of people's differences helps you accomplish something together—no matter where you’re from. Amway believes that diversity and inclusion are essential to the growth and prosperity of today’s companies. When woven into every aspect of the talent life cycle, companies committed to diversity and inclusion are the best equipped to innovate, improve brand image and drive performance. Chris Hadfield features in the new docuseries One Strange Rock and is the author of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything
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Transcript: High above our heads is the International Space Station. It’s an amazing, complex thing—the most complicated thing we’ve ever built in space, one of the most complex international projects ever conceived and ever completed. But the keyword of that is international. It is a place built by people from all around the planet, 15 different countries.
And that just sounds sort of theoretical, until you start thinking: different languages, different units measurement systems—is it inches or is it meters? Different electrical systems—is it 220, is it 110, is positive ground, is it negative ground? But the most complex problem to deal with, often, is just people who have come from a wildly different cultural background, a completely different sense of what is normal.
What do you do on a Friday night? What does “yes” mean? What does “uh-huh” mean? What is the day of worship? When do you celebrate a holiday? How do you treat your spouse or your children? How do you treat each other? What is the hierarchy of command? All of those things seem completely clear to you, but you were raised in a specific culture that is actually shared by no one else.
If you have brothers or sisters, ask your brother and sister in detail about some stuff and they will disagree with you. They have a different culture than you do, so imagine if the people that you’re flying a spaceship with come from a wildly different part of the world, trying to find a way to share a sense of purpose so that you can overcome the natural barriers of a difference of culture to do something really difficult—that’s one of the biggest tasks that an astronaut faces.
You can start by just by learning language. It’s obvious if it’s as discrete as learning English or learning Russian or learning Japanese, that’s a clearly defined language, but have someone from Louisiana talk to someone from Brooklyn; they both speak English but the language is very different.
And if you want to speak clearly and communicate with that person you have to recognize that the culture with which they interpret the world is absolutely necessary for you to understand if you want to clearly communicate with them.
And for me the only real measure of clear communication and successful communication is a change of behavior of the listener. If all they did was go “uh-huh,” then you have no understanding of whether they actually comprehended and internalized what it was you were trying to communicate to them.
But if you can see that their actions now reflect a different idea, then you can measure whether what you were intending actually got communicated across, then the loop is complete and you’ve successfully crossed whatever cultural barrier was there. And so that requires a lot of extra effort.
A woman's fury holds lifetimes of wisdom | Tracee Ellis RossThe global collection of women's experiences can no longer be ignored, says actress and activist Tracee Ellis Ross. In a candid, fearless talk, she delivers invitations to a better future to both men and women.
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Michio Kaku: Who is right about A.I.: Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?In mid-2017, Elon Musk spoke these words at a National Governors Association meeting and sparked what is now a famous A.I. debate between himself and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react.” Musk wants governors to legislate A.I. now, believing it to be an existential threat to humanity's future and likening it to “summoning the demon.” Zuckerberg, on the other hand, called Musk's predictions "pretty irresponsible" and made the case for A.I. as a tool to vastly improve people's quality of life, adding that tech companies should not slow down. To which Musk tweeted: I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited. And that's the battle of the billionaires in a nutshell, a battle that has divided experts and pundits alike into many sides of an epic debate about the future of A.I. So where does theoretical physicist Michio Kaku stand? Kaku thinks both are right—Zuckerberg in the short term, and Musk in the long run. The tipping point from Team Zuck to Team Musk for Kaku is the moment A.I. achieves self-awareness, which he suspects could be at the end of this century. And what should we do then? "When robots become as intelligent as monkeys I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they begin to have murderous thoughts," says Kaku. What do you think of Kaku's take on the Musk vs. Zuckerberg A.I. debate and his solution? Michio Kaku's latest book is the awesome The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth
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Michio Kaku's Universe in a Nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NbBjNiw4tk
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Transcript: Recently, I was on the Richard Quest show on CNN TV and I was asked the question that we have the battle of the billionaires; on one hand we have Mark Zuckerberg saying, “Don’t worry, artificial intelligence will give us new jobs, new industries, create wealth, prosperity.” And then we have people like, well, Elon Musk, who says, “Watch out. They pose an existential threat to humanity.” Who knows, maybe one day they’ll put us in zoos and throw peanuts at us and make us dance, make us dance behind bars like we do with monkeys and with bears.
Well, my personal point of view is that both points of view are in some sense correct. In the short term, I think Zuckerberg is right. Artificial intelligence will open up whole new vistas, it will make life more convenient, things will be cheaper, new industries will be created. I personally think the A.I. industry will be bigger than the automobile industry.
In fact, I think the automobile is going to become a robot. You’ll talk to your car. You’ll argue with your car. Your car will give you the best facts, the best route between point A and point B; the car will be part of the robotics industry. Whole new industries involving the repair, maintenance, servicing of robots, not to mention robots that are software programs that you talk to and make life more convenient.
However, let’s not be naïve. There is a point, a tipping point at which they can become dangerous and pose an existential threat. And that tipping point is self-awareness.
You see, robots are not aware of the fact that they’re robots. They’re so stupid they simply carry out what they are instructed to do because they’re adding machines. We forget that. Adding machines don’t have a will. Adding machines simply do what you program them to do.
Now, of course, let’s not be naïve about this, eventually adding machines may be able to compute alternate goals and alternate scenarios when they realize that they are not human. Right now, robots do not know that.
However, there is a tipping point at which point they could become dangerous. Right now, our most advanced robot has the intelligence of a cockroach—a rather stupid cockroach.
However, it’s only a matter of time before robots become as smart as a mouse, then as smart as a rat, then a rabbit, then a cat, a dog, and eventually as smart as a monkey. Now, monkeys know they are not human. They have a certain amount of self-awareness. Dogs, especially young dogs, are not quite sure. One reason why dogs obey their masters is because they think the master is the top dog, and so they’re a little bit confused about whether or not we humans are part of the dog tribe. But monkeys, I think, have no problems with that; they know they’re not human.
So when robots become as intelligent as monkeys I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they begin to have murderous thoughts. When will that happen? I don’t know.
War and what comes after | Clemantine WamariyaClemantine Wamariya was six years old when the Rwandan Civil War forced her and her sister to flee their home in Kigali, leaving their parents and everything they knew behind. In this deeply personal talk, she tells the story of how she became a refugee, living in camps in seven countries over the next six years -- and how she's tried to make sense of what came after.
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SpaceX's plan to fly you across the globe in 30 minutes | Gwynne ShotwellWhat's up at SpaceX? Engineer Gwynne Shotwell was employee number seven at Elon Musk's pioneering aerospace company and is now its president. In conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson, she discusses SpaceX's race to put people into orbit and the organization's next big project, the BFR (ask her what it stands for). The new giant rocket is designed to take humanity to Mars -- but it has another potential use: space travel for earthlings.
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A Parkland teacher's homework for us all | Diane Wolk-RogersDiane Wolk-Rogers teaches history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, site of a horrific school shooting on Valentine's Day 2018. How can we end this senseless violence? In a stirring talk, Wolk-Rogers offers three ways Americans can move forward to create more safety and responsibility around guns -- and invites people to come up with their own answers, too. Above all, she asks us to take a cue from the student activists at her school, survivors whose work for change has moved millions to action. "They shouldn't have to do this on their own," Wolk-Rogers says. "They're asking you to get involved."
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Why a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un could backfire on the U.S. | Ronan FarrowNobody hopes the eventual face-to-face meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un works out more than Ronan Farrow. Farrow's new book War on Peace in part details the history of diplomatic efforts between past White House administrations and the North Korean regime, and how fragile and fraught with lies that relationship has been. Trump's "saber-rattling" style may be fresh enough to inspire change, but there is a very good chance the U.S. will get played by North Korea's hollow promises. "We are going to need a core of experts who are experienced in the ways in which these regimes, one after another, are difficult and lie to the rest of the world and pose a threat to that region," says Farrow. The potential meeting between Trump and Jong-un will also be the first time a sitting American president will meet face-to-face with a leader of the North Korean regime, and in doing so, the U.S. might give North Korea what it wants most: legitimization. "The risk with this meeting is that we play into their hands and say, “Yeah, sure, we acknowledge you as an equal on the international stage,” and we give up some of our leverage in having them want that contact, want that leader-to-leader access, which could make the nitty-gritty work of actually implementing diplomacy and making sure that they are contained as a nuclear power that much more difficult," says Farrow. Ronan Farrow is the author of War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
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Transcript: War on Peace tells the stories of a number of the diplomats who have been deeply engaged in North Korea diplomacy over the last several administrations. And I think it’s ahistorical when you hear people say, “Those were all failures, we didn’t get anything done.”
Under the Clinton administration, we had a really substantive framework agreement with the North Koreans where they made a lot of commitments that would have been very important in the long-term to slowing their progress as a nuclear power, and the United States actually reneged on a lot of the commitments that we made on our end. We were in no small part responsible for the collapse of that deal.
Then subsequently during the George W. Bush administration, you had a situation where Bush, after the disasters of Iraq, set about doubling down on diplomacy and they lead six-party talks. A career diplomat named Chris Hill went over there and spent countless hours talking to all of the players, and they actually shut down some of the reactors for the first time in years. They were starting to give us some information about their nuclear development. In the end, they did cheat, it did fall through, and that wasn’t our fault, but we did make some inroads. Particularly in our conversation with China about North Korea, which is going to be a pivotal part of any solution going forward.
Now you see the Trump administration coming in with this kind of madcap approach: diplomacy by tweet, all of this saber rattling, and now potentially a meeting between leaders.
And the reality is, we don’t know how that’s going to pan out. Could it work? Sure. And I, and I think everyone else invested in this problem, sincerely hope that it does.
But what those experts whose stories are in War on Peace say, one after another, is we are flying blind now and we don’t have to be. You can have the same kind of saber-rattling and tough approach, you could have the same kind of leader-to-leader meeting and also insulate yourself against some of these pitfalls.
Make sure that we are not accidentally legitimizing the North Koreans as a nuclear power. Make sure that we are hip to the fact that they very often lie about the kinds of commitments they’re making now and have done so in the past. There is a real risk here that we get played.
Look, North Korea will continue to be perilous. It was perilous under the previous regime; it is perilous now. I think that the thaw in relations between the North and the South is one of the most positive developments to come along, and that’s due to a number of factors, not just what’s happening in the United States right now.
But ultimately, regardless of who is in the seat of power there, we are going to need a core of experts who are experienced in the ways in which these regimes, one after another, are difficult and lie to the rest of the world and pose a threat to that region.
And I have complete confidence in one thing, which is: whoever comes along next in terms of North Korean leadership, we’re going to need some people who are really well-versed in dealing with that region if we want to keep them contained.
Why it's worth listening to people you disagree with | Zachary R. WoodWe get stronger, not weaker, by engaging with ideas and people we disagree with, says Zachary R. Wood. In an important talk about finding common ground, Wood makes the case that we can build empathy and gain understanding by engaging tactfully and thoughtfully with controversial ideas and unfamiliar perspectives. "Tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away," Wood says. "To achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity."
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The "dead zone" of the Gulf of Mexico | Nancy RabalaisOcean expert Nancy Rabalais tracks the ominously named "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico -- where there isn't enough oxygen in the water to support life. The Gulf has the second largest dead zone in the world; on top of killing fish and crustaceans, it's also killing fisheries in these waters. Rabalais tells us about what's causing it -- and how we can reverse its harmful effects and restore one of America's natural treasures.
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Why you should make useless things | Simone GiertzIn this joyful, heartfelt talk featuring demos of her wonderfully wacky creations, Simone Giertz shares her craft: making useless robots. Her inventions -- designed to chop vegetables, cut hair, apply lipstick and more -- rarely (if ever) succeed, and that's the point. "The true beauty of making useless things [is] this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is," Giertz says. "It turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. Maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question."
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The harm reduction model of drug addiction treatment | Mark TyndallWhy do we still think that drug use is a law-enforcement issue? Making drugs illegal does nothing to stop people from using them, says public health expert Mark Tyndall. So, what might work? Tyndall shares community-based research that shows how harm-reduction strategies, like safe-injection sites, are working to address the drug overdose crisis.
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A printable, flexible, organic solar cell | Hannah BürckstümmerUnlike the solar cells you're used to seeing, organic photovoltaics are made of compounds that are dissolved in ink and can be printed and molded using simple techniques. The result is a low-weight, flexible, semi-transparent film that turns the energy of the sun into electricity. Hannah Bürckstümmer shows us how they're made -- and they how could change the way we power the world.
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What's missing in the global debate over refugees | Yasin KakandeIn the ongoing debate over refugees, we hear from everyone -- from politicians who pledge border controls to citizens who fear they'll lose their jobs -- everyone, that is, except migrants themselves. Why are they coming? Journalist and TED Fellow Yasin Kakande explains what compelled him and many others to flee their homelands, urging a more open discussion and a new perspective. Because humanity's story, he reminds us, is a story of migration: "There are no restrictions that could ever be so rigorous to stop the wave of migration that has determined our human history," he says.
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What if we ended the injustice of bail? | Robin SteinbergOn any given night, more than 450,000 people in the United States are locked up in jail simply because they don't have enough money to pay bail. The sums in question are often around $500: easy for some to pay, impossible for others. This has real human consequences -- people lose jobs, homes and lives, and it drives racial disparities in the legal system. Robin Steinberg has a bold idea to change this. In this powerful talk, she outlines the plan for The Bail Project -- an unprecedented national revolving bail fund to fight mass incarceration. Her ambitious plan is one of the first ideas of the Audacious Project, TED's new initiative to inspire global change.
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How we need to remake the internet | Jaron LanierIn the early days of digital culture, Jaron Lanier helped craft a vision for the internet as public commons where humanity could share its knowledge -- but even then, this vision was haunted by the dark side of how it could turn out: with personal devices that control our lives, monitor our data and feed us stimuli. (Sound familiar?) In this visionary talk, Lanier reflects on a "globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake" companies like Google and Facebook made at the foundation of digital culture -- and how we can undo it. "We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them," he says.
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Why religion is literally false and metaphorically true | Bret WeinsteinWhere do your beliefs come from? There's a school of thought that sees religion as a mind virus that wastes the time and effort of human beings, but evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein offers a more reasonable explanation: "belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved," he says. Religious people are evolutionarily fitter than non-believers, not because they are protected by a deity but rather because religion is a form of adaptive evolution. Religion is so widespread because it has massive survival advantages beneath the supernatural elements—that's what Weinstein refers to as "literally false and metaphorically true". For example, believing in heaven is literally false—there is no such place—but believing in it keeps your descendants in good standing in the religious community after you're gone, thus setting your lineage up to continue. The thought itself may be untrue, but the result of the thought is evolutionarily effective. "Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have," Weinstein says. For more from Bret Weinstein, visit http://www.bretweinstein.net.
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Transcript: We have minds that are programmed by culture that can be completely at odds with our genomes. And it leads to misunderstandings of evolution, like the idea that religious belief is a mind virus, that effectively these beliefs structures are parasitizing human beings and they are wasting the time and effort that those human beings are spending on that endeavor rather than the more reasonable interpretation, which is that these belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.
Our belief systems are built around evolutionary success and they certainly contain human benevolence, which is appropriate to phases of history when there is abundance and people can afford to be good to each other. The problem is if you have grown up in a period in which abundance has been the standard state you don’t anticipate the way people change in the face of austerity. And so what we are currently seeing is messages that we have all agreed are unacceptable reemerging because the signals that we have reached the end of the boom times, those signals are everywhere, and so people are triggered to move into a phase that they don’t even know that they have.
Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have rather than to match our best instincts—when we are capable of being good to each other because there’s abundance, we have those instincts and so it’s not incorrect to say that human beings are capable of being marvelous creatures and being quite ethical.
Now I would argue there’s a simple way of reconciling the correct understanding that religious belief often describes truths that, in many cases, fly in the face of what we can understand scientifically, with the idea that these beliefs are adaptive. I call it the state of being literally false and metaphorically true. A belief is literally false and metaphorically true if it is not factual but if behaving as if it were factual results in an enhancement of one’s fitness. To take an example, if one behaves in let’s say the Christian tradition in such a way as to gain access to heaven one will not actually find themselves at the pearly gates being welcomed in, but one does tend to place their descendants in a good position with respect to the community that those descendants continue to live in. So if we were to think evolutionarily, the person who is behaving so as to get into heaven has genetic interests. Those genetic interests are represented in the narrow sense by their immediate descendants and close relatives, in the larger sense they may be represented by the entire population of people from whom that individual came, and by acting so as to get into heaven, the fitness of that person, the number of copies of those genes that continue to flourish in the aftermath of that person’s death will go up. So the belief in heaven is literally false—there is no such place—but it is metaphorically true in the sense that it results in an increase in fitness.
How language shapes the way we think | Lera BoroditskyThere are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
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How a team of chefs fed Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria | José AndrésAfter Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, chef José Andrés traveled to the devastated island with a simple idea: to feed the hungry. Millions of meals served later, Andrés shares the remarkable story of creating the world's biggest restaurant -- and the awesome power of letting people in need know that somebody cares about them.
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The Standing Rock resistance and our fight for indigenous rights | Tara HouskaStill invisible and often an afterthought, indigenous peoples are uniting to protect the world's water, lands and history -- while trying to heal from genocide and ongoing inequality. Tribal attorney and Couchiching First Nation citizen Tara Houska chronicles the history of attempts by government and industry to eradicate the legitimacy of indigenous peoples' land and culture, including the months-long standoff at Standing Rock which rallied thousands around the world. "It's incredible what you can do when you stand together," Houska says. "Stand with us -- empathize, learn, grow, change the conversation."
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Why you’re probably reading the Bible wrong | Rob BellReligious scholar, pastor, and all-around fascinating guy Rob Bell thinks that most everyone teaching religious texts these days is teaching it wrong. It's a lot of parables and metaphors, he posits, and there's no way that people should be reading religious texts like the Bible or the Quran literally.
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Yeah, oftentimes when people talk about sacred texts, for many people the sort of thing that you say to show how serious you are is “Well, you know, we take it literally.”
That actually has caused an extraordinary amount of destruction in the world. So I begin with, I try to take it LITERATELY. So if it’s a poem, then it’s a poem. And if it’s a letter, who wrote it, and when did they write it, and who are they writing it to?
What was the world like at that time? If it was history but the writer is kind of winking along the way like “This is what I’m really saying,” then you take it with that subtlety and nuance and even humor.
So all religious texts have to be interpreted, and the really dangerous thing is when someone says “I’m not giving you my opinion. I’m just telling you what it says.” Because that’s actually their opinion!
If you deny human agency it generally leads to some sort of oppression or exploitation. So everything gets way more interesting when you start reading it literately because you then don’t have to do those awkward explanations.
One of the greatest examples of this is there’s this ancient story about Jonah who gets swallowed by a fish. Not a whale, a fish. Because that’s what it says in the ancient text. And so the question often becomes a debate on whether or not a guy really got swallowed by a fish.
And you have the literalists going “it says he got swallowed by a fish, he got swallowed by a fish.” And then you have the others going “no, it’s a larger metaphor.”
But what’s interesting: as the story begins, the Assyrians were the worst neighbors. They were the cruel oppressors who had made life miserable. And so this man Jonah is told go and bless Nineveh, and Nineveh was the capital of Assyria.
So the story begins with a man being told “go bless your worst most heinous enemy.” And he doesn’t. He goes the other direction. He runs away, which I think the original audience would have cheered this man Jonah on. “You go the other direction! Whatever you do don’t go bless the person who has made your life a living hell.”
So he eventually gets on a boat. There’s a storm and he’s thrown overboard and he’s swallowed by a fish. I think the power of the story is not arguing about whether or not he was swallowed by a fish. I think the story was told to a group of people to confront them with how they cannot forgive their worst enemy.
And will the past and the wounds that you have suffered define you and hold you back, or can you forgive? Can you move towards your enemy, not with violence, but with love? Do the things that have happened to us define us, or is there a love that can transcend even this?
So this would be a classic example to me where there’s an ancient text and a story where you can in your attempt to defend it literally actually avoid the more interesting questions of the heart that I think are the questions the storyteller is trying to get at.
And yes, in our world to this day, taking some of these texts literally has caused so much violence.
You read the ancient text. You also use your mind. You listen for what new thing might be happening in the world. You read it as a fully orbed experience, and then it actually gets quite inspiring.
How I use the drum to tell my story | Kasiva MutuaIn this talk-performance hybrid, drummer, percussionist and TED Fellow Kasiva Mutua shares how she's breaking the taboo against female drummers in Kenya -- and her mission to teach the significance and importance of the drum to young boys, women and girls. "Women can be custodians of culture, too," Mutua says.
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Should we create a solar shade to cool the earth? | Danny HillisIn this perspective-shifting talk, Danny Hillis prompts us to approach global issues like climate change with creative scientific solutions. Taking a stand for solar geoengineering, he looks at controversial solutions with open-minded curiosity.
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The death of democracy: Why the radical Left may end up killing what it lovesEvolutionary biologist Heather Heying rose to prominence as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web after she and her husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, spoke out against a planned "Day of Absence" at Evergreen State College, where white students, staff and teachers would vacate campus and only minority students would remain. Their opposition to the event led to accusations of racism and a string of protests, threats, and violence, leading The Seattle Times to call the college a "national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism." Democracy depends on protest, Heying asserts above, but a new strain of unintelligent protest on the Left may damage the very values liberals are trying to protect. "Increasingly we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done," she says. "... But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme Right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous—but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy." In this video, Heying looks at tribalism and dissent from an evolutionary perspective, and highlights how technology has hijacked our ancient brain to create a more polarized society than ever before. Follow Heather on twitter: @HeatherEHeying and on Medium and through her website, http://www.heatherheying.com.
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Transcript: Society-wide, people are becoming ever more tribal. And tribalism is as old as social groups, which is older than humans. So it’s no surprise that people are looking to find those who sound the most like them, and who they imagine will be the most likely to keep them in their heads when things go wrong. But the way that it’s manifesting is a particularly modern instantiation that I don’t think we’ve seen before.
So protest is old and is honorable and is important; we must be allowed, in any system that calls itself democratic, to dissent. Increasingly, we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done, and that’s dangerous, and it comes from a place of fear, and fear is very powerful evolutionarily. It rises to the top of the emotions when it shows up, and it’s hard to get through the fear with an argument that is rational. Emotion and rationality don’t tend to interface with one another very well, and some of the language that we’re hearing from the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum—I’m not sure that calling it a spectrum is really apt, but everyone is familiar with it.
So the extremes on the right and on the left are both using fear to further polarize people, and the people on the right, the people on the far right, the extremists on the right are both, I think, a smaller group and better armed and thus in some ways more terrifying, but there are so many fewer of them that they don’t seem to have as much voice in society as the growing numbers of extremists on the left who are using words and increasingly, in the case of some of the groups, violent tactics.
But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous, but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy.
So why does it work? It works because since people have been social, which is to say since before people were people, since we were great apes and before that primates that weren’t great apes, and whatever social mammals came before that, we have been splintering into groups and watching out for our own. And it wasn’t just kin groups, it was kin groups and extended family, and then friends and family.
But the tribes that we see forming now are able to garner more power because they can use modern technology to move into old, old circuits.
So social media can be used to mobilize a group and to enrage a group, to inflame a group, where a town crier 500 years ago or a roving storyteller thousands of years ago might have brought news that would have alarmed a group of townspeople or a village or a hunter-gatherer tribe when they came together in their annual fusion event with lots and lots of tribes together, they might hear something that struck them as dangerous
To eliminate waste, we need to rediscover thrift | Andrew DentThere's no such thing as throwing something away, says Andrew Dent -- when you toss a used food container, broken toy or old pair of socks into the trash, those things inevitably end up in ever-growing landfills. But we can get smarter about the way we make, and remake, our products. Dent shares exciting examples of thrift -- the idea of using and reusing what you need so you don't have to purchase anything new -- as well as advances in material science, like electronics made of nanocellulose and enzymes that can help make plastic infinitely recyclable.
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My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it | Drew PhilpIn 2009, journalist and screenwriter Drew Philp bought a ruined house in Detroit for $500. In the years that followed, as he gutted the interior and removed the heaps of garbage crowding the rooms, he didn't just learn how to repair a house -- he learned how to build a community. In a tribute to the city he loves, Philp tells us about "radical neighborliness" and makes the case that we have "the power to create the world anew together and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse."
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Math can help uncover cancer's secrets | Irina KarevaIrina Kareva translates biology into mathematics and vice versa. She writes mathematical models that describe the dynamics of cancer, with the goal of developing new drugs that target tumors. "The power and beauty of mathematical modeling lies in the fact that it makes you formalize, in a very rigorous way, what we think we know," Kareva says. "It can help guide us to where we should keep looking, and where there may be a dead end." It all comes down to asking the right question and translating it to the right equation, and back.
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How we can teach computers to make sense of our emotions | Raphael ArarHow can we make AI that people actually want to interact with? Raphael Arar suggests we start by making art. He shares interactive projects that help AI explore complex ideas like nostalgia, intuition and conversation -- all working towards the goal of making our future technology just as much human as it is artificial.
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Why I choose humanism over faith | Leo IgweAs a humanist, Leo Igwe doesn't believe in divine intervention -- but he does believe in the power of human beings to alleviate suffering, cure disease, preserve the planet and turn situations of poverty into prosperity. In this bold talk, Igwe shares how humanism can free Africans from damaging superstitions and give them the power to rebuild the continent.
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The role of faith and belief in modern Africa | Ndidi NwuneliNdidi Nwuneli has advice for Africans who believe in God -- and Africans who don't. To the religious, she advises against using God to outsource responsibility for what happens in their lives. To the non-religious, she asks that they keep an open mind and work with faith-based organizations, especially on issues like health care and education. "There's so much potential that can be realized when we walk across the divide of faith and, hand in hand, try to solve many of our problems," Nwuneli says.
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How Spanish, not English, was nearly the world's language | John Lewis GladdisWant to know the reason North America speaks English and not Spanish? It all boils down to a single day in the English Channel in August of 1588, says Yale University history professor John Lewis Gaddis. The Spanish Armada was cleverly chased out of British waters by a rag-tag British fleet that set old ships on fire and pointed them right at the anchored Spanish fleet, causing the Spaniards to cut anchor and flee. Because of the way the wind was blowing, the Spanish ships had to sail all the way around the British Isles (about 2,000 nautical miles) to get home and were soundly defeated.
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I think the favorite lesson that I like to teach is the Spanish Armada in 1588, sent there by King Philip II of Spain, and the defense against the Spanish Armada led by Queen Elizabeth I, and what happened to the Spanish Armada in that situation.
The reason I like to teach it is because Spain was the global superpower in that period. Spain had conquered almost the entire new world. Britain had not—England as it was at that time—had not even begun to develop colonies.
And the issue, of course, was Catholicism, and was Catholicism going to be brought back to England after it had been kicked out by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII.
So this was what led Philip (believing that he was an agent of the Almighty) to send this largest of all naval forces north into the English Channel as a launch pad for the reconquest by Catholicism of England. And that’s August of 1588.
Elizabeth’s strategy was not to attempt to directly confront that fleet, because she didn’t have a fleet that was capable of doing that. She certainly could not have confronted directly a Spanish army because she had virtually no army of her own.But she is thinking in terms of geography. She’s thinking in terms of what direction the winds blow in normally in the English Channel.
And she saw that if she just allowed the Spanish fleet to advance slowly up the English Channel—which it had to do because it was cumbersome—with a few English ships pursuing it and then pick them off as they pursue, and then as they got up to the border of what’s now Belgium and France (where they were going to disembark their troops) realized that taking advantage of the winds, if you just set a few old English ships on fire with explosives on them and send them into the middle of this huge Spanish fleet, that’s going to cause terror and that in itself will be enough to defeat the Spanish.
So it’s all happening on one evening with the winds in the right direction with eight ships used, and the Spanish completely panicked to the extent of cutting their own anchor cables so more than 100 ships self-destructed in terms of losing control of the ability to navigate.
The only thing they could do then was to flee, but because of the winds, they had to flee around all of England, around Scotland, down the Irish coast. And by the time they staggered back into Spain they were profoundly depleted. That’s the turning point.
That’s the moment at which it can be said the Spanish Empire reached its high point and then started descending.
And it’s also the moment at which we can say the English began to become very gradually a superpower.
And I’m fascinated by the fact that it all can be reduced to a single night in the English Channel, and to the direction in which the winds blew. So that testifies to the importance of seizing the moment. It testifies to the importance of not micromanaging but macromanaging in the sense of delegating authority to the experts, in this case, her own sea captains. Trusting them to do the right thing. Trusting them to take advantage of spontaneous moments. They didn’t have time to consult Elizabeth about the fire ships.
They didn’t have time to wonder if they sacrificed eight ships, will she get mad and cut off their heads? They figured no, it’s unlikely because she’s a strategist herself. She will understand what that sacrifice achieved. And, of course, that’s what happened. So it’s her great triumph. It’s Spain’s great failure, and you can argue it leads to the development of North America by the British and to the fact that we are sitting here speaking English and not Spanish now.
My descent into America’s neo-Nazi movement -- and how I got out | Christian PiccioliniAt 14, Christian Picciolini went from naïve teenager to white supremacist -- and soon, the leader of the first neo-Nazi skinhead gang in the United States. How was he radicalized, and how did he ultimately get out of the movement? In this courageous talk, Picciolini shares the surprising and counterintuitive solution to hate in all forms.
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Academic research is publicly funded -- why isn't it publicly available? | Erica StoneIn the US, your taxes fund academic research at public universities. Why then do you need to pay expensive, for-profit journals for the results of that research? Erica Stone advocates for a new, open-access relationship between the public and scholars, making the case that academics should publish in more accessible media. "A functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed," Stone says. "Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us?"
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How fungi recognize (and infect) plants | Mennat El GhalidEach year, the world loses enough food to feed half a billion people to fungi, the most destructive pathogens of plants. Mycologist and TED Fellow Mennat El Ghalid explains how a breakthrough in our understanding of the molecular signals fungi use to attack plants could disrupt this interaction -- and save our crops.
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Why populism is the greatest con in America | Martin AmisThere is no substitute for thinking—although modern-day America may have you believing otherwise. Novelist Martin Amis attributes the recent surge in anti-intellectualism to the populist politics sweeping the United States. "Populism relies on a sentimental and, in fact, very old-fashioned view that the uneducated population knows better in its instincts than the over-refined elite. That leads to anti-intellectualism, which is self-destructive for everyone." The rejection of rationality and analysis is something politicians can easily capitalize on, and Amis refers to President Trump as a plutocrat in populist's clothing. "It’s profoundly hypocritical because his policies do not favor the working man... It’s an act, populism. Always an act." Are the American people being conned, and is a return to elitism the answer? Martin Amis is the author of The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017.
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Transcript: Is snobbery due for a comeback? Well, not—I don’t mean class snobbery. All that rubbish is, at least in England, it’s more or less a thing of the past. But I think intellectual snobbery has been much neglected and I was pleading for more care about how people express themselves, and more reverence—not for people of high social standing, but for people of decent education and training.
Populism relies on a sentimental and, in fact, very old-fashioned view that the uneducated population knows better in its instincts than the over-refined elite. That leads to anti-intellectualism, which is self-destructive for everyone.
I mean, this is as old as democracy, you know: should you get the able-est and most intellectually agile leader, or should you get the most average leader? This was discussed in Rome in classical antiquity.
And in every other developed nation brain has won the battle over instinct. It’s ridiculously old-fashioned to think that there’s some core instinct that is going to be wiser than an analytical and rational approach. “I go with my gut,” you know. Bush Jr. took us into Iraq. He said, “I went with my gut,” which was watched with approval by probably the majority of Americans.
Now, in every other nation brain has won over gut but in America it still splits the nation, and the idea that Donald Trump has cast off these shackles and we can go back to being brutes again is a terrible prospect. “Telling it like it is.” What does that mean? I never know what he’s going on about when he says that: “I tell it like it is,” and his supporters say, “He tells it like it is.” Tells WHAT like WHAT is?
In fact, since his mendacity rate is about 80 percent at the best of times he’s telling it how it ISN’T.
And what that means, decoded, “telling it like it is,” is being a blundering loudmouth who gives voice to the sort of low grumble in the common mind. I can see no virtue in that. And it’s profoundly hypocritical because his policies do not favor the working man. He’s a plutocrat to his core, and those are the policies he’ll follow. It’s an act, populism. Always an act.
