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.
Why the future of science depends on creativity and emotion | NASA's Michelle ThallerEver wondered why a sunset is red, or what the planet Jupiter is made of? Questions are the launchpad of every scientific journey, and now you have the chance to ask yours to a real NASA astronomer. Michelle Thaller, assistant director of science communication at NASA, will be answering questions from Big Thinkers, like you! To submit your question, click here. In this video, Thaller explains why questions are so beautiful, and why making science accessible to everyone enriches our world. It's public curiosity that allows science to flourish. "To me, science is going to die unless science becomes something that everyone can be involved in. It can’t just be the purview of a few privileged people that separate themselves off from the rest of culture. You know, the same thing with art: art is something that isn’t just done by professional artists. Anyone can draw and paint and dance and become involved in the arts and value the arts because of that. And everyone can ask questions," Thaller says.
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Transcript: So much of science culture, to me, seems like a holdover from the last century. There is still this formalism that’s involved, and to some degree scientific formalism is really needed because the whole point of being a scientist is if you write a scientific paper another scientist should be able to read your paper and set up their instrument just like yours and do exactly the same experiment, and if everything goes right they would get the same result, you know: “Point your telescope at this part of the sky, observe for this long and you’re going to see the same thing that I did.” At least you hope so.
And this formalism now is something that we constantly stumble over because I think scientists have made the mistake that the formalism IS science. It is a tool, it is a part of science, and it’s a useful tool. But science itself is an inquiry, and it’s curiosity. It is not a method. There is no such real thing as a scientific method; people go about being a scientist in many different ways with many different strategies. So there really seems to be this sort of—it almost is a rejection, as a scientist, of being very emotionally connected to your work, of being able to convey that to an audience, and I think that the word that I come up with is the idea of celebrating what we do, celebrating science, the amazing accomplishments, the amazing system we have in place that can invent new technologies, that can make new discoveries.
Celebrating something as simple as that there is a field of study called astrophysics where we’re doing everything from learning what set off the Big Bang to exploring the moons of Jupiter. These are wonderful things to be celebrated. And yet, as scientists, we think that it’s somehow kind of blowing our own horn, it’s very unseemly to do this.
And I often run into scientists that really resist science communicators like me trying to help them visualize their science. I think about exoplanets, planets around other stars. At this moment in time, we know of about 4,000 planets going around other stars in the sky. And we have some data on them. The data is usually just what the mass of the planet is, how big the planet is, whether the planet is solid or gaseous. But so often I run across scientists that just want to present the graphs of their data and they get very upset when we bring in artists—very well-informed artists, by the way—that work with the scientists and say well, you know, with that size of a planet and that distance from the star maybe it would have an atmosphere, maybe it would have clouds. Maybe it even has water on the surface. And we always say, we don’t know these things, but this is based on scientific fact.
A lot of scientists really, really rebel when you try to actually make it something visual and something emotional. It doesn’t seem to really be science if you let that happen.
To me, science is going to die unless science becomes something that everyone can be involved in. It can’t just be the purview of a few privileged people that separate themselves off from the rest of culture. You know, the same thing with art: Art is something that isn’t just done by professional artists. Anyone can draw and paint and dance and become involved in the arts and value the arts because of that. And everyone can ask questions. And everyone can wonder why a sunset is red or wonder what the planet Jupiter is made of. It’s not something that should be cordoned off and made into something separate from the rest of human life.
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.
How quantum physics can make encryption stronger | Vikram SharmaAs quantum computing matures, it's going to bring unimaginable increases in computational power along with it -- and the systems we use to protect our data (and our democratic processes) will become even more vulnerable. But there's still time to plan against the impending data apocalypse, says encryption expert Vikram Sharma. Learn more about how he's fighting quantum with quantum: designing security devices and programs that use the power of quantum physics to defend against the most sophisticated attacks.
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What if we paid doctors to keep people healthy? | Matthias MüllenbeckWhat if we incentivized doctors to keep us healthy instead of paying them only when we're already sick? Matthias Müllenbeck explains how this radical shift from a sick care system to a true health care system could save us from unnecessary costs and risky procedures -- and keep us healthier for longer.
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How to spot high-conflict people before it’s too late | Bill EddyHere's a fast fact about high-conflict people: life is better when you avoid them. Bill Eddy, mediation expert and president of the High Conflict Institute, describes them not only as difficult but also potentially dangerous. So how can we avoid becoming a target in their path of destruction? First, you have to be able to recognize them, says Eddy. They tend to share these four key characteristics: a preoccupation with blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors. Once you know what you're dealing with—a textbook high-conflict personality—you can take measures to manage this relationship, whether it's at home, at work, or beyond. Eddy shares his matter-of-fact methods for withdrawing from these people or, if that's not an option, for how to resist their conflict lures and disengage from the drama. Bill Eddy is the author of 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities.
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Transcript: What’s interesting is high-conflict personalities seem to—we’ve really boiled it down to four key characteristics. The first and maybe the most stunning is a preoccupation with blaming other people. It’s really, “It’s all your fault,”—and you may have experienced this—“and it’s not at all my fault”. That’s zero. “My part of the problem is zero.” And that’s how high-conflict people talk. And they’ll say, “Don’t you get it? It’s all your fault.”
The second is a lot of all-or-nothing thinking. “Of course it’s all your fault, but my way or the highway.” Solutions to problems are: “There’s all-good people and there’s all-bad people.” So they have this kind of all-or-nothing perspective.
A third is often, but not always, unmanaged emotions. And you may see that; people that just start yelling or just start crying or just storm out of a room—that kind of behavior we’re seeing, but it’s emotions that they’re not managing.
And the fourth is extremes of behavior.
And one thing I talk about in the book 'Five Types of People' is this 90 percent rule, that 90 percent of people don’t do some of the things that high-conflict people do. So if you see some shocking behavior and then the person makes an excuse for it, that’s often the tip of the iceberg.
So it’s preoccupation with blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors. That seems to be the pattern for high-conflict personalities. People that have those we call high-conflict people. But, by the way, don’t tell them that you think that—that’ll blow up in your face.
So target of blame seems to be why these folks can become so difficult. If you’re the target of blame your life may be ruined by one of these folks, and that’s what people need to become aware of. So the target of blame—each of these five high-conflict personalities tends to zero in generally on one person. It could change over time but they see that person as the cause of all their problems. And so they want to control that person or eliminate that person or destroy or humiliate that person. It’s a fixation on one person, and all of their life problems they emotionally focus on that person. So you don’t want to be one of those folks.
How to avoid being a target of blame? First of all, if you see warning signs of this behavior don’t get too close to such a person. You may be a friend, but don’t be the closest friend. You may be a co-worker, but don’t be the closest co-worker. Because what seems to happen is the people they get really close to are the ones that are most at-risk of becoming their targets of blame.
But it could be anybody. They tend to target intimate others and people in authority. So this could be boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, parents, children, co-workers, neighbors they get close to. It also could be police, it could be a government agency or government official, it could be their boss, it could be the company owner. So they tend to focus on intimate others and/or people in authority.
Now the way to avoid becoming a target of blame is not getting too close to them but also not engaging in conflict with them. They often invite conflict, like they’ll say outrageous things and you may feel like you’ve got to persuade them that they’re wrong, and that’s what I call a “forget about it”. Just forget about it. You’re not going to change their mind. If they’re a difficult person, a high-conflict person, this is who they are, and you may not really even exist for them. So if you argue with them they’re not going to change. So save yourself the trouble.
How to tame your wandering mind | Amishi JhaAmishi Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what's important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention's power, Jha says -- but some simple techniques can boost it. "Pay attention to your attention," Jha says.
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The rhythm of Afrobeat | Sauti SolFrom Beyoncé to Drake and beyond, the world is rocking to the rhythm of Afrobeat. Feel the music as Kenyan afro-pop superstars Sauti Sol take the TED stage to perform three songs: "Live and Die in Afrika," "Sura Yako" and "Kuliko Jana."
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The human stories behind mass incarceration | Eve AbramsThe United States locks up more people than any other country in the world, says documentarian Eve Abrams, and somewhere between one and four percent of those in prison are likely innocent. That's 87,000 brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers -- predominantly African American -- unnecessarily separated from their families, their lives and dreams put on hold. Using audio from her interviews with incarcerated people and their families, Abrams shares touching stories of those impacted by mass incarceration and calls on us all to take a stand and ensure that the justice system works for everyone.
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Need a new idea? Start at the edge of what is known | Vittorio Loreto"Where do great ideas come from?" Starting with this question in mind, Vittorio Loreto takes us on a journey to explore a possible mathematical scheme that explains the birth of the new. Learn more about the "adjacent possible" -- the crossroads of what's actual and what's possible -- and how studying the math that drives it could explain how we create new ideas.
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Is the Trump presidency a religious cult? | Reza AslanAre fundamentalist Christians a dangerous religious cult? Possibly. The controversial author and religious scholar Reza Aslan posits that President Donald Trump has much of his evangelical fan-base believing that he's somehow been anointed by God to become President. Nevermind the Russian election scandal, his affairs with porn stars and unwarranted sexual acts towards women, or his inability to remember even a single Bible verse when asked. Evangelical Christians are abandoning their core moral beliefs to follow, as Reza suggests, someone who exhibits every trademark of a cult leader.
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Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the previous election. That’s a record. That’s more white evangelicals than voted for George W. Bush—and George W. Bush was a white evangelical.
This makes no sense to people, especially when you consider that Trump is not just the most irreligious president in modern history, that his entire worldview makes a mockery of core Christian values like humility and empathy and care for the poor; That this individual who couldn’t even name a single verse in the bible when asked to do so, and yet - and yet - received a record number of votes by white evangelicals.
Scholars of religion—normal, rational, people—have been trying to figure out why. Why? What happened?
And I think that there’s a couple of things to keep in mind.
Number one, it’s white evangelicals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but 67 percent of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton.
Now, these are people who believed the exact same thing, whose only real difference is that.. is the color of their skin.
So let’s not ignore the fact that there is a racial element to this support.
Jim Wallace, the head of the Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, said it best when he said that these white evangelicals “acted more white than they did evangelical.” And I think he’s right.
The second reason I think has to do with the pernicious influence of something called the prosperity gospel, which has gripped the imaginations of white evangelicals.
This is that version of Christianity preached by these charlatans like Joel Olstein and T.D. Jakes, the essential gist of which is that God wants you to drive a Bentley, that what Jesus really wants for you is material prosperity—and indeed that’s how you know God has blessed you, is by your material prosperity.
Many white evangelicals looked at Donald Trump, and what they saw was a wealthy man. And that wealth, as far as they were concerned, was just a sign of God’s blessings.
And so that freed Trump from having to do what every other candidate, certainly every other Republican candidate for president has had to do, and that is: actually prove his spiritual bonafides. Trump never had to do that. All he had to do was just keep talking about how rich he was. And for a large swathe of white evangelicals that was enough.
Thirdly, Donald Trump did something that no other president, not even any Republican president courting the evangelical vote ever did. He expressly promised secular power to these white evangelical groups.
In his speeches to them and in the conferences that he had, both private and public, he very clearly and very explicitly said that if they voted for him that he would give them “their power back,” even if he didn’t agree with their pet causes that he would just allow them to have those causes.
And you can see as president he’s talking now about removing, for instance, the Johnson Amendment, which is an amendment that prohibits preachers and churches from actually engaging directly in politics and preaching politics from the pulpit. It’s why they get to keep their tax break. No one has ever thought about removing this requirement until Donald Trump.
And now he is very seriously moving towards allowing churches to take part directly in political activism as churches.
But none of this, none of this explains the most important phenomenon about white evangelicals in America, and that is this: In the span of a single election cycle, white evangelicals have gone from being the group in America that is most likely to say that a politician’s morality matters to the group that is now least likely to say that.
Atheists in America think that a politician’s morality matters more than white evangelicals in America do—White evangelicals who continue to refer to themselves as value voters.
For survivors of Ebola, the crisis isn't over | Soka MosesIn 2014, as a newly trained physician, Soka Moses took on one of the toughest jobs in the world: treating highly contagious patients at the height of Liberia's Ebola outbreak. In this intense, emotional talk, he details what he saw on the frontlines of the crisis -- and reveals the challenges and stigma that thousands of survivors still face.
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How to reboot your life with the Japanese philosophy of Ikigai | Rob BellWhat gets you out of bed in the morning? If your only answer to that question is: 'My alarm clock,' then firstly, that's detention, and secondly: where is your sense of purpose? Spiritual teacher Rob Bell explains how his discovery of Ikigai—a Japanese life philosophy—crystilized a problem he was seeing too often, in most people he met. In your late teens or early twenties, you typically land on a path that you follow for the rest of your life. You picked a degree and now you're stuck. You made a decision and now it seems too late to choose again. That can lead us to a deeply unsatisfying place, where today is just a repeat of yesterday. Ikigai contains "this really interesting idea, that when you no longer have something that gets you out of bed in the morning, then you’re kind of dead, even if you’re still alive," says Bell. Your reason for being should shift many times over the course of your life, and looking at your life as containing many seasons— rather than one long stretch—can be a better way to frame and find fulfillment. Ikigai asks four key questions, at the center of which you can find your purpose: 1) What do you love? 2) What are you good at? 3) What does the world need from you? 4) What can you get paid for?
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Rob Bell: I’ve met more people who, essentially, somewhere along the way picked up: 'You go to school, you get trained in something, then you go get a job in that and then you do that job and that’s your career and then you die.' But then they got into this thing and realized they don’t actually want to do this with their life. Or nobody wants this particular trade anymore. You make eight-track players; people aren’t buying eight-tracks anymore.
There’s this weird thing about the market where if you go in with, 'Well, this is a thing that I do,' there may be forces beyond you that like: 'No one wants to pay for that anymore.'
And so over the years, I kept meeting people who had this very single track 'this is what I’m supposed to do' thing and then it disappointed them for reasons out of their control or simply, “I got trained to do this thing that I don’t like to do.”
Then I stumbled on this Japanese word “ikigai” and ikigai essentially is that which gets you out of bed in the morning. Sometimes it’s translated as 'your reason for being'. And in Japanese culture they have this very well thought through idea of ikigai: that you never stop working out your ikigai—what it is that gets you out of bed in the morning. And so in this season of life, this is what you’re doing but that may change. It may shift. Somebody you love may get sick and so you need to care for them. You used to do this and now that industry is sort of dried up but now you need to go back to school because you need to now go do this.
And they had this really interesting idea that when you no longer have something that gets you out of bed in the morning, then you’re kind of dead, even if you’re still alive. And the reason why I find that fascinating is you can be successful, you can have a nice job, you can have a nice house, you can do all the stuff that everybody says, “Hey, you’ve made it,” and yet wake up in the morning with a profound sense of dread like, “Ugh, another day?” And despair is a spiritual disease. Despair is when you believe that tomorrow will simply be a repeat of today.
Despair is when you look ahead into the future and each day is just another version of this. What we really want, no matter how educated, sophisticated, accomplished we are, we want to wake up in the morning with this sense of anticipation.
Like, “Look what I get to do today!” The great Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “I didn’t ask for success, I asked for wonder.”
A rite of passage for late life | Bob SteinWe use rituals to mark the early stages of our lives, like birthdays and graduations -- but what about our later years? In this meditative talk about looking both backward and forward, Bob Stein proposes a new tradition of giving away your things (and sharing the stories behind them) as you get older, to reflect on your life so far and open the door to whatever comes next.
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What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? | Liz OgbuLiz Ogbu is an architect who works on spatial justice: the idea that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources and services is a human right. In San Francisco, she's questioning the all too familiar story of gentrification: that poor people will be pushed out by development and progress. "Why is it that we treat culture erasure and economic displacement as inevitable?" she asks, calling on developers, architects and policymakers to instead "make a commitment to build people's capacity to stay in their homes, to stay in their communities, to stay where they feel whole."
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How I use art to bridge misunderstanding | Adong JudithDirector and playwright Adong Judith creates provocative art that sparks dialogue on issues from LGBTQ rights to war crimes. In this quick but powerful talk, the TED Fellow details her work -- including the play "Silent Voices," which brought victims of the Northern Ugandan war against Joseph Kony's rebel group together with political, religious and cultural leaders for transformative talks. "Listening to one another will not magically solve all problems," Judith says. "But it will give a chance to create avenues to start to work together to solve many of humanity's problems."
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Jordan Peterson: The fatal flaw in leftist American politicsWhat is political extremism? Professor of psychology Jordan Peterson points out that America knows what right-wing radicalism looks like: The doctrine of racial superiority is where conservatives have drawn the line. "What’s interesting is that on the conservative side of the spectrum we’ve figured out how to box-in the radicals and say, 'No, you’re outside the domain of acceptable opinion,'" says Peterson. But where's that line for the Left? There is no universal marker of what extreme liberalism looks like, which is devastating to the ideology itself but also to political discourse as a whole. Fortunately, Peterson is happy to suggest such a marker: "The doctrine of equality of outcome. It seems to me that that’s where people who are thoughtful on the Left should draw the line, and say no. Equality of opportunity? [That's] not only fair enough, but laudable. But equality of outcome…? It’s like: 'No, you’ve crossed the line. We’re not going there with you.'" Peterson argues that it's the ethical responsibility of left-leaning people to identify liberal extremism and distinguish themselves from it the same way conservatives distance themselves from the doctrine of racial superiority. Failing to recognize such extremism may be liberalism's fatal flaw. Jordan Peterson is the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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Transcript: I would like to talk briefly about depolarization on the Left and the Right, because I think there’s a technical problem that needs to be addressed. So here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
It’s been obvious to me for some time that, for some reason, the fundamental claim of post-modernism is something like an infinite number of interpretations and no canonical overarching narrative. Okay, but the problem with that is: okay, now what?
No narrative, no value structure that is canonically overarching, so what the hell are you going to do with yourself? How are you going to orient yourself in the world? Well, the post-modernists have no answer to that. So what happens is they default—without any real attempt to grapple with the cognitive dissonance—they default to this kind of loose, egalitarian Marxism. And if they were concerned with coherence that would be a problem, but since they’re not concerned with coherence it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
But the force that’s driving the activism is mostly the Marxism rather than the post-modernism. It’s more like an intellectual gloss to hide the fact that a discredited economic theory is being used to fuel an educational movement and to produce activists. But there’s no coherence to it.
It’s not like I’m making this up, you know. Derrida himself regarded—and Foucault as well—they were barely repentant Marxists. They were part of the student revolutions in France in the 1960s, and what happened to them, essentially—and what happened to Jean-Paul Sartre for that matter—was that by the end of the 1960s you couldn’t be conscious and thinking and pro-Marxist. There’s so much evidence that had come pouring in from the former Soviet Union, from the Soviet Union at that point, and from Maoist China, of the absolutely devastating consequences of the doctrine that it was impossible to be apologetic for it by that point in time.
So the French intellectuals in particular just pulled off a sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into post-modern identity politics. And we’ve seen the consequence of that. It’s not good. It’s a devolution into a kind of tribalism that will tear us apart on the Left and on the Right.
In my house, I have a very large collection of socialist, realist paintings from the former Soviet Union—propaganda pieces, but also kind of harsh impressionist pieces of working-class people and so forth—and I collected them for a variety of reasons. Now you could debate about the propriety of that given the murderousness of those regimes. And fair enough, I have my reasons. But I don’t have paintings from the Nazi era in my house, and I wouldn’t. And that’s been a puzzlement to me because I regard the communists, the totalitarian communist regimes, as just as murderous as the Nazi regimes.
But there’s an evil associated with the Nazi regime that seems more palpable in some sense. So I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. And then I’ve been thinking about a corollary to that, which is part of the problem with our current political debate.
On the Right, I think we’ve identified markers for people who have gone too far in their ideological presuppositions. And it looks to me like the marker we’ve identified is racial superiority.
Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE | Chris NowinskiSomething strange and deadly is happening inside the brains of top athletes -- a degenerative condition, possibly linked to concussions, that causes dementia, psychosis and far-too-early death. It's called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and it's the medical mystery that Chris Nowinski wants to solve by analyzing brains after death. It's also why, when Nowinski meets a pro athlete, his first question is: "Can I have your brain?" Hear more from this ground-breaking effort to protect athletes' brains -- and yours, too.
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3 new jobs A.I. is creating: Trainers, explainers, and sustainers | Paul DaughertyWhere will you work in the future? As automation revs its engine and academic institutions take up megaphones to predict the end of the human workforce, we may have overlooked a vast area of employment where human intelligence and machine intelligence collaborate, says Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture. Daugherty calls this the "missing middle"—an employment-rich zone for people in humanities, STEM, and service jobs. There are three specific kinds of jobs that A.I. is creating right now: trainers, explainers, and sustainers. Here, Daughtery explains each type of job and delves further into how A.I. will change the future of work for people in design, customer service, and medicine. Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
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Transcript: One of our fundamental premises with 'Human + Machine' is really the “plus” part of human plus machine.
There’s been a lot of this dialogue about polarizing extremes, that the machines can do certain things and humans can do certain things, and as a result we end up with this battle, kind of pitting what the machines will do versus the humans. We think that creates the wrong dynamics.
So with 'Human + Machine' we’re trying to reframe the dialogue to: what’s the real interesting space, and really the big space, where humans and machines collaborate—we call it collaborative intelligence—and come together and help provide people with better tools powered by A.I. to do what they do more effectively?
And if you think about it that way, we really believe that with A.I. we’re not moving into a more machine-oriented age, we’re actually moving into an age that’s a more human age, where we can accentuate what makes us human, empowered by more powerful tools that are more humanlike in their ability, and that creates these new types of jobs.
So we call that the 'missing middle' because there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about these jobs in the middle where people and machines collaborate. And we’ve come up with two sets of jobs. On one side you have the jobs where people are needed to help machines, and that’s not a category that too many people focus on. We think it’s an important one and I’ll come back to that in a minute. On the other side, we have a set of jobs where machines help people, machines give people new superpowers. And those are the two broad categories of jobs we see in the 'missing middle'.
So in that set of jobs where people are needed to help machines, there are a few interesting, novel, new categories of jobs we found that people don’t often think about and we call those trainers, explainers, and sustainers, and they’re very important things for all organizations to think about as you think about how to deploy artificial intelligence in your organization.
So think about a trainer. What we mean by a trainer is it’s a new type of job where a person is needed to train A.I. or train the machines that we’re using in businesses. We’re not talking about simple things like tagging data for supervised learning—that’s included, but that’s just the start of it. What we’re really talking about here is more sophisticated forms of training that are needed so that our artificial intelligence and our systems behave properly.
For example, for companies we’re working with that are developing chatbots and virtual agents, if you’re a bank you might want a very different type of personality than a media company or a gaming company or a casino, and embodying the personality, the behavior, the culture, the characteristics, the nature of the response in your A.I. is a really important consideration for companies. Because we talk about the idea that with A.I., you know, A.I. becomes the brand of your company because it’s the face of the company and how your company is perceived by your customers. So this idea of a trainer that brings in skills to develop that kind of behavioral response for your A.I. is a really important skill. And we’re hiring people to do these jobs today, people with backgrounds in things like sociology, psychology and other areas. Not a technical skill but a new type of role that’s very important to get A.I. right as you apply it to your organization. Another type of job where we see people needed to help machines are explainers and sustainers, and I’ll talk about these two a little bit together. Explainers are new roles where we need people in roles where they can explain the implications of artificial intelligence.
What we can do about the culture of hate | Sally KohnWe're all against hate, right? We agree it's a problem -- their problem, not our problem, that is. But as Sally Kohn discovered, we all hate -- some of us in subtle ways, others in obvious ones. As she confronts a hard story from her own life, she shares ideas on how we can recognize, challenge and heal from hatred in our institutions and in ourselves.
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"my mama" / "BLACK BANANA" | ReiSinger-songwriter Rei brings her mix of indie rock and blues to the TED stage in a performance of two songs, "my mama" and "BLACK BANANA."
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Hungry for meaning: Why there is no conflict between science and spirituality | Rob BellSpirituality plays a different ballgame than science, so the language used in either of them doesn't often match up to the other side. New York Time bestselling author and spiritual teacher Rob Bell posits that the two need each other to help describe this modern world. Whereas science deals with explaining cold hard facts, spirituality deals in vagueries that can often help the human side of us a lot more.
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Ah, yes. That word: “spiritual”.
I think the reason why many people run away from it is because lots of what has been done in the name of spiritual or spirituality has been completely crazy. So the problem with that word is it’s easy for a lot of really bizarre unfounded—sometimes even destructive and toxic—ideas can hang out under this word spiritual because you’re talking essentially about that which isn’t accessed through the five senses.
When somebody says, “Well, I just had a spiritual feeling.” Well, you can’t really put that on a spreadsheet. You can’t really take a picture of that. My understanding of spirituality is that this life that we’ve each been given, the very breath that we took and we’re about to take, is a gift. That life is a gift and how you respond to it, what you do with it matters.
So you’ll find in a business people working very hard and making lots of money and yet at some point asking these questions like, what is the point of what we’re doing? Why are we here? Why are we giving this kind of energy to this? Which is fundamentally a spiritual question, because the answer to that question won’t show up in the second quarter financials, and yet why people get up in the morning and come work here is the driving question behind the question behind the question.
So I begin with life is a gift and what you do with it, how you respond to it matters. And when we talk about it mattering we are talking about something that’s true but can’t be accessed in the ways that we normally access things.
And I think a lot of scientists have run from the word spiritual because a scientist deals with hard facts.
And when you get into language of the heart, language of the soul, when you start talking about transcendence you are talking about more than literal truth.
So like if somebody asks me why I fell in love with my wife and I said, “Well because she’s five seven, she’s from Arizona and she drives a Honda,” that’s kind of a weird answer. But if you say to me “Why’d you fall in love with your wife?” and I said, “I fell in love with Kristen because when we got together it was like I found my other half.” Something within you is like okay, now that’s an answer that I get. I understand that answer.
And yet it’s not like I was limping. It’s not like suddenly I actually literally found my other half. I shifted to a different kind of language to describe a different kind of reality. And so oftentimes in my experience the scientist is fine with spirituality when we understand the terms that we’re working with.
This idea somehow that faith and science are at opposition I’ve always found to be complete insanity. Both are searching for the truth. Both have a sense of wonder and an expectation and exploration. They’re each simply naming different aspects of the human experience. One thrives in naming exteriors – height, weight, gravitational pull, electromagnetic force. The other is about naming interiors – compassion, kindness, suffering, loss, heartache. They’re both simply different ways of exploring different dimensions of the human experience.
Well if you think about the past like let’s say 300-400 years of human history, especially the history of the Western world we’ve had this explosion. Some call it the age of certainty, the explosion of scientific rationalism. I mean we have 10,000 songs in our pockets. We have airports and hospitals. We don’t have polio anymore. I mean we have had this explosion of rational, stand-at-a-distance and study and analyze it with a clipboard and a lab coat—I guess now it would be an iPad—But we’ve had this explosion of knowledge about how the world actually works.
Can you solve this riddle? How to overcome your mind’s rigid thinking | Leonard MlodinowTheoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow knows that good ideas don't come easily. Creative, original thinking is actually a lot harder to achieve than just tuning out, as the brain puts a lot of filters and biases on ideas before they come out. Some of these filters are applied through learned experience: for example, you're not going to be able to truly tap into creativity if you're focused on whether your potential idea will fail or not, nor are you going to be able to think creatively if you're distracted. The human brain is constantly coming up with ideas in the subconscious mind but few make it past these filters. But if you focus, and allow your brain to relax, those ideas can bubble up into the conscious mind more and more often. Leonard Mlodinow's latest book is Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change.
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Transcript: Sometimes the solution to a challenge in life isn't cleverer thinking, it's to step back and look at the problem, not the solution and then you'll realize that you had some hidden assumption or some assumption that you could relax that you didn't realize and that will change everything. For example, here's a riddle: Marjorie and Margie were born of the same mother and father on the same day of the same month at the same hour and yet they are not twins. How is that possible? So these two girls were born at the same time of the same parents but they're not twins? Well, the answer is they're triplets. Now you could start reasoning you're not going to get there because you have an assumption, an implicit assumption that you're making you have a picture in your mind - that's why the riddle is tough. I say Marjorie and Margie you're picturing two girls or two women, once you have that picture in your mind you're excluding the answer, which is triplets or quadruplets or something else like that. And that happens in life too that sometimes the answer is easy once you question your assumptions. And that's a key to elastic thinking.
The human brain is an idea machine. On the unconscious level, a level that you're not even aware of, your brain is constantly making associations and coming up with ideas. Now if all these ideas just popped into your consciousness you would be overwhelmed you would drown in them you wouldn't be able to function as some people with certain mental disorders experience. If you're schizophrenic, for instance, you might be swamped with so many sensations and ideas that you can't even connect with reality. Most of us do better than that because we have these things called cognitive filters in our brain that kill the ideas that are less conventional or less likely to be true less connected to reality and they allow the more ordinary ideas to come through on the theory in your brain that those are the ones most likely to work and in most circumstances they are the ones that work. But sometimes they're not and you need a different idea. When you're looking to think differently you have to learn how to relax those cognitive filters.
When you relax your mind it's only when you relax your mind and you open your mind and you open yourself that a new idea can pop into your mind that hey maybe I never thought of this so I didn't question that. So because of that when you're exercising elastic thinking, when you're trying to get a new idea or to question an assumption, overcome a mental barrier, to adapt to change rather than applying the same old same old, it's important to keep all distractions away from you. Keep anything that would focus your mind away. For instance, your cell phone, even if you're not checking your cell phone but you know it's on you might feel it vibrate or you might just think I wonder what's there, that's bad. Changing your task, multitasking is bad. You're not going to get these really brilliant ideas if every ten minutes you're going to another focus. These things take time so another point is you have to give yourself the time. For me, it's unlimited time. If I'm doing physics or if I'm writing a book and I start at 10:00 in the morning if I have something to do at 1:00 in the afternoon that kills the whole morning. I can't do it. I won't even start I'll just say I can't work today because I have something to do at 1:00. Now that seems a little bit extreme, but there's a reason for that I'm not as imaginative, I'm not as exploratory with my ideas if I know I have a deadline because I have the pressure that I have to solve this physics problem or write this chapter on these pages and be done by 1:00. I know that at 1:00 I'm going to have to leave and I'm not going to not like it if I didn't get anywhere.
Why must artists be poor? | Hadi EldebekThe arts bring meaning to our lives and spirit to our culture -- so why do we expect artists to struggle to make a living? Hadi Eldebek is working to create a society where artists are valued through an online platform that matches artists with grants and funding opportunities -- so they can focus on their craft instead of their side hustle.
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Who is God? One religion answers this question better than the others.We project upon God our own biases and bigotries," says religious scholar and author Reza Aslan. God is, by definition, unhuman and is therefore impossible to conceive of—but we humans have a psychological itch that must be scratched: we're compelled to know what our god is really like so we fill in the blanks with what we know best: ourselves. One religion satisfies this urge to know better than the rest: in the birth of Jesus, God literally becomes a human being. "That, I think more than anything else, explains why Christianity is the most successful religion in the world," says Aslan.
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Reza Aslan: There’s a cognitive psychologist by the name of Justin Barrett who did a series of really fascinating studies about the way in which people think about God. He asked a group of devoutly religious people—Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus—he basically gave them a form to fill out about the ways in which they think about the divine. And for the most part what he found was that they answered in theologically correct ways when talking about God as being, say, omniscient or omnipresent. But then he began to engage the same subjects in conversation. He asked them to start describing in regular language how they think about God. And what he discovered is that almost every single person, when forced to start talking about God, violated those core theological principles of God being, for instance, omnipresent and omniscient. In fact, what he discovered is that the more they talked about God, the more it sounded like they were describing some person that they met on the street. And this goes to a fundamental aspect about the way that we think about the divine, whether we are ourselves believers or not. And that is that, unconsciously, we can’t help but to imagine God as essentially a divine version of ourselves. When we conceive of God we unconsciously, innately, impose upon God our own personality, our own virtues, our own vices, our own strengths, our own weaknesses. We project upon God our own biases and bigotries. We implant in God human characteristics, human personality, human desires all along with superhuman powers. And so, as a result, what we really do—again, whether we’re aware of it or not—is we divinize ourselves.
If you believe in God then what you believe in is something that is, by definition, utterly unhuman. And so the question becomes: how do you talk about that thing, how do you think about that thing, how do you form a relationship with something that is utterly unhuman? Well, the way you do so is by humanizing that thing. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, intimately linked and remarkably cohesive narrative in which human beings increasingly humanize the divine. Until, of course, in the person of Jesus, God literally becomes a human being. .
The Great Migration and the power of a single decision | Isabel WilkersonSometimes, a single decision can change the course of history. Join journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson as she tells the story of the Great Migration, the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and West between World War I and the 1970s. This was the first time in American history that the lowest caste people signaled they had options and were willing to take them -- and the first time they had a chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their innate talents, Wilkerson explains. "These people, by their actions, were able to do what the powers that be, North and South, could not or would not do," she says. "They freed themselves."
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Jordan Peterson: Inequality and hierarchy give life its purposeCriticized by the left and claimed by the right, Jordan Peterson's ideas are a defense of traditional morality and leading a purpose-driven life. The Canadian psychology professor has become a YouTube and IRL sensation, garnering tens of millions of views seemingly overnight. His claim that hierarchies help individuals create goals for themselves (and that goal-setting is a good life skill) seems to deprioritize equality—at least equality of outcome—as the primary goal of society. Such counterintuitive ideas run throughout his newest book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
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Transcript: If you don’t have anything to look up to, you don’t have anything to do, right? A lot of the meaning that people find in their lives is purpose driven. And in order to put effort into something, to work towards something, you have to assume axiomatically that what you’re working towards is better than what you have. Because why else would you do it?
And there’s a relationship, like, if it’s way better than what you have, it’s obviously proportionally difficult. So you try to balance difficulty with positivity, let’s say, something like that. But you’re always aiming up if you’re aiming. And if you’re not aiming then you don’t really have any purpose, and that deprives your life of meaning, and that’s not good because if your life is deprived of meaning then what you’re left with is the suffering. It’s not neutral, right, it’s negative.
So now the problem with having to aim up is that produces a hierarchy, because if you posit and aim then everyone arrays themselves along a hierarchy of “better at it” to “worse at it”.
And it doesn’t matter—if you create basketball as a game, 100 years later you create people who are hyperspecialized at basketball and they’re great at it, and virtually everyone else is bad. So it doesn’t matter. As soon as you produce a value proposition, you produce a hierarchy.
The problem with a hierarchy is it produces inequality. The problem with inequality is it produces resentment. Right, but you can’t get rid of the damn hierarchy just because they produce inequality and resentment, because then you don’t have anywhere to go. So that’s not an answer.
Okay, so let’s say you’re trying to deal with the fact that you have to put up with a hierarchy if you’re going to have any values. Well, how do you escape from the resentment trap? And the answer is you do an intelligent multidimensional analysis of your life.
It’s like, by the time you’re 30, I would say, you’re a pretty singular person. You’re unique and particular and your life has multiple dimensions. And you’re more or less successful—or not—along many of those dimensions.
But it’s a completely ridiculous game to pick someone else arbitrarily, who’s doing much better than you on one of those dimensions, to assume that you’re a failure because of that, or that the world is unfair because of that, without knowing in full detail all of the rest of the elements of their lives. I mean, look, we’re absolutely awash in stories of unhappy celebrities mired in interminable divorces or in affairs or in addictions. And that’s par for the course.
It’s not helpful. It’s helpful to have a goal. It’s necessary to have a hierarchy. It’s not particularly useful to compare yourself to other people. But it is useful to compare yourself to yourself. That’s the right baseline, right? That takes everything else into account.
And it’s really practically useful. And I’ve done this in my clinical practice very frequently. It’s like okay, let’s take stock of where you are and then let’s hypothesize about where you would like to be. It’s a complex conversation because we want to figure out what’s not so good about your present situation—exactly, precisely—and then come up with a hypothesis about what your life would look like if it was better. And then we can work on incremental improvement.
And the idea would be there’s some step you could take, that you would take, that would make today or tomorrow fractionally better than yesterday. And then you can iterate that. And that’s actually unbelievably powerful. You hit the effect of compounding interest, let’s say, very, very rapidly if you do that.
So there’s real utility in incremental progress. And you don’t have to improve your life much in increments to start hitting the effect of compounding interest. You make one thing slightly better, and that increases the probability that you’ll make the next thing slightly better—as well as having its positive side effects.
3 myths about the future of work (and why they're not true) | Daniel Susskind"Will machines replace humans?" This question is on the mind of anyone with a job to lose. Daniel Susskind confronts this question and three misconceptions we have about our automated future, suggesting we ask something else: How will we distribute wealth in a world when there will be less -- or even no -- work?
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How to inspire every child to be a lifelong reader | Alvin IrbyAccording to the US Department of Education, more than 85 percent of black fourth-grade boys aren't proficient in reading. What kind of reading experiences should we be creating to ensure that all children read well? In a talk that will make you rethink how we teach, educator and author Alvin Irby explains the reading challenges that many black children face -- and tells us what culturally competent educators do to help all children identify as readers.
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What a world without prisons could look like | Deanna Van BurenDeanna Van Buren designs restorative justice centers that, instead of taking the punitive approach used by a system focused on mass incarceration, treat crime as a breach of relationships and justice as a process where all stakeholders come together to repair that breach. With help and ideas from incarcerated men and women, Van Buren is creating dynamic spaces that provide safe venues for dialogue and reconciliation; employment and job training; and social services to help keep people from entering the justice system in the first place. "Imagine a world without prisons," Van Buren says. "And join me in creating all the things that we could build instead."
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Bored out of your mind at work? Your brain is trying to tell you something. | Dan CableWe've all been bored on the job at least once in our lives, but that boredom is actually very old human wiring. We constantly seek out new information to keep our minds sharp, and when tasks get repetitive we get bored and move on. But what if you can't move on? What if the tasks are your job and you have to repeat them day after day to keep a roof over your head? That, says London Business School professor Dan Cable, is why boredom has become an epidemic. Our brains aren't used to staying in their lanes, so perhaps that boredom is not a bug after all, but a feature. Dan's new book is Alive at Work.
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Transcript: Well about two years ago I stumbled on a piece of neuroscience that just stunned me. As a psychologist, I wish somebody had told me more about this but what I learned is that there appears to be a part of our brain called the ventral striatum, that's the technical term, or you also could call it the seeking system. And this system is urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know. It's urging us to be curious. And, by the way, I mean innately. I mean children six months old, three months old. If you give them some toy they love it for a little while. As they get used to it, your car keys become more interesting. It's the new and it's the desire to learn. And evolutionarily this system was developed to help us, to keep us learning. When I learned about this seeking system it really turned me on because it started to give me an insight into why disengagement from boring work, that may not be a bug. That might be a feature.
In the 2015-2016 Gallup polls, the evidence is that about 70 percent of people are not engaged in what they do all day long and about 18 percent of people are repulsed, they're actively disengaged from what they do. And I think that the reason why I say this is a problem, and it could even be called an epidemic is because work is mostly what we do. We spend so much more time at work than with our families or with those things called hobbies. And so I think that the pervasiveness of people feeling like work is a thing that we have to shut off from, a thing that we can't be our best selves, a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend. I think that is a sort of humanistic sickness and while it is bad for people, that's the humanistic bit, it also is really bad for organizations who get lackluster performance.
I think that it's interesting to think about when this all started happening and I didn't live back in the 1850s, but all the records suggest that you could buy shoes and those shoes would be sold by some store, some cobbler. And maybe there would be three people that worked there. Rarely would there be five people that worked there. And while that probably wasn't the best work in the world, each of the people in the store would watch the customer walk in and then they'd make a shoe for that customer. And they'd take leather and they'd sew it and then they'd give it. And around 1890 we got this different idea as a species where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million. And this idea of scaling up had certain implications for how work felt. And part of that was because it was decided that the way to do this would have extreme efficiency by breaking the work into really small tasks where most of the people don't meet the customer. Most of the people don't invent the shoe. Most of the people don't actually see the shoe made from beginning to end. And this idea of removing the meaning from the work was intentional. And the idea of removing the curiosity from the job was intentional. For Henry Ford curiosity was a bug, it was a problem and he needed to stamp it out in the name of reliability and quality. Now I'm not saying we're still acting just like the 1900s, but I am saying that's when we cut our teeth on management practices and the way we use control systems and punishments and extrinsic rewards to kind of cull people out into doing really repeated and sometimes tedious tasks again and again and again without having a sense of the bigger picture or who uses the final product. I think that that's part of where it came from.
So a small organization in any industry - selling toner cartridges, selling fruit, selling shoes. If you're just starting up and you've only got 30 or 50 people working there everybody is curious. Everybody is doing everything. There aren't really tight role descriptions. The job titles are not burned into your flesh. The frame of your job is not sacred.
The best way to help is often just to listen | Sophie AndrewsA 24-hour helpline in the UK known as Samaritans helped Sophie Andrews become a survivor of abuse rather than a victim. Now she's paying the favor back as the founder of The Silver Line, a helpline that supports lonely and isolated older people. In a powerful, personal talk, she shares why the simple act of listening (instead of giving advice) is often the best way to help someone in need.
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Chris Hadfield: The astronaut's guide to flat Earth theoryTo the average person, there appears to be a growing number of people who believe — somehow — that the world is actually flat and that we are all being "lied" to by world governments. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has actually been to space and has seen that the world is round, but is unphased by these so-called "flat-earthers."
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When the very first balloon was launched that could carry people it was in Paris in the late 1700s and it was Montgolfier the brothers, they had hydrogen balloons and hot air balloons and it was the cutting edge of science. It was the cutting edge of technology. We just learned how to capture a gas like hydrogen that would be lighter than air as you could take a balloon and the first balloon rose and Ben Franklin was there and it was huge and magnificent, all of those scientists. And it rose but it got out of control and it went and landed out in the countryside 15 miles away from Paris and the peasants there attacked it with pitchforks because they thought it was an alien coming from space. The schism between learned understanding and scientific pursuit and the common perception of what was normal was that close just 15 miles away. It was an enormous gap between what we knew and what we were doing and what a lot of folks knew yet or what had become part of common knowledge. So there's nothing new about the speed with which we're inventing things and the ability for people to understand what's going on. There's a recent populous sort of wave of anti-science as if that's something new. It's mostly because social media has given everybody what appears to be an equal voice. On the corner of Hyde Park in London there's Speakers Corner and that used to be the Internet where you could go stand there and yell any stupid thing you wanted and if people wanted to gather around and listen that was their choice, but if you weren't interested in whatever that person was spouting then you didn't need to listen. But now the Internet has sort of turned everything into the Speakers Corner so you really have to just decide what are you going to listen to and what aren't you. And if someone decides to put forward some stupid idea that is patently false like if somebody says the sky is orange, you can have an argument about it if you want, but it's obviously not true so there's really no point in even engaging in conversation. Or if somebody says the world is flat, it's patently untrue so there's no point in engaging in conversation because all you're doing is giving that person credibility for something that we've known for thousands of years to not be truth. I don't even worry about it. The world is full of fascinating interesting new discoveries and we're pushing the very boundaries of what we know. Stephen Hawking, who just recently died, the work that he did in trying to understand how the universe works the original thinking there's so many brilliant motivated people around that's why would you engage with someone who is being deliberately ignorant? I don't mind people that just don't know when they're just in the process of learning, but if someone has chosen to take the facts and be deliberately stupid about them then I think they've discounted themselves from rational conversation so I don't bother. If you wrestle with a pig the best you can be is a pig wrestler; I want to do better than that. So just because somebody says something, no matter how big their megaphone is, it doesn't mean that they deserve conversation. Just use your own brain, that's why we each have one, and choose who you're going to disregard.
To solve the world's biggest problems, invest in women and girls | Musimbi KanyoroAs CEO of the Global Fund for Women, Musimbi Kanyoro works to support women and their ideas so they can expand and grow. She introduces us to the Maragoli concept of "isirika" -- a pragmatic way of life that embraces the mutual responsibility to care for one another -- something she sees women practicing all over the world. And she calls for those who have more to give more to people working to improve their communities. "Imagine what it would look like if you embraced isirika and made it your default," Kanyoro says. "What could we achieve for each other? For humanity?" Let's find out -- together.
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The wonderful world of life in a drop of water | Tom Zimmerman and Simone Bianco"Hold your breath," says inventor Tom Zimmerman. "This is the world without plankton." These tiny organisms produce two-thirds of our planet's oxygen -- without them, life as we know it wouldn't exist. In this talk and tech demo, Zimmerman and cell engineer Simone Bianco hook up a 3D microscope to a drop of water and take you scuba diving with plankton. Learn more about these mesmerizing creatures and get inspired to protect them against ongoing threats from climate change.
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How shocking events can spark positive change | Naomi KleinThings are pretty shocking out there right now -- record-breaking storms, deadly terror attacks, thousands of migrants disappearing beneath the waves and openly supremacist movements rising. Are we responding with the urgency that these overlapping crises demand from us? Journalist and activist Naomi Klein studies how governments use large-scale shocks to push societies backward. She shares a few propositions from "The Leap" -- a manifesto she wrote alongside indigenous elders, climate change activists, union leaders and others from different backgrounds -- which envisions a world after we've already made the transition to a clean economy and a much fairer society. "The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better," Klein says. "But first we need to picture the world that we're fighting for. And we have to dream it up together."
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How fashion helps us express who we are -- and what we stand for | Kaustav DeyNo one thinks twice about a woman wearing blue jeans in New York City -- but when Nobel laureate Malala wears them, it's a political act. Around the globe, individuality can be a crime, and clothing can be a form of protest. In a talk about the power of what we wear, Kaustav Dey examines how fashion gives us a nonverbal language of dissent and encourages us to embrace our authentic selves.
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Do you really know why you do what you do? | Petter JohanssonExperimental psychologist Petter Johansson researches choice blindness -- a phenomenon where we convince ourselves that we're getting what we want, even when we're not. In an eye-opening talk, he shares experiments (designed in collaboration with magicians!) that aim to answer the question: Why do we do what we do? The findings have big implications for the nature of self-knowledge and how we react in the face of manipulation. You may not know yourself as well as you think you do.
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What soccer can teach us about freedom | Marc Bamuthi Joseph"Soccer is the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together," says theater maker and TED Fellow Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Through his performances and an engagement initiative called "Moving and Passing," Joseph combines music, dance and soccer to reveal accessible, joyful connections between the arts and sports. Learn more about how he's using the beautiful game to foster community and highlight issues facing immigrants.
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What I learned when I conquered the world's toughest triathlon | Minda DentlerA 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and then a full-length marathon on hot, dry ground -- with no breaks in between: the legendary Ironman triathlon in Kona, Hawaii, is a bucket list goal for champion athletes. But when Minda Dentler decided to take it on, she had bigger aspirations than just another medal around her neck. She tells the story of how she conquered this epic race, and what it inspired her to do next.
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How to connect with depressed friends | Bill BernatWant to connect with a depressed friend but not sure how to relate to them? Comedian and storyteller Bill Bernat has a few suggestions. Learn some dos and don'ts for talking to people living with depression -- and handle your next conversation with grace and maybe a bit of humor.
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How we became sisters | Felice Belle and Jennifer MurphyPoets Felice Belle and Jennifer Murphy perform excerpts from their play "Other Women," which is created and directed by Monica L. Williams. In a captivating journey, they weave together stories full of laughter, loyalty, tragedy and heartbreak, recalling the moments that made them sisters.
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To learn is to be free | Shameem AkhtarShameem Akhtar posed as a boy during her early childhood in Pakistan so she could enjoy the privileges Pakistani girls are rarely afforded: to play outside and attend school. In an eye-opening, personal talk, Akhtar recounts how the opportunity to get an education altered the course of her life -- and ultimately changed the culture of her village, where today every young girl goes to school.
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How coders are creating software that's impossible to hack | Kathleen FisherHackers thrive on human error, but a new method of coding is ending that. Recent developments by the HACMS (High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems) program at DARPA has allowed computer scientists to use mathematical proofs to verify that code—up to 100,000 lines of it at a time—is functionally correct and free of bugs. Kathleen Fisher, professor of computer science and former program manager at DARPA, explains how this allows coders to build a thin base of hyper-secure code that is verified to be functionally correct, "and then you can have lots of software running on top of it that doesn’t have that same level of assurance associated with it but that you can prove: it doesn’t matter what it does, it’s not going to affect the operation of the overall system." To illustrate this technology in the real world, Fisher tells the story of how this new method of coding defended a Boeing Little Bird helicopter from a "red team" of hackers charged with causing havoc in the system and bringing that baby down. So is there anything hackers can't hack? Now there is, thanks to the beauty (and rigor) of formal mathematics.
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Transcript: HACMS is a program at DARPA that ran for four-and-a-half years that was focused on using techniques from what is called the 'formal methods community', so techniques based on math more or less, to produce software for vehicles that came with proofs that the software had certain desirable properties; that parts of it were functionally correct, that there were no certain kinds of bugs in the software. And the consequence of those proofs is that the system is much harder to hack into.
So the formal methods community has been promising for, like, 50 years that they could produce software that proveably didn’t have certain kind of vulnerabilities. And for more or less 50 years they have failed to deliver on that promise. Yes, they could produce proofs of correctness for code but for ten lines of code or 100 lines of code—not enough code to make a difference for any kind of practical purpose.
But recently there have been advances in a bunch of different research areas that have changed that equation, and so now formal methods researchers can prove important properties about code bases that are 10,000 or 100,000 lines of code. And that’s still small potatoes compared to the size of Microsoft Windows or the size of Linux which are millions, hundreds of millions of lines of code. But when you start to get to 10,000 or 100,000 lines of code there are really interesting software artifacts that fit in that size. Things like compilers and microkernels, and you can leverage those kinds of exquisite artifacts to build much more complex software systems where only a small part of the system has to be verified to be functionally correct, and then you can have lots of software running on top of it that doesn’t have that same level of assurance associated with it but that you can prove: it doesn’t matter what it does, it’s not going to affect the operation of the overall system. So, for example, HACMS researchers used the high-assurance code and put it on a Boeing Unmanned Little Bird which is a helicopter that can fly completely autonomously or it can fly with two pilots. And this helicopter has two computers on it: one is the mission control computer that controls things like 'fly over there and take a picture' or 'fly over there and take a picture', and communicate to the ground station or the operator who’s telling the helicopter what to do.
It also has a flight control computer that controls things like altitude hold and stability, sort of the mechanics of flying the helicopter at any given time period. So the researchers put seL4 microkernel, which is a verified microkernel guaranteed to be functionally correct, on the mission control computer, and they used it to create different software partitions. So one of those partitions was responsible for communicating with the ground station. Another one of those partitions was responsible for operating the camera that the helicopter had. The researchers verified that the code in the 'communicate with the ground station' was functionally correct and isolated from the software in the 'control the camera' part. So the camera part was all the legacy software that had previously been on the helicopter to control camera operation.
How we look kilometers below the Antarctic ice sheet | Dustin SchroederAntarctica is a vast and dynamic place, but radar technologies -- from World War II-era film to state-of-the-art miniaturized sensors -- are enabling scientists to observe and understand changes beneath the continent's ice in unprecedented detail. Join radio glaciologist Dustin Schroeder on a flight high above Antarctica and see how ice-penetrating radar is helping us learn about future sea level rise -- and what the melting ice will mean for us all.
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The brain-changing benefits of exercise | Wendy SuzukiWhat's the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today? Exercise! says neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki. Get inspired to go to the gym as Suzuki discusses the science of how working out boosts your mood and memory -- and protects your brain against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
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Be humble -- and other lessons from the philosophy of water | Raymond TangHow do we find fulfillment in a world that's constantly changing? Raymond Tang struggled with this question until he came across the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching. In it, he found a passage comparing goodness to water, an idea he's now applying to his everyday life. In this charming talk, he shares three lessons he's learned so far from the "philosophy of water." "What would water do?" Tang asks. "This simple and powerful question ... has changed my life for the better."
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The role of human emotions in science and research | Ilona StengelDo human emotions have a role to play in science and research? Material researcher Ilona Stengel suggests that instead of opposing each other, emotions and logic complement and reinforce each other. She shares a case study on how properly using emotions (like the empowering feeling of being dedicated to something meaningful) can boost teamwork and personal development -- and catalyze scientific breakthroughs and innovation.
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You don't have to be an expert to solve big problems | Tapiwa ChiweweDriving in Johannesburg one day, Tapiwa Chiwewe noticed an enormous cloud of air pollution hanging over the city. He was curious and concerned but not an environmental expert -- so he did some research and discovered that nearly 14 percent of all deaths worldwide in 2012 were caused by household and ambient air pollution. With this knowledge and an urge to do something about it, Chiwewe and his colleagues developed a platform that uncovers trends in pollution and helps city planners make better decisions. "Sometimes just one fresh perspective, one new skill set, can make the conditions right for something remarkable to happen," Chiwewe says. "But you need to be bold enough to try."
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Refugees want empowerment, not handouts | Robert HakizaThe prevailing image of where refugees live is of temporary camps in isolated areas -- but in reality, nearly 60 percent of them worldwide end up in urban areas. TED Fellow Robert Hakiza takes us inside the lives of urban refugees -- and shows us how organizations like the one that he started can provide them with the skills they need to ultimately become self-sufficient.
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The genius of the London Tube Map | Michael Bierut on "Small Thing Big Idea""Small Thing Big Idea," an original TED series, celebrates the lasting genius of everyday objects so perfectly designed that they changed the world around them. Check out the whole series: https://go.ted.com/STBI
How to have a healthier, positive relationship with sex | Tiffany Kagure Mugo and Siphumeze KhundayiCheck out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com
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A life-saving invention that prevents human stampedes | Nilay KulkarniCheck out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com
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How to resolve racially stressful situations | Howard C. StevensonIf we hope to heal the racial tensions that threaten to tear the fabric of society apart, we're going to need the skills to openly express ourselves in racially stressful situations. Through racial literacy -- the ability to read, recast and resolve these situations -- psychologist Howard C. Stevenson helps children and parents reduce and manage stress and trauma. In this inspiring, quietly awesome talk, learn more about how this approach to decoding racial threat can help youth build confidence and stand up for themselves in productive ways.
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The 13th Amendment: Slavery is still legal under one conditionThe 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery—but it still remains legal under one condition. The amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Today in America, big corporations profit of cheap prison labor in both privatized and state-run prisons. Shaka Senghor knows this second wave of slavery well—he spent 19 years in jail, working for a starting wage of 17 cents per hour, in a prison where a 15-minute phone call costs between $3-$15. In this video, he shares the exploitation that goes on in American prisons, and how the 13th Amendment allows slavery to continue. He also questions the profit incentive to incarcerate in this country: why does America represent less than 5% of the world's population, but almost 25% of the world's prisoners? Shaka Senghor's latest venture is Mind Blown Media.
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Transcript: So prisons in America specifically are some of the biggest, most dysfunctional businesses we have in our society, and they are a business because of the cheap and free labor.
When you read the 13th Amendment—that basically was the amendment that broke through slavery and freed the men and women who were enslaved at the time—there is a clause in there that allows for the re-enslavement of people in the event that they’re convicted of a crime. And so in prisons throughout our country, you have people who are working for basically free, and if they’re not working for free they’re working for wages that, if we saw that happening in another country, we would be very critical of.
When I was in prison I worked for $0.17 an hour; that was my starting rate working in the kitchen. But there are also big corporations who invest in prison labor because they can get this labor for $1.50 an hour. The sad part about it is that, in turn, they don’t even hire these men and women when they’re actually released from prison. Everything in prison has inflated costs. It costs us—inside prison, when I was inside—anywhere between $3 and $15 for a 15-minute phone call.
We don’t have to pay that out here in free society. There is a way that we can send emails to men and women inside prison, and it cost five cents every time we send that, whereas out here in society we can send emails without any charge. And so there are so many ways that the prison is exploited: the cheap labor, the cost of services and goods, and it’s a model that, sadly and unfortunately, has affected a large segment of our society.
I think most people aren’t aware of why the business models of prison exist, because most of our society has been left clueless in regards to how our judicial system works. And it’s largely been through the effect of campaigns that politicians have run for years, this whole idea that one of the greatest fears you should have is crime in America. When you’re operating out of a space of fear you’re not thinking clearly, so you’re not willing to examine things that are right in front of us.
And so the way that the prison system has developed and evolved over the years, is it originally started as government-run, state-run institutions, and then people started seeing investment opportunities when the states and couldn’t keep up with the budgetary cost of incarcerating so many people. We currently have over two million men and women incarcerated throughout the country, and we represent five percent of the world population, yet we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people.
And so, at some point, states could no longer keep up with those budgets, private investors moved in and seized an opportunity, and then they started structuring laws in a way that ensured that people continue to be incarcerated for the most frivolous things. Like, 40 years ago we didn’t have as many laws on the books that we have now, and when you look at how the war on drugs itself impacted incarceration rates, if you follow that pathway you’ll see how people seized on that opportunity and began to invest in private businesses.
Looking for a job? Highlight your ability, not your experience | Jason ShenVery few of us hold jobs that line up directly with our past experiences or what we studied in college. Take TED Resident Jason Shen; he studied biology but later became a product manager at a tech company. In this quick, insightful talk about human potential, Shen shares some new thinking on how job seekers can make themselves more attractive -- and why employers should look for ability over credentials.
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How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us | Margaret MitchellAs a research scientist at Google, Margaret Mitchell helps develop computers that can communicate about what they see and understand. She tells a cautionary tale about the gaps, blind spots and biases we subconsciously encode into AI -- and asks us to consider what the technology we create today will mean for tomorrow. "All that we see now is a snapshot in the evolution of artificial intelligence," Mitchell says. "If we want AI to evolve in a way that helps humans, then we need to define the goals and strategies that enable that path now."
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3 creative ways to fix fashion's waste problem | Amit KalraWhat happens to the clothes we don't buy? You might think that last season's coats, trousers and turtlenecks end up being put to use, but most of it (nearly 13 million tons each year in the United States alone) ends up in landfills. Fashion has a waste problem, and Amit Kalra wants to fix it. He shares some creative ways the industry can evolve to be more conscientious about the environment -- and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
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The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven't met yet | Tanya MenonWe often find ourselves stuck in narrow social circles with similar people. What habits confine us, and how can we break them? Organizational psychologist Tanya Menon considers how we can be more intentional about expanding our social universes -- and how it can lead to new ideas and opportunities.
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Why I train grandmothers to treat depression | Dixon ChibandaDixon Chibanda is one of 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe -- for a population of more than 16 million. Realizing that his country would never be able to scale traditional methods of treating those with mental health issues, Chibanda helped to develop a beautiful solution powered by a limitless resource: grandmothers. In this extraordinary, inspirational talk, learn more about the friendship bench program, which trains grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy and brings care, and hope, to those in need.
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Why libertarianism is a marginal idea and not a universal value | Steven PinkerIs conflict humanity's natural state? Could we ever agree on a set of values? The knee-jerk response for any student of history would be 'no', but the data tells a different story. Psychologist and author Steven Pinker offers proof in the form of Wagner's law: "One development that people both on the Left and the Right are unaware of is almost an inexorable force that leads affluent societies to devote increasing amounts of their wealth to social spending, to redistribution to children, to education, to healthcare, to supporting the poor, to supporting the aged." Until the 20th century, most societies devoted about 1.5% of their GDP to social spending, and generally much less than that. In the last 100 years, that's changed: today the current global median of social spending is 22% of GDP. One group will groan most audibly at that data: Libertarians. However, Pinker says it's no coincidence that there are zero libertarian countries on Earth; social spending is a shared value, even if the truest libertarians protest it, as the free market has no way to provide for poor children, the elderly, and other members of society who cannot contribute to the marketplace. As countries develop, they naturally initiate social spending programs. That's why libertarianism is a marginal idea, rather than a universal value—and it's likely to stay that way. Steven Pinker is the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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Transcript: Sometimes people say that in the absence of religion there can be no moral values and, in fact, for that reason, there can never be values that everyone agrees upon. “We are inherently conflictual. The human condition is conflict among peoples because they could just never agree on values.”
Well, putting a lie to that are developments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Millennium Development Goals where the nations of the world agreed on a number of milestones that humanity should strive for—having to do with health and longevity and education—and some of which were met years early, such as reduction of extreme poverty, usually defined as more or less what a person would need to support themselves and their family, which was met several years ahead of schedule. Right now, less than ten percent of the world lives in a state of extreme poverty, and the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, called the Sustainable Development Goals, calls for the elimination of extreme poverty by the 2030s. An astonishing goal, one that is by no means out of reach.
One development that people both on the Left and the Right are unaware of is almost an inexorable force that leads affluent societies to devote increasing amounts of their wealth to social spending, to redistribution to children, to education, to healthcare, to supporting the poor, to supporting the aged.
Until the 20th century, most societies devoted, at most, one-and-a-half percent of their GDP to social spending, and generally much less than that. But starting in the 1930s with the New Deal in the United States and accelerating in Europe after World War II with the welfare state, now the median across societies of social spending is 22 percent of GDP.
The United States is a little bit below that, but even that’s misleading because we’ve got a lot of welfare that’s done by our employers. That’s how we get our health insurance. That’s how we get our retirement. Other countries, it’s the government that mediates that. But if you add the private social spending onto the public portion the United States is actually second highest of the entire world. But this is a development sometimes called Wagner’s law, and it just seems that resistance is futile.
Even conservative politicians like George W. Bush presided over another expansion of the welfare state with his Medicare drug benefit. And the attempts by the Trump administration to repeal Obamacare, for example, were stymied by pitchfork-and-torch-bearing angry constituents.
People like social spending despite their protestations, even in libertarian America. And, in fact, it's probably not a coincidence that the number of libertarian paradises in the world—that is developed states with no substantial social spending—is zero. And as developing countries develop, as they start to become affluent, they get on the bandwagon and they start to develop programs of social spending.
The virginity fraud | Nina Dølvik Brochmann and Ellen Støkken DahlThe hymen is still the most misunderstood part of the female body. Nina Dølvik Brochmann and Ellen Støkken Dahl share their mission to empower young people through better sex education, debunking the popular (and harmful) myths we're told about female virginity and the hymen.
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Capitalism isn't an ideology -- it's an operating system | Bhu SrinivasanBhu Srinivasan researches the intersection of capitalism and technological progress. Instead of thinking about capitalism as a firm, unchanging ideology, he suggests that we should think of it as an operating system -- one that needs upgrades to keep up with innovation, like the impending take-off of drone delivery services. Learn more about the past and future of the free market (and a potential coming identity crisis for the United States' version of capitalism) with this quick, forward-thinking talk.
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What is good luck? Weak Ties Theory, Charlize Theron, and luck circles | Janice Kaplan"It’s the people who you aren’t necessarily closest to who often can do the most for you," says Janice Kaplan, author of How Luck Happens. Sociologists call this Weak Ties Theory, which describes the powerful effect random connections can have on your life. "Your very close friends, your family members tend to know the same people that you do, they know the same opportunities that you do. But it’s that next circle, that slightly wider circle that’s likely to bring in new opportunities for you," Kaplan says. This isn't about adding more friends on Facebook, making vision boards a la The Secret, or seeing if your barista has heard of any great jobs lately. Specificity is absolutely key—you have to know what you want. Then, when you have the opportunity to talk to someone in outside your circle—your hairdresser, or someone at the gym—and you mention a specific goal, you might be surprised at who or what they know that can help you out. Luck is a random phenomenon, but Kaplan insists that building your own luck circle and putting yourself in the right places will result in unexpected and fantastic opportunities. Here, she shares an example from her book about how Charlize Theron got her first break after a traumatic childhood and a series of professional failures. Janice Kaplan is the author of How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life.
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Transcript: It’s probably not a big surprise that luck is often other people; luck is created by other people helping us out, and sociologists have that wonderful term of “weak ties”, which means that it’s the people who you aren’t necessarily closest to who often can do the most for you. Your very close friends, your family members tend to know the same people that you do, they know the same opportunities that you do.
But it’s that next circle, that slightly wider circle that’s likely to bring in new opportunities for you. I’m not talking about Facebook friends here, I’m talking about having colleagues and friends of friends, who you meet, who you talk to, who you bring into your circle, and who are very likely then to help you find other opportunities.
One thing we found is that often people who cross over in different categories, in different social classes, in different economic classes—like fitness trainers or hairdressers—tend to be really interesting people for bringing luck, because they know so many different people from so many different categories.
So it may be a surprise that while you’re there trying to improve your biceps you happen to mention a job you'd like and the guy who is helping you hold the weights happens to know somebody who might be able to help. Again, what’s really important as you build those bigger circles, as you build those luck circles, is to know very specifically what you’re looking for. Because if you put out that general idea it’s not going to go anywhere, but if you can be very specific about what you’re wanting sometimes those weak ties really can lead to something very unexpected and very important.
In the book I talk about Charlize Theron, the Academy Award-winning actress, who came to America when she was about 19, and she came after a series of unfortunate events in South Africa. She had a pretty traumatic and difficult childhood growing up, including her mother murdering her father, and she went to Italy first, she wanted to be a dancer, and then her knees gave out. It’s just one piece of bad luck after another in a life, but Charlize knew what she wanted to do, and she came to America, she came to Los Angeles to give herself one last chance to put herself in the place where luck could find her.
Well, it wasn’t doing such a great job at finding her—she was in a bank, the teller wouldn’t cash a check that her mom had sent from South Africa, and she had a meltdown and a fit. Well, guess what? Somebody who was standing near her in the bank happened to be a talent agent, handed her his card, and the rest is Oscar-winning history.
The surprising ingredient that makes businesses work better | Marco AlveràWhat is it about unfairness? Whether it's not being invited to a friend's wedding or getting penalized for bad luck or an honest mistake, unfairness often makes us so upset that we can't think straight. And it's not just a personal issue -- it's also bad for business, says Marco Alverà. He explains how his company works to create a culture of fairness -- and how tapping into our innate sense of what's right and wrong makes for happier employees and better results.
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Michio Kaku predicts asteroid mining will happen sooner than you thinkGood news! We're on the precipice of the next great gold rush... but it won't be in the hills of California. Or anywhere on this planet. It'll be in outer space, as there are untapped rare materials in asteroids that could be used for future technologies. That's right: there's gold in them thar skies! Theoretical physicist and one of our favorite Big Thinkers, Dr. Michio Kaku, explains to us that while China might have a stranglehold on the rare minerals and metals on our planet, there's no stopping interplanetary mining. We've even got an actual plan with actual economics already in place... we just have to wait until NASA's SLS rocket technology fully develops. 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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Transcript: When I was researching my book The Future of Humanity I came across a comment made by Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson made the biggest gamble of his life buying the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. Napoleon was fighting the British he needed hard cash immediately. He had Louisiana and that whole middle portion of the United States and so Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson for a song. But Thomas Jefferson thought how long would it take to investigate what he had just purchased? He had doubled the size of the USA. Think about that. And he probably violated the Constitution in the process. Everyone forgets that. Everyone glosses over that fact, but hey when Louis and Clark went into the territories that comprised the Louisiana Purchase they found tremendous prospects for wealth and prosperity, but Thomas Jefferson wrote that it may take a thousand years, a thousand years before they could then begin to settle the west.
Well, how long did it take? A few decades because what happened? Gold. Gold was discovered in California sparking the gold rush and within just a few years millions of prospectors, settlers, fortune hunters converged on California. It didn’t take a thousand years to develop that. Then the question now is is there going to be a new gold rush in outer space? Some people think so. Some Google billionaires have created an organization, a company, Planetary Resources, that are looking into prospecting in the asteroid belt. Now, asteroids come in all shapes and sizes and we’re cataloging them now and we have already found some perspective asteroids that could be mined. One asteroid perhaps maybe 30/50 feet across brought back down either to the moon or to the planet earth could in fact yield billions of dollars in rewards because of the rare earths and the platinum type medals that you find inside. You see, the electronics industry is dependent upon rare earths. Where are these rare earth elements found it? Mainly in China. They’re everywhere, of course, but China has the most developed market and the Chinese in turn supply on the order of 90 percent of the rare earths.
Well, a few years ago they decided to capitalize that and raise the price. All of a sudden shockwaves, shockwaves spread around the earth because people realized that oh my God China has a stranglehold, a stranglehold on high technology. How can you build the next iPhone if you don’t have the rare earths to make the transistors and to make the delicate components of these high tech devices? So I think what’s happening here is that some people see an area for profit and that is asteroid mining. Now of course, the infrastructure for that doesn’t exist, but NASA has looked at its budget and does have a program that has been shelved temporarily to redirect an asteroid. The Asteroid Redirect Program is to send of the SL ass booster rocket into outer space with the Orion capsule. It will then intercept an asteroid and bring it back to orbit around the moon. Then it can be mined as it orbits around the moon or as it’s brought back to planet earth. And so this is now beyond the phase of science fiction. We’re no longer talking about dreaming about an asteroid redirect, we’re talking about an actual plan with the economics, with the details laid out. However, at the present time we have to wait for NASA’s SLS rocket to mature to the point where we can intercept an asteroid.
3 lessons of revolutionary love in a time of rage | Valarie KaurWhat's the antidote to rising nationalism, polarization and hate? In this inspiring, poetic talk, Valarie Kaur asks us to reclaim love as a revolutionary act. As she journeys from the birthing room to tragic sites of bloodshed, Kaur shows us how the choice to love can be a force for justice.
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We don't need God or religion to know right from wrong | Michael ShermerDo we really need God or religion to tell us what's right and wrong? Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, says that this kind of celestial-spiritual guidance really isn't necessary. Or particularly effective. He makes a great case for being a moral realist — for example, studying past examples of war or slavery to learn morals from them — is much more effective than going back to mysticism like, say, The Bible, a fantastical book written by committee some 2,000 years ago and hardly updated since.
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Science and good and evil, good and bad, right and wrong, murder, all these things... human moral values. Well, I wrote a book about this, The Moral Arc. I am what’s called a moral realist: I think there are real moral values out there to be discovered. Now, not “out there” in the cosmos for astronomers to discover, I’m talking about in human nature, in human social nature.
And I’ll just give you a super simple example that I can’t believe anybody would disagree with, uh, this.
And it begins with Abraham Lincoln’s defense of why slavery is wrong. And he said simply, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” And I would agree and go further with a more recent example, if the Holocaust is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
Now, moral relativists or moral philosophers who are not moral realists, they don’t want to be called relativists—there’s other positions, but let’s just leave it at there’s other positions then moral realism.
Are you seriously going to argue that there’s some condition in which the Holocaust was okay, that it was acceptable? Now, now, mind you I’m talking about all of us in this category here talking about this are not thinking that God is the answer, that there’s some outside deity telling us what’s right and wrong, most of us that are in science or philosophy already reject that—going all the way back to Plato who debunked that idea in the first place—which is to say that if murder is really wrong or the Holocaust is really wrong or slavery is really wrong, why do we need God to tell us that?
I mean if those moral principles are out there and God is just telling us what it is, then why do we need the middleman? Just tell us the reasons why it’s wrong and okay. And if it’s just because God said it what if he didn’t say murder was wrong, would that make it right? No, it would still be wrong.
So either way, you don’t need God, so here we are in our bubble of just us trying to figure out what’s right and wrong. I argue in The Moral Arc that in fact we are already understanding what is right and wrong through the study of human nature and human culture and human history by saying there are certain things that are really better than other things, in the same way, that Kepler discovered planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular—given that he was doing his calculations correctly and given that planetary orbits really are elliptical and not circular he could hardly have discovered anything else.
We would eventually discover that democracies are better than theocracies or dictatorships just in terms of what the people want based on their survival and flourishing as sentient beings.
And that’s my moral foundation: survival and flourishing of sentient beings. We all want to survive and flourish. It’s in our nature. It’s what evolution designed us to desire. That is our moral foundation, our nature, that is who we are and what we want.
Okay, building from there: ok, so certain economic systems are really better toward of that than others, you will discover that if you are a rational being trying to figure out what’s the best way to structure things. Now it’s true that we can’t solve every moral issue by just running an experiment, but if you think about it every nation with a different constitution is an experiment. Every state in the United States, 50 different states have 50 different constitutions. They have 50 different laws about gun control or abortion—well not quite that but they have different variations on how it’s allowed. But just take anything. So these are 50 different experiments. Every Supreme Court Justice decision is an experiment. Let’s see what happens now that they’ve decided this let’s measure the consequences of this.
The 19th Amendment of abolishing alcohol, this was an experiment, a failed experiment. If your goal is to reduce the amount of drinking, that didn’t work, so the 21st Amendment abolished the 19th Amendment—those are all experiments.
How protest is redefining democracy around the world | Zachariah MampillyThe democratic process is messy, complicated and often inefficient -- but across Africa, activists are redefining democracy by putting protest at its center. In an illuminating talk, political scientist Zachariah Mampilly gives us a primer on the current wave of protests reshaping countries like Tunisia, Malawi and Zimbabwe -- and explains how this form of political dissension expands our political imaginations beyond what we're told is possible.
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What emotions does this music make you feel? It probably depends on your culture. | Anthony BrandtWe've been conditioned to believe that music taste is based on personal preference. But it might just be a lot more complex than that. Ask any random person what kind of music they love and they'll most likely give you one, two, or maybe three genres. We're actually born to appreciate all music but whittle our broader tastes away as we get older. Composer, writer, and Rice University professor Anthony Brandt posits that music is like language; if you don't expose yourself to it, you'll lose understanding of it.
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So one of the cool things about the human brain is that we’re born into the world able to learn any of the world’s languages. And, in fact, babies when they’re born they babble using all the possible phonemes, and then gradually those are pruned away mirroring their parents just to be limited to the phonemes of their native language. And in the same way with music: we’re literally born able to enjoy, appreciate any of the incredibly rich diversity of musics all over the world. But through exposure, we become conditioned and familiar with things to the point that it’s second nature and it almost feels absolute to us in terms of the certainty we feel in our reactions.
What’s wonderful and so inspiring and great is also that we can constantly stretch and expand that. And just as we can learn a second and a third and even a fourth and fifth language, we can constantly be broadening our tastes through exposure and growing what we love.
And often people are afraid, “Oh, does that mean that I give up what I loved before?” No, it’s just like having more children. You just have more love and you love more music.
So I want to do a little experiment with you. I’m going to play you two arias and I want you to grade them on an emotional scale, where number one would be the depth of tragedy and ten is ecstatic joy. And so we’ll play you the first clip and then just take a few seconds to write down your response to it.
And now we’ll play you the second clip and again do the same thing. One is the depth of tragedy, ten is ecstatic joy.
Okay, now let’s have a look at how you responded. And the answer to what those arias are is that they’re actually both arias telling about the exact same point in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
It’s the moment when Orpheus looks back at Eurydice when he’s leaving the underworld. And by making that mistake he will never see her again. And so it’s the moment of greatest sadness in the piece.
But I strongly suspect that you graded the first one as being quite sad, but you graded the second one as being happier even though they’re representing exactly the same part of the story.
And the reason for that is that the first one is in the minor mode which we, in the West, are conditioned to experience as meaning sad and a negative affect.
And the second one was written before that idea of “minor is sad and major is happy” was actually solidified in Western culture. And so that second aria is actually in major even though Orpheus is singing about exactly the same thing.
And it’s a great example of how tuned we are to our culture to respond almost instantaneously and effortlessly to the emotional cues that we get in Western music. But that’s based on exposure and conditioning. It’s not something absolute.
And so there are cultures in the world that get married to music in minor. The Jewish song Hava Nagila, which is about celebrating life, that’s a song in minor.
Again, one is just astounded looking across world cultures at the way we reinterpret musical expression and constantly come up with our own angles and visions which eventually get solidified within a certain cultural sphere.
So we think about Beethoven as the most visionary experimental composer of his day. And yet he never wrote a piece which used the noise characteristics of the instruments as expressive features. He never wrote the piece where the pulse was completely flexible and you didn’t have a steady beat at all. He didn’t write a piece where there were all of a sudden silences interspersed in odd ways or people could play the same music all at their own speed.
And the point is that half a world away, that was the music of the culture. That was actually what was considered normative. That was how people expressed themselves in music.
And so we all move in these narrow channels, but actually when you take the broad view music is an open frontier, not a closed system. And that’s just a model for all human imagination in general.
This company pays kids to do their math homework | Mohamad JebaraMohamad Jebara loves mathematics -- but he's concerned that too many students grow up thinking that this beautiful, rewarding subject is difficult and boring. His company is experimenting with a bold idea: paying students for completing weekly math homework. He explores the ethics of this model and how it's helping students -- and why learning math is crucial in the era of fake news.
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How architecture can create dignity for all | John CaryIf architect and writer John Cary has his way, women will never need to stand in pointlessly long bathroom lines again. Lines like these are representative of a more serious issue, Cary says: the lack of diversity in design that leads to thoughtless, compassionless spaces. Design has a unique ability to dignify and make people feel valued, respected, honored and seen -- but the flip side is also true. Cary calls for architects and designers to expand their ranks and commit to serving the public good, not just the privileged few. "Well-designed spaces are not just a matter of taste or a questions of aesthetics," he says. "They literally shape our ideas about who we are in the world and what we deserve." And we all deserve better.
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Depression and anxiety: How inequality is driving the mental health crisis | Johann HariExpressions like "feeling down" or "feeling low" are more literal than we think, says Lost Connections author Johann Hari. A 30-year field study of wild African baboons by the incredible Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky has shown that there is a remarkable relationship between depression, anxiety, and social hierarchies. Male baboons—who live in a very strict pecking order—suffer the most psychological stress when their social status is insecure, or when they are on the bottom rung, looking up at the luxuries of others. Does it sound familiar yet? "If you live in the United States... we’re at the greatest levels of inequality since the 1920s," says Hari. "There’s a few people at the very top, there’s a kind of precarious middle, and there’s a huge and swelling bottom." It's no coincidence that mental health gets poorer as the wealth gap continues to widen: depression and anxiety are socioeconomic diseases. The silver lining is that this relationship has been discovered. Could an economic revolution end the depression epidemic? And, most curiously, what can we learn from the Amish on this front? Johann Hari is the author of Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.
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Transcript: When I feel depressed, like loads of people I say, “I feel down,” right?
And as I was learning about the causes of depression and anxiety for my book 'Lost Connections' I started to realize—I don’t think that’s a metaphor. There’s this amazing professor at Stanford called Robert Sapolsky who, in his early twenties, went to live with a troop of baboons in Kenya. And it was his job to figure out: when are baboons most stressed out?
So his job was to hit them with little tranquilizer darts and then take a blood test and measure something called cortisol, which is a hormone that baboons and us release when we’re stressed. And baboons live in this hierarchy—so the females don’t, interestingly—but the men live in a very strict hierarchy. So if there’s 30 men, number one knows he’s above number two. Number two knows he’s above number three. Number 12 knows he’s above number 13. And that really determines a lot; it determines who you get to have sex with, it determines what you get to eat, it determines whether you get to sit in the shade or you’re pushed out into the heat. So really it's significant where you are in the hierarchy.
And what Professor Sapolsky found is that baboons are most stressed in two situations. One is when their status is insecure. So if you’re the top guy and someone’s circling which comes for you, you will be massively stressed.
And the other situation is when you feel you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you’ve been kind of humiliated. And what Professor Sapolsky noticed—and then it was later developed by other scientists—is, when you feel you’ve been pushed to the bottom, what you do is you show something called a submission gesture.
So you, baboons will raise— I say “you,” I assume no baboons are watching this, maybe they are—a baboon will put its body down physically or put it’s head down or put its bottom in the air and it will cover its head. So it’s clearly seems to be communicating: “Just leave me alone. You’ve beaten me, okay? You’ve beaten me.”
And what lots of scientists, like Professor Paul Gilbert in Britain and Professor Kate Pickett and Professor Richard Wilkinson, also in Britain, have really developed is this idea that actually what human depression is, in part—not entirely, but in part—is a form of a submission gesture. It’s a way of saying, “I can’t cope with this anymore,” right. Particularly people who feel they’ve been pushed to the bottom of hierarchies. Or who feel, if you remember the other stressful situations when your status is insecure, it’s a way of just going, “Okay, I retreat. I don’t want this fight anymore. You’ve beaten me.” It’s a kind of very strong evolutionary impulse where you feel you’re under attack, to just submit in the hope that the stress and anxiety will then go away, that the sources of the stress and anxiety will then go away.
And one thing that’s so important, and that’s what Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson really developed, is they’ve shown that as inequality grows, depression and anxiety grow. They’ve shown this is a very robust effect, right. This helps us to explain it. If you live in Norway your status is relatively secure, right. No one’s that high, no one’s that low. Movement between where you are is not so extreme.
How we can help hungry kids, one text at a time | Su KahumbuSu Kahumbu raises badass cows -- healthy, well-fed animals whose protein is key to solving a growing crisis in Africa: childhood nutritional stunting. With iCow, a simple SMS service she developed to support small-scale livestock farmers, the TED Fellow is helping farmers across the continent by texting them tips on caring for and raising animals. Learn more about how this cheap innovation is helping feed hungry kids, one text at a time.
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Revenge of the tribes: How the American Empire could fall | Amy ChuaYale professor Amy Chua has two precautionary tales for Americans, and their names are Libya and Iraq. "We’re starting to see in America something that I’ve seen in other countries that is not good," says Chua. "We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to get to the point where we look at people on the other side of the political spectrum and we see them not just as people that we disagree with but literally as our enemy, as immoral, “un-American” people." Tribalism is innate to humanity, and it is the glue that holds nations together—but it's a Goldilocks conundrum: too much or too little of it and a nation will tear at the seams. It becomes most dangerous when two hardened camps form and obliterate all the subtribes beneath them. Chua stresses the importance of "dividing yourself so that you don’t get entrenched in just two terrible tribes." Having many identities and many points of overlap with fellow citizens is what keeps a country's unity strong. When that flexibility disappears, and a person becomes only a Republican or a Democrat—or only a Sunni Muslim or a Shia Muslim, as in Iraq—that's when it's headed for danger. In this expansive and brilliant talk on political tribes, Chua explains what happens when minorities and majorities clash, why post-colonial nations are often doomed to civil war, and why you can't just replace dictators with democracy. Amy Chua is the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.
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Transcript: I think a great example of group blindness in the United States is when Woodrow Wilson said in 1915—in a very famous speech—“There are no groups in America. America doesn’t consist of groups. And if you continue to think of yourself as belonging to a smaller group you’re not American.”
It’s astonishing that he could say this—these universalist tones at a time when Native Americans were largely still denied citizenship, Mexican Americans were still being lynched, Asian Americans were barred from owning land, and African Americans were being subjected to violence and degradation virtually every day. And yet he was saying we don’t have any groups here. So that’s an example of almost willful blindness to groups. And sometimes this kind of universalist rhetoric, “Oh we’re all just one people,” is a way of hiding a lot of inequality and smaller kinds of group oppression.
So if you look at a country like Libya they’re actually a little bit like the United States. That is, they are a wildly multi-ethnic nation. The problem is they don’t have a strong enough overarching national identity to hold it together.
And the goal is a group—or a country, in this case—that has, on the one hand, a very strong overarching national identity: “We’re Americans,” but—importantly—at the same time allows individual, subgroup, and tribal identities to flourish.
You should be a country where you can say, “I’m Irish American,” or, “I’m Libyan American,” and yet be intensely patriotic at the same time. So: “I’m Muslim American. I’m Chinese American. I’m Nigerian American.” So, at its best, in America, there should be a certain amount of porousness and fluidity across tribes.
It’s when tribalism gets really entrenched that things can get very dangerous.
Western democracies at their best—or just any democracies—are when people have crosscutting group identities. So it’s like okay, I’m a Democrat or I’m a Republican but I’m also Asian American or African American or straight or gay, wealthy or not wealthy. Just different ways of dividing yourself so that you don’t get entrenched in just two terrible tribes.
It’s sort of like, if I’m talking about sports I’m with you, but if I’m talking about food preferences I’m with you, and you could have different groups that neutralize each other.
One of the problems with what we’re seeing in America today is that it seems increasingly that certain tribes are hardening. In particular, you’ve got what is very misleadingly called the “coastal elites”. In a way, that’s misleading because coastal elites are not all coastal and they’re also not all elites in the sense of being wealthy. Often, in this term coastal elites is included professional elites or even students who have no money but they’re well-educated, they’re progressive, they are multicultural and cosmopolitan.
And we’re starting to see in America something that I’ve seen in other countries that is not good.
This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life | Karen LloydHow deep into the Earth can we go and still find life? Marine microbiologist Karen Lloyd introduces us to deep-subsurface microbes: tiny organisms that live buried meters deep in ocean mud and have been on Earth since way before animals. Learn more about these mysterious microbes, which refuse to grow in the lab and seem to have a fundamentally different relationship with time and energy than we do.
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A funny look at the unintended consequences of technology | Chuck NiceTechnology should work for us, but what happens when it doesn't? Comedian Chuck Nice explores the unintended consequences of technological advancement and human interaction -- with hilarious results.
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How NASA averted the 2060 apocalypse | Michelle ThallerPop quiz! Which NASA mission has been most critical to humanity? It's not the Moon landing. It's not the Apollo 8 mission, with its iconic Earthrise photo. It's not even spinoff tech like cell phones, baby formula, and GPS. "All those kind of fall flat, to tell you the truth," says Michelle Thaller, NASA's assistant director of science communication. "I think that people don’t understand." Thaller says the greatest mission NASA ever pulled off was saving your butt. While conducting blue sky research—curiosity-driven scientific investigation with no immediate "real-world" applications—that scientists in the 1980s discovered that the ozone layer was being depleted. Realizing the danger this posed to life on Earth, scientists—and NASA's crack team of science communicators—mobilized the public, the U.N., and governments to get the Montreal Protocol signed, and to ban ozone-depleting chemicals for good. "We’ve since done atmospheric models that show that we would have actually destroyed the ozone layer, had we done nothing, by the year 2060..." says Thaller. "That would have destroyed agriculture. Crops would have failed all over the world. You couldn’t have livestock outside. People couldn’t have lived outside. We very nearly destroyed civilization, and your grandchildren would have lived through that." The value of blue sky research is severely underestimated—especially when budgets are being drafted. But it has led to the best NASA spinoff Michelle Thaller can think of: grandchildren.
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Transcript: Well, I am one of the directors of science [at NASA], and my specialty is communications. There's the idea that a mission ends when you return the data, when you make the discoveries, when the scientists publish their papers. To me, the mission doesn’t end until you have some sort of public involvement, until you have some sort of public buy-in. I think that’s as important as any other part of the mission.
I’ve been trying to tell people for years that a communications team on a mission is just like having your crack team of electrical engineers or your best computer programmers. You need to have people that really understand communications well. And it helps—I mean, in my case I started out as a research astrophysicist and so I understand a lot of the topics as well. But I do communications now at NASA.
And as far as why NASA is important, I think this is one of these things that people have no idea: We run, at the moment, 108 science missions. Those are mostly spacecraft. Some of them are on balloons or sounding rockets or on the space station. Some of them are on the earth. We have people embedded with the Sami reindeer herders trying to understand how climate change is changing the migration of reindeer herds. I mean it’s amazing that NASA is all over. Everything from the disaster mitigation from all of those hurricanes—we actually sent staff to Puerto Rico when FEMA was overwhelmed, they had been setting up communication centers.
I mean everything from determining what set off the Big Bang to where those wildfires are going to be spreading to in southern California. We have 108 missions and I’ve never seen any organization operate more efficiently. I’ve never worked with more brilliant people.
I think people often don't understand what the real value is as far as blue sky research, you know. People talk about spinoffs and people joke about things like Velcro and Tang. I mean those are jokes, but the more intelligent people might notice things like microprocessors started at NASA. Cell phones. The reason you have computers, the reason the United States was poised to lead the computer revolution was because of the Apollo program. But all those kind of fall flat, to tell you the truth. I think that people don’t understand. It was a NASA satellite doing research just out of curiosity to see what gases were in the atmosphere that discovered that the ozone hole was being depleted in the 1980s.
And the NASA scientists with a number of university scientists went running to the U.N. and said, “If we don’t do something, we are literally going to destroy the planet.” And they actually got the Montreal Protocol signed. They actually made treaties. They banned these chemicals that were depleting our ozone layer. And we’ve since done atmospheric models that show that we would have actually destroyed the ozone layer, had we done nothing, by the year 2060, which, if not in my lifetime, is probably in our children’s lifetime.
And basically, that would have destroyed agriculture. Crops would have failed all over the world. You couldn’t have livestock outside. People couldn’t have lived outside.
How to fix a broken heart | Guy WinchAt some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. Imagine how different things would be if we paid more attention to this unique emotional pain. Psychologist Guy Winch reveals how recovering from heartbreak starts with a determination to fight our instincts to idealize and search for answers that aren't there -- and offers a toolkit on how to, eventually, move on. Our hearts might sometimes be broken, but we don't have to break with them.
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How I use Minecraft to help kids with autism | Stuart DuncanThe internet can be an ugly place, but you won't find bullies or trolls on Stuart Duncan's Minecraft server, AutCraft. Designed for children with autism and their families, AutCraft creates a safe online environment for play and self-expression for kids who sometimes behave a bit differently than their peers (and who might be singled out elsewhere). Learn more about one of the best places on the internet with this heartwarming talk.
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From death row to law graduate | Peter OukoPeter Ouko spent 18 years in Kamiti Prison in Kenya, sometimes locked up in a cell with 13 other grown men for 23 and a half hours a day. In a moving talk, he tells the story of how he was freed -- and his current mission with the African Prisons Project: to set up the first law school behind bars and empower people in prison to drive positive change.
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Why Michio Kaku wants to avoid alien contact at all costsIf aliens do exist, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku posits, why would they want anything to do with us? It would be like a hunter talking to a squirrel, he suggests, and he has a great point. Hollywood and science fiction novels have conditioned us for years to believe that aliens either want to hang out on our intellectual level and learn from us... or destroy us. If alien life really does have the technology and know-how to make it all the way here, perhaps we should just play it cool and not assume that we are the top species in the universe.
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We have this mental image that a flying saucer will circle the White House lawn, land on the White House lawn and give us a bounty of all sorts of technological goodies to initiate an age of Aquarius on the planet earth. Personally, I don’t think that’s going to happen. For example, if you’re in the forest do you go out and talk to the squirrels and the deer? Maybe you do for a while, but after a while, you get bored because they don’t talk back to you because they have nothing interesting to tell you because they can’t relate to our values and our ideas. If you go down to an anthill do you go down to the ants and say I bring you trinkets; I bring you bees; take me to your aunt queen; I give you nuclear energy. So I think for the most part the aliens are probably not going to be interested in us because we’re so arrogant to believe that we have something to offer them. Realize that they could be thousands, maybe millions of years ahead of us in technology and they may have no interest in interacting with us in the same way that we don’t necessarily want to deal with the squirrels and the deer in the forest.
Now some people say that we should not try to make contact with them because they could be potentially dangerous. For the most part, I think they’re going to be peaceful because they’ll be thousands of years ahead of us, but we cannot take the chance. So I personally believe that we should not try to advertise our existence to alien life in outer space because of the fact that we don’t know their intentions.
6 space technologies we can use to improve life on Earth | Danielle WoodDanielle Wood leads the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab, where she works to tear down the barriers that limit the benefits of space exploration to only the few, the rich or the elite. She identifies six technologies developed for space exploration that can contribute to sustainable development across the world -- from observation satellites that provide information to aid organizations to medical research on microgravity that can be used to improve health care on Earth. "Space truly is useful for sustainable development for the benefit of all peoples," Wood says.
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Why America is the world’s biggest cult | Rose McGowanActress, author, and whistleblower Rose McGowan is here to tell you that American culture has been screwed up for a long, long time. She wonders how people can defend a culture that embraces sexual deviants (see: Woody Allen, Louis C.K.) and clearly racist imagery (see: the Washington Redskins name and logo). She muses, too, on why American culture seems to be so bent on putting complex and thoughtful women second place to the likes of, as she puts it, a "slovenly slob" like Adam Sandler. Women deserve better, she posits. And we're absolutely inclined to agree.
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The thing we should do with people who create art that have done terrible things…
Well, if you found out that the head of Johnson & Johnson was a serial rapist that everybody at Johnson & Johnson knew, one way or another, would you still buy that baby powder?
Sorry your heroes are going away. Wah, there are more important things to do. Okay. Sorry. Bummer for you. Wahh.
The construct of society, the raping and killing of women, there’s a channel called ID it’s devoted to 24 hours a day of sexualizing murder victims. Ok? Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. That’s my message: just knock it off.
Wah, you don’t get to like Woody Alan. Oh, what a big huge loss for you. I’m sure that compares to the girl who has just been raped that now feels like she wants to hang herself from the balcony. Because that really balances out.
So when people bitch about that, sorry, bummer for you. You don’t watch Birth of a Nation do you? Probably not, because you know it’s racist. So in time these people will be looked at like that.
My job—and others’ jobs that work in kind of what I’m doing—is to put an asterisk next to these assholes' names for all time.
And if people want to cry about not getting to like somebody they liked when they were kids? Well, get a fucking bigger problem. It’s not that complicated, people. It’s really not. It’s really not. It’s easy. Read a different book. That’s it.
I have so many people fighting me because they want to stay in the system. The system benefits .0001 percent. My ultimate goal is smashing the 99 and the one percent. That’s what I’m here for. And I’m here to do that through thought and raising women up.
And yes, in Children of God, the cult I was born into, and again it’s like oh make a big deal of the cult. I would be talking about Ohio if that happened to me my life, that just was not. But that’s a cult too, and I think you all know it.
That’s the thing: it’s like, “Oh it’s so weird how you grew up.” I think it’s weird how you live. And I think it’s tragic.
Because like ten percent, because there is a lot of free minds that are out there for sure, but we have to be vigilant. What if those ten percent of the world that you look at as the weirdos and the fringe people, what if it’s you guys?
Black life at the intersection of birth and death | Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa"It is the artist's job to unearth stories that people try to bury with shovels of complacency and time," says poet and freedom fighter Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa. Performing her poem "The Joys of Motherhood," Katwiwa explores the experience of Black mothers in America and discusses the impact of the Movement for Black Lives -- because, she says, it's impossible to separate the two.
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My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead | Anjali KumarAnjali Kumar went looking for God and ended up finding something else entirely. In an uplifting, funny talk about our shared humanity, she takes us on a spiritual pilgrimage to meet witches in New York, a shaman in Peru, an infamous "healer" in Brazil and others, sharing an important lesson: what binds us together is far stronger than what separates us, and our differences are not insurmountable.
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The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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