How data is helping us unravel the mysteries of the brain | Steve McCarrollGeneticist Steve McCarroll wants to make an atlas of all the cells in the human body so that we can understand in precise detail how specific genes work, especially in the brain. In this fascinating talk, he shares his team's progress -- including their invention of "Drop-seq," a technology that allows scientists to analyze individual cells at a scale that was never before possible -- and describes how this research could lead to new ways of treating mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
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How inequality destroys the future by focusing on the past | Timothy SnyderRead more at BigThink.com:
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So starting with the objective part, with the facts, the United States is a country which is among the least equal in the world.
According to Credit Suisse, which is a Swiss bank and not some kind of crazy left wing organization, we are second in the world in wealth inequality after the Russian Federation. In the United States since the 1980s basically 90 percent of the American population has seen no improvement in either wealth or income. Almost all the improvement in wealth and income has been in the top ten percent, and most of that has been in the top one percent, and most of that has been in the top .1 percent, and most of that has been in the top .01 percent, which means that not only are people not moving forward objectively, but the way they experience the world—and this is very powerful—is that other people are on top.
So if you and I have the same thing over the course of 30 years, but we watch as our neighbor suddenly has 20 times as much, we’re not going to say “Everything’s fine because we have the same,” we’re going to say “Gosh, our neighbor has more than we do, and has so much more than we do he could probably reach in and take everything we have away,” which is, of course, true—and that’s the condition that people call oligarchy.
So the politics of inevitability says “the market has to lead to democracy, and therefore there’s no reason to correct for what the market does.”
If you don’t correct what the market does, if you don’t support trade unions, if you don’t build up some kind of a welfare state, if you don’t support public education and so on, then you’re going to have a situation where citizens spread apart in wealth and spread apart in income, which is what’s happening.
And that in turn may be the most powerful way that the politics of inevitability breaks into the politics of eternity. Because if there is massive inequality of wealth and income, individuals and families no longer think “I’ve got a bright future,” they no longer believe—and this is something Mr. Trump got right even if he has no solution and he’s making things worse on purpose—they no longer believe in the American dream, and they’re correct not to do so.
If you were born in 1940 your chances of doing better than your parents were about 90 percent. If you were born in 1980 your chances were about one in two, and it keeps going down. So wealth inequality means the lack of social events, it means a totally different horizon, it means that you see life in a completely different way. You stop thinking time is an arrow which is moving forward to something better and you start thinking, “Maybe the good old days were better. Maybe we have to ‘make America great again,’”and you get caught in these nostalgic loops. You start thinking “it can’t be my fault that I’m not doing better, so who’s fault is it?”
And then the clever politicians instead of providing policy for you provide enemies for you, they provide language for you with which you can explain why you’re not doing so well. They blame the Other, whether it’s the Chinese or the Muslims or the Jews or the blacks or the immigrants, and that allows you to think “Okay time is a cycle, things used to be better, but other people have come and they’ve taken things away from me.”
And that’s how the politics of inevitability becomes the politics of eternity: wealth inequality, income inequality are one of the major channels by which that happens.
So one of the fundamental problems with our American right wing “politics of inevitability” is that it generates income-and wealth-inequality and it explains away income and wealth inequality.
And so you get this cycle where objectively people are less and less well-off and subjectively we keep telling ourselves this is somehow okay, because in the grand scheme of things this is somehow “necessary,” when it’s not.
The extraordinary effect of mindfulness on depression and anxiety | Daniel GolemanRead more at BigThink.com:
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Let's get honest about our money problems | Tammy LallyStruggling to budget and manage finances is common -- but talking honestly and openly about it isn't. Why do we hide our problems around money? In this thoughtful, personal talk, author Tammy Lally encourages us to break free of "money shame" and shows us how to stop equating our bank accounts with our self-worth.
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"Wild Women" | Sunni PattersonWith lightning on her tongue, Sunni Patterson performs her powerful poem, "Wild Women," accompanied by the entrancing moves of dancer Chanice Holmes.
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A new way to think about the transition to motherhood | Alexandra SacksWhen a baby is born, so is a mother -- but the natural (and sometimes unsteady) process of transition to motherhood is often silenced by shame or misdiagnosed as postpartum depression. In this quick, informative talk, reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks breaks down the emotional tug-of-war of becoming a new mother -- and shares a term that could help describe it: matrescence.
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How I went from child refugee to international model | Halima AdenHalima Aden made history when she became the first hijab-wearing model on the cover of Vogue magazine. Now she returns to Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp -- where she was born and lived until the age of seven -- to share an inspiring message about what she's learned on the path from child refugee to international model.
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Why meritocracy is America’s most destructive myth | DeRay MckessonRead more at BigThink.com:
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DeRay Mckesson: I wanted to write about what it means that some people seemingly have to “earn” or do something to deserve access to things that we think about as basic necessities.
So how hard can you work to earn access to a meal every night, or like what do you have to do to “deserve” a good education? What do you have to do to deserve to have housing?
And that’s one of the ways that race sort of works in this country, is that there’s some people that are deemed “inherently worthy.” So we think about the way whiteness works and white supremacy, white people are just deemed worthy of things, but there’s this notion that you need to work extra hard to deserve a great public education.
I am from Baltimore and when you think about the school system Baltimore City is not funded equitably at all and it’s like, what do those kids have to do to like earn equitable funding? They actually don’t need to do anything besides just be alive! And one of the things that we need to do is make sure that we set up a system where people just have the basic necessities like food, water, education. We can guarantee that. There’s no reason why we don’t have it.
I actually think about the difference between equality and equity. Equality is “everybody gets the same thing,” equity is that “people get what they need and deserve.”
And the work of justice, we’re almost always fighting for equity. So we think about things like school funding, we are not asking for equal funding, we know that it just costs more to educate kids who grow up in poverty, it costs more to educate kids with special needs, and we know that we need to pay that cost, that those kids deserve that. We’re not saying that every kid it costs the same to educate every kid, that’s just not true. We want a world of equity where people get what they need and deserve.
We know the disparities around criminal justice, that there are disparities around race and we want an equitable system that doesn’t penalize people for where they live, how they show up, what ZIP Code they come from. So the difference between equity and equality is an important distinction, and the only way to get to equality—equality of access, whatever metric of equality you want—is by having equity of resources, equity of experiences, that the equity piece says that “you need something different and you deserve something different, and from a system level I’m going to make sure that you have access to that.”
So I was talking to somebody about food stamps once and she was like, “People should have to work for food stamps because if they work for it they’ll have dignity.”
Like, not eating, I think, is pretty like—not having food is a lack of dignity right there. Food is one of those basic things— we have enough food that we could feed everybody, we have enough water that everybody can have three meals every single day, like we can guarantee those things, we don’t need to artificially create this “requirement” that people work so they can earn food. Like we can actually guarantee these basic things for people.
And one of the things that we have to do as we fight for social justice is talk about these things, as basic as they are. That it’s not radical to believe that we can live in a world that police don’t kill people. It’s not radical to say that every kid should be able to read and write. It’s not radical or extreme to say that we can feed every single person every single day. The only radical thing about it is that we have to say it in the first place! Like that is actually where the radical part comes in.
How China is (and isn't) fighting pollution and climate change | Angel HsuChina is the world's biggest polluter -- and now one of its largest producers of clean energy. Which way will China go in the future, and how will it affect the global environment? Data scientist Angel Hsu describes how the most populous country on earth is creating a future based on alternative energy -- and facing up to the environmental catastrophe it created as it rapidly industrialized.
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A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe | Burçin Mutlu-PakdilWhat's it like to discover a galaxy -- and have it named after you? Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil lets us know in this quick talk about her team's surprising discovery of a mysterious new galaxy type.
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Data makes you smart, but it doesn't make you wise | Timothy SnyderRead more at BigThink.com:
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An astronaut’s guide to risk taking | Chris HadfieldRead more at BigThink.com:
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Chris Hadfield: Everything worth doing in life has risk.
Learned to ride a bike, learn to walk. When I was a kid learning to walk I fell and cracked my skull, but I needed to learn to walk. Taking a test, getting married, getting a drivers license, all of those things, they give you an approved capability or an improved richness in life, but they all come with a degree of risk. That is exaggerated if the thing that you want to do is fly a rocket ship. Rocket ships are dangerous. It’s a controlled explosion. If you drew a cartoon of a rocket what it would be would be a bomb with six seats on the top. I mean rocket ships are crazy dangerous. On the first flight of the Space Shuttle when Bob Crippen and John Young were sitting there back in 1981 and they blasted off out of Florida, now that we go back and we look at what the actual history of the Space Shuttle was, their odds of dying that day in the first eight-and-a-half minutes were one in nine! Terrible odds, one in nine. I mean look around you at ten people and realize: just to try that one in nine times they would have died. They got away with it, and we learned a lot from it, but even when I flew on my first shuttle flight on the 74th shuttle flight we learned enough things, we had improved it, but the odds of dying that day for my crew were still one in 38, which—no insurance company would be happy. It’s hard to get life insurance as an astronaut actually.
But the question you really need to ask that is do I want to learn to walk? Do I want to ride this bike? Do I want to get married? Do I want to learn to drive a car? What risks are worth taking in my life? Because even if you decide “Okay I’m going to take no risk, I’m going to stay at home and hide under my pillow,” there’s still risk with that and you’re still going to die eventually anyway! So it’s kind of a measure of what was worth doing in your life, and therefore what was worth taking a risk for? Once you’ve got that behind you and said “Okay I’m going to be an astronaut, I’m going to fly a rocket ship, that’s a risk I’m going to take,” now it changes your whole job.
Your job is not to be afraid, your job is not to be an incompetent nervous passenger, your job now is to defeat the risk, like when you learned to ride a bike. If you just stay as a passenger on the bike you’re never going to know what to do with the handlebars and you’re never going to master riding a bike. And once you can ride a bike you’ve got a freedom you’ve never had before.
And rocket ships are just the same, you have to decide what risks are worth taking and then start changing who you are, learning how to turn the handlebars so that you can make this thing do something that otherwise might hurt you or kill you. And then once you’ve got that done it can take you to places and give you richnesses in your life that you never would have had access any other way. And in my case when you make it through that launch, when you’ve guided that rocket up through the atmosphere and the engine shut off, suddenly you’re in the rarest of human experiences. You’re weightless, and the world is pouring by at five miles a second, and you can see across an entire continent and you’re peering into something that is brand new for humanity. So I think it’s worth asking yourself: “What risks are worth taking?” And once you’ve decided to take them, then change who you are so that you can win, you can defeat, you can master that thing and open a door for yourself that otherwise was just shut.
How art can shape America's conversation about freedom | Dread ScottIn this quick talk, visual artist Dread Scott tells the story of one of his most transgressive art installations, which drew national attention for its controversial use of the American flag and led to a landmark First Amendment case in the US Supreme Court.
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Minimalism is killing us: Re-awaken your senses, bring back joy | Ingrid Fetell LeeRead more at BigThink.com:
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Ingrid Fettell Lee:
I think one of the reasons we don’t feel joy as much as we might like is because we have a culture in which joy is judged often as frivolous, as childish, as superficial. And it’s interesting to think about where this actually comes from. It has pretty deep roots in our culture. So if you look in 1810 Goethe wrote in his Theory of Color that “savage nations”, uneducated people, and children typically prefer bright colors whereas “people of refinement” avoid color in their dress and try to banish color from the objects about them. And what happens in this equation is that we’re seeing the equivalency between “savage nations”, so uncivilized people, primitiveness, a lack of sophistication or education and children. And those are being equated to the sort of aesthetics, the tangible manifestations of joy in our culture. And when you look at the roots of this a lot of it stems from colonialism. So you had a bunch of Europeans getting on boats going around the world trying to conquer other people’s and when they found these sort of “uninhibited” displays of emotion, when they found festivals and dancing and drumming and colorful dwellings and outfits they felt a need to distance themselves from those behaviors.
And so what happened was European culture became more and more emotionally repressed as a result. So we had to get rid of the color in our surroundings because that was “uncivilized”. We had to get rid of our sort of exuberant and playful displays. And you actually see this when in certain colonies when settlers would arrive they would bring their pretty raucous festivals—I mean Carnival originated in Europe and it was a pretty raucous festival there. They would bring it to these colonies like In Trinidad and Tobago, for example. And then once they got there they realized the had to stop visibly celebrating and they started having formal balls instead of, you know, wild celebrations, because that made the seem “too close” to the natives. And so joy became repressed within our culture, and in its place we got this sense of seriousness that this is what is valued. And that became reflected in our aesthetic culture as well.
Over the past few years the dominant aesthetic has been an aesthetic of minimalism. And we’ve been encouraged to sort of simplify and strip back our possessions in our homes and sort of get to very simple gray, beige interiors.
And in a way this has been described as sort of reaction to all of the overstimulation that’s going on in our devices, that it sort of helps us relax. But, in fact, what we find is that minimalist interiors actually can be very stressful. That when you look at our sort of natural love of abundance and lushness and textures and sensation, when you actually deprive us of sensations we go a little bit crazy. And a study I love that sort of explores this had a bunch of people sitting in a room, and all they had to entertain themselves was a machine that gave electric shocks. And after only a few minutes of sitting alone in a bare, unadorned room they started giving themselves quite painful electric shocks rather than sit without any stimulation. So the brain seeks and craves stimulation. And when it doesn’t have that it will sort of seek it out even in ways that maybe aren’t so adaptive.
Social anxiety: How to rewire your confidence and be a better communicator | Andrew HornRead more at BigThink.com:
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One of the most important aspects of meaningful conversation is listening. If you’re asking important questions and not listening, you’re not having a conversation at all; you are giving a soliloquy. So one of the easiest ways that we can practice active listening and avoid a conversation dead-end is to make sure that we are “turning” the conversation more than we’re “taking” it. So I’ll give you a quick example.
So my sister just comes back from Thailand and she says, “I had amazing trip. We went to the north and the beaches in the south.” So here’s what a “take” would sound like. It’s like, “Oh I went to Thailand last year. We went to the beaches too.”
So do you see what you just did? You just directed that thing right into a dead-end, and now it’s going to stop. So what a “turn” looks like is you get to say, “Oh wow I went to the beaches as well! What was your favorite part?” And so that simple turn shows them two things: that you heard what they said and that you care enough to ask a follow-up question.
And I promise you that the best conversationalists always turn the conversation more than they take it. Because often times what happens is that it’s not our first question that is going to get the answer or the depth that we desire, so if we commit to turning the conversation back three and four times we’re going to peel off those layers and get more depth out of our conversations. So always remember turn the conversation more than you take it, and you’re going to avoid those conversation dead ends.
When we move past asking better questions we move into the “metamorphic two-step”. And this is all about presence. And presence is so important in conversation. You’ve all said this before, “She has such presence.” “He has such presence.” Presence is that embodied existence in the moment, it’s when you’re only responding and reacting to what’s happening right now. There’s no story from the past, there’s no fear of the future, and it’s a magical thing when we can create that in conversation. And one of the easiest ways to do that is something called the metamorphic two-step. And the metamorphic two-step is actually a hypnosis technique that will help you to identify how you want to feel in social situations.
So I learned this from my friend Andrew who is a hypnotherapist here in New York City, he works with a lot of the Fortune 500 brands, the quickest growing startups. And basically what he talks about with some of these leaders is helps them to identify where they have anxiety in their leadership roles and helps them to overcome that and really achieve peak performance.
And so when I first met him I said, “Okay so how would you use hypnosis to alleviate something like a social anxiety?” And so what he would tell me is he’d say, “Okay, so what I want you to do is think about a social situation where you might have some anxiety.” And I would say, “Okay I’m going into a big tech conference with a bunch of really influential people and I might be nervous.” And he’d say, “Articulate the undesired state of being. What is that?” And so I’d say, “I’m worried that I won’t have anything to say, I’m worried that they won’t think that I’m high up enough to actually care about what I’m going to say, I’m not going to add value.”
How sound can hack your memory while you sleep | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesCan you cram for a test while you sleep? Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues attempt to enhance memory by running experiments on subjects while they sleep. You'll be surprised by the results.
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How octopuses battle each other | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesThem's fighting words if you're an octopus, in that more than one octopus in a space often means a rumble. Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues analyze aggression by observing the fighting behavior of two-spotted octopuses or, if you prefer, octopodes.
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The real reason why mosquitoes buzz | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesWhat does the love song of a mosquito sound like? Find out as neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues explore the meaning of all that annoying buzzing in your ear.
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This computer is learning to read your mind | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesModern technology lets neuroscientists peer into the human brain, but can it also read minds? Armed with the device known as an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and some computing wizardry, neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues attempt to peer into a subject's thoughts.
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How you can make a fruit fly eat veggies | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesCan the mind be manipulated to love a food we loathe? The evidence from fruit flies is compelling, and perhaps surprising. Our tag team of neuroscientists attempts to change a fly's preference for fruit over vegetables simply by shining a light on their brain.
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How a dragonfly's brain is designed to kill | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesDragonflies can catch prey with near perfect accuracy, the best among all predators. But how does something with so few neurons achieve such prowess? Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues explore how a dragonfly unerringly locks onto its preys and captures it within milliseconds using just sensors and a fake fly.
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How power affects the way you behave—and the way you’re punished | Michele GelfandRead more at BigThink.com:
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Michele Gelfand: Yes, so I wrote this book to give a lens to people to view the world differently. It’s something that we take for granted every day, the kind of rules that we follow. They’re omnipresent but they’re invisible. So from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep we’re following rules. Most of us put clothes on before we go out in the street, most of us ride on the right side or the left side depending on where we live, we say hello and goodbye on the phone, we follow these rules all the time.
But some groups have very strong rules. They’re what I call “tight cultures” where there’s strong rules and little tolerance for deviance, and other groups—what I call “loose groups”—are much more permissive, and they have a wide range of behavior that’s seen as appropriate. And this lens is really very powerful. It helps us to understand things from politics to parenting, from nations to neurons.
A general principle about tight and loose is that groups that have more power live in looser worlds. They have more latitude. And groups that have less power – women, minorities, other identities that are stigmatized – they live in tighter worlds. They’re subject to stronger punishments for the same exact behavior. And I’ve shown this actually with some research we published in Psych Science, a journal in my field, some years ago. But you can see other evidence of it all the time. You saw it in the U.S. Open this past weekend with Serena Williams who argued that these refs would never call the same kinds of punishments and penalties on a white male tennis player.
Cultural intelligence is more than just knowledge about other cultures. That’s certainly part of it, one dimension that’s clearly just about knowledge of the culture. But it’s also about your motivation to interact with people in different cultures. That’s actually one of the most important parts of cultural intelligence, is having that kind of openness to see diversity as opportunity versus a threat. That predicts people doing much better when they’re crossing cultures. And there’s also a sense of “metacognition,” which is a fancy way of saying, “thinking about what you know about culture, questioning what you know about it.”
So there’s multiple dimensions of cultural intelligence and we can assess it. We can measure it, and we can use it to predict how well people will do on international assignments, in negotiations that are cross-cultural. So it’s really an incredibly important construct.
And again in this globalized era we really need to move beyond IQ and EQ. You can have great intelligence but have no cultural intelligence. You can have emotional intelligence but you can also fail on CQ. So it’s really an incredibly important attribute to cultivate.
And the kids have been noticing this. As females they say, “You know mom, we’re living in a tighter world than our male counterparts.” When they play sports you hear the referee’s whistle going off way more. And so I think it’s also important to train them to think about the worlds they’re living in, to think about how they themselves are going out in the world, are going to be subject to the strength of norms and to try to think about how to negotiate that.
Don't fail fast -- fail mindfully | Leticia GascaWe celebrate bold entrepreneurs whose ingenuity led them to success, but what happens to those who fail? Far too often, they bury their stories out of shame or humiliation -- and miss out on a valuable opportunity for growth, says author and entrepreneur Leticia Gasca. In this thoughtful talk, Gasca calls for business owners to open up about their failures and makes the case for replacing the idea of "failing fast" with a new mantra: fail mindfully.
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How to get serious about diversity and inclusion in the workplace | Janet StovallImagine a workplace where people of all colors and races are able to climb every rung of the corporate ladder -- and where the lessons we learn about diversity at work actually transform the things we do, think and say outside the office. How do we get there? In this candid talk, inclusion advocate Janet Stovall shares a three-part action plan for creating workplaces where people feel safe and expected to be their unassimilated, authentic selves.
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Superhumans: The remarkable brain waves of high-level meditators | Daniel GolemanRead more at BigThink.com:
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Daniel Goleman: My co-author of the book Altered Traits is a neuroscientist, Richard Davidson. He has a lab at the University of Wisconsin. It’s a very large lab, he has dedicated scanners, he has about 100 people working there, and he was able to do some remarkable research where he flew Olympic level meditators—who live in Nepal or India typically, some in France—he flew them over to the lab and put them through a protocol in his brain scanners and did state-of-the-art tests and the results were just astounding. We found, for example, or he found that their brain waves are really different.
Perhaps the most remarkable findings in the Olympic level meditators has to do with what’s called a gamma wave. All of us get gamma for a very short period when we solve a problem we’ve been grappling with, even if it’s something that’s vexed us for months. We get about half second of gamma; it’s the strongest wave in the EEG spectrum. We get it when we bite into an apple or imagine biting into an apple, and for a brief period, a split-second, inputs from taste, sound, smell, vision, all of that come together in that imagined bite into the apple. But that lasts very short period in an ordinary EEG.
What was stunning was that the Olympic level meditators, these are people who have done up to 62,000 lifetime hours of meditation, their brainwave shows gamma very strong all the time as a lasting trait just no matter what they’re doing. It’s not a state effect, it’s not during their meditation alone, but it’s just their every day state of mind. We actually have no idea what that means experientially. Science has never seen it before.
We also find that in these Olympic level meditators when we asked them, for example, to do a meditation on compassion their level of gamma jumps 700 to 800 percent in a few seconds. This has also never been seen by science. So we have to assume that the special state of consciousness that you see in the highest level meditators is a lot like something described in the classical meditation literatures centuries ago, which is that there is a state of being which is not like our ordinary state. Sometimes it’s called liberation, enlightenment, awake, whatever the word may be we suspect there’s really no vocabulary that captures what that might be. The people that we’ve talked to in this Olympic level group say it’s very spacious and you’re wide open, you’re prepared for whatever may come, we just don’t know. But we do know it’s quite remarkable.
Why the "wrong side of the tracks" is usually the east side of cities | Stephen DeBerryWhat do communities on the social, economic and environmental margins have in common? For one thing, they tend to be on the east sides of cities. In this short talk about a surprising insight, anthropologist and venture capitalist Stephen DeBerry explains how both environmental and man-made factors have led to disparity by design in cities from East Palo Alto, California to East Jerusalem and beyond -- and suggests some elegant solutions to fix it.
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To transform child welfare, take race out of the equation | Jessica PryceIn this eye-opening talk about the impact of race and neighborhood on foster-care decisions, social worker Jessica Pryce shares a promising solution to help child welfare agencies make bias-free assessments about when to remove children from their families. "Let's work together to build a system that wants to make families stronger instead of pulling them apart," Pryce says.
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"Interpassion" / "Ba$$in" | YelleYelle and GrandMarnier bring their danceable electropop hits to the TED stage in an energizing performance of two songs, "Interpassion" and "Ba$$in."
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How women in rural India turned courage into capital | Chetna Gala SinhaWhen bankers refused to serve her neighbors in rural India, Chetna Gala Sinha did the next best thing: she opened a bank of her own, the first ever for and by women in the country. In this inspiring talk, she shares stories of the women who encouraged her and continue to push her to come up with solutions for those denied traditional financial backing.
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Overcome anxiety: Articulate your rationale, quell your doubts | Jordan PetersonRead more at BigThink.com:
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3 steps to money mastery: Would you rather have freedom or stuff? | Vicki RobinRead more at BigThink.com:
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So let’s take a look at financial independence and what that really means. It means, you know, if you haven’t thought about it at all you just think “Oh, that’s for rich people” or “I could never do that.”
And so first of all I’d like to distinguish between independence and freedom.
So financial freedom is like freeing your mind. Financial freedom is understanding that I’m me and there’s an economy out there, and I have a relationship with it but it doesn’t run my life. It’s freeing my mind from the messages of the consumer culture, the messages of the economy. The message is that, you know, a house is a “starter house.” No, that’s MY HOUSE! I could die in my house, you know. It’s like there’s so many presumptions that drive us into wage slavery, debt, and it doesn’t matter whether you are at the low end or at the high end.
If you are engaged in that sort of ancient process of “more, more, more” you are not free. So the first layer of financial independence I talk about is this freedom of the mind, this freeing your mind, of saying like “I’m sovereign, the economy is secondary. I will move my sovereign self into the economy for my own purposes.”
Rather than “I’m a schlump and the economy is my mega boss and, I don’t know – my boss seems to be as big as the sky and so I will just let my life be run by my boss and the tax system. I’m just going to let myself be run by this thing.”
No, so you’re a sovereign being! So that’s your first layer of financial independence is your own sovereignty.
And then the second layer is to get out of debt. And for some people debt feels endless. And the first step to getting out of debt is stop going into debt. Really. It’s like – and so there are many organizations. There’s Debtors Anonymous. There’s many ways that people can help them with this addiction to constantly spending and spending beyond their means. However you do that you just stop increasing your debt and start whittling your way through it. And with the approach in Your Money or Your Life I mean there’s many people who have written to us who flatten their debt in a couple of years—impossible debt, debt that was going to be endless. They would die with this debt. And once they see what the debt is doing to them in terms of the actual opportunities, the future opportunities of their lives, once they see that, once they have a taste for, a yen for the kind of sovereignty, authenticity, autonomy, freedom, whatever you want to call it, you know, mastery over your own time, ability to write your novel or take your sailing cruise or play with your grandkids—Whatever it is that you want more than you want stuff that’s what we’re trying – that’s the sort of link that we try to get people to make, so that something in the future is more important than the immediate pleasure of buying one more tchotchke that you’re never going to use.
We call them “gazingus pins”, the things you buy repeatedly and you never use, and they go into the gazingus-pin-drawer and yet when you’re in the store you buy another one. And just look in your drawers, look in your closets, you’ll find it.
So getting, flattening your debt is the second level of financial independence, and the third level really is to get those six months of savings in liquid assets, whether it’s bank accounts—Someplace where you can actually within 24 to 48 hours you could realize that money.
So that you have an emergency fund so that you are not tumbled back into debt as soon as something happens; You lose a job which many people now feel that even their very, very important and significant jobs are precarious. So you want to get out of the zone of precariousness. And part of how you get out of that precariousness is savings.
And then over time the next layer of financial independence is you start to see that surplus savings can be invested in such a way that it throws off an income. And over time if you become a systematic and sometimes obsessive saver, you know, there are people who save up to 80 or 90 percent of their income whether it’s in their 401K or in a Roth IRA. There’s all these instruments for saving money.
You become a super saver and you can see, you could chart it. You can watch your passive income grow, and you can start to see because you track your daily expenses based on the mechanics of this whole thing, of knowing money is your life energy. You track everything you buy.
And an easy way to do it—if you don’t like, you know, like writing in a little notebook every time you do a transaction—is just use your debit card. I said debit, not credit.
How to spot unhealthy ideas that stop true happiness | Johann HariRead more at BigThink.com:
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Johann Hari: Of the nine causes of depression and anxiety I learned about for my book Lost Connections, there were a few that were really challenging for me because I realized how much I recognized them in myself. So one of the hardest – I have to tell you a story about something else first, but when I was, in 2009 on Christmas Eve—it makes it even sadder that this story happened on Christmas Eve. So I use to live on junk food. I used to eat appallingly.
And on Christmas Eve 2009 I went into my local KFC at lunchtime and I turned up and I gave my order—which is so disgusting I won’t even repeat it.
And the guy behind the counter said “Oh Johann, I’m so glad you’re here! Wait a minute.”
I was like, “Okay….”
So he walked off and he came back with all the other staff and they’d bought me a massive Christmas card. And they’d written in it “To our best customer.”
And so I was looking at this and my clogged heart sank. I thought, “This isn’t even the fried chicken shop I come to the most.” It was a very unfortunate low point.
But we all know, right, junk food has taken over our diets. Not admittedly to the extreme that I was, but junk food is increasingly dominating our diets and it’s making us physically sick.
One of the things that really shocked me in the research is that there’s really good evidence that something similar has happened with our minds. Our kind of junk values have taken over our minds and they’ve made us mentally sick.
So for thousands of years now philosophers have said, if you think life is about, you know, money and status and showing off you’re going to feel terrible, right? From Confucius on down, people have been warning us of that. But weirdly nobody had actually scientifically investigated it, until an incredible man I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser who’s at Knox University in Illinois.
So Professor Kasser knew when it comes to human motivation there’s basically—to put it crudely—two kinds of human motivation, right.
Imagine you play the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that’s an intrinsic motivation. You’re not doing it to get something out of it. You’re just doing it because that thing gives you joy, right?
Okay, now imagine you play the piano not because it gives you joy, but in a dive bar to pay the rent or because your parents are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro, or to impress a man, maybe some weird piano fetishist, right? That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. You’re not doing it for the experience itself. You’re doing it to get something out of it. You’re doing it one removed. You’re doing it to get something out of the experience.
Now we’re all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic values obviously, and we change throughout our lives. But Professor Kasser discovered some really fascinating things. The first thing is, the more your life is dominated by extrinsic values—the more you’re doing things not because you think they’re important but because of how you’ll look to other people, how you’ll seem on the outside—the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. It’s a quite significant effect that’s been found in 22 studies with depression and 14 studies with anxiety.
How urban spaces can preserve history and build community | Walter HoodCan public spaces both reclaim the past and embrace the future? Landscape architect Walter Hood has explored this question over the course of an iconic career, with projects ranging from Lafayette Square Park in San Francisco to the upcoming International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. In this inspiring talk packed with images of his work, Hood shares the five simple concepts that guide his approach to creating spaces that illuminate shared memories and force us to look at one another in a different way.
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How cancer cells communicate — and how we can slow them down | Hasini JayatilakaWhen cancer cells are closely packed together in a tumor, they're able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement throughout the body. What if we could interrupt this process? In this accessible talk about cutting-edge science, Hasini Jayatilaka shares her work on an innovative method to stop cancer cells from communicating -- and halt their fatal ability to spread.
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What a scrapyard in Ghana can teach us about innovation | DK Osseo-AsareIn Agbogbloshie, a community in Accra, Ghana, people descend on a scrapyard to mine electronic waste for recyclable materials. Without formal training, these urban miners often teach themselves the workings of electronics by taking them apart and putting them together again. Designer DK Osseo-Asare wondered: What would happen if we connected these self-taught techies with students and young professionals in STEAM fields? The result: a growing maker community where people engage in peer-to-peer, hands-on education, motivated by what they want to create. Learn more about how this African makerspace is pioneering a grassroots circular economy.
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Why I fight for the education of refugee girls (like me) | Mary MakerAfter fleeing war-torn South Sudan as a child, Mary Maker found security and hope in the school at Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp. Now a teacher of young refugees herself, she sees education as an essential tool for rebuilding lives -- and empowering a generation of girls who are too often denied entrance into the classroom. "For the child of war, an education can turn their tears of loss into a passion for peace," Maker says.
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The little risks you can take to increase your luck | Tina SeeligLuck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic -- it's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Catching more of it is easy but not obvious. In this insightful talk, Stanford engineering school professor Tina Seelig shares three unexpected ways to increase your luck -- and your ability to see and seize opportunities.
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How teachers can help kids find their political voices | Sydney ChaffeeSocial justice belongs in our schools, says educator Sydney Chaffee. In a bold talk, she shows how teaching students to engage in activism helps them build important academic and life skills -- and asks us to rethink how we can use education to help kids find their voices. "Teaching will always be a political act," Chaffee says. "We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better."
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Why art thrives at Burning Man | Nora AtkinsonCraft curator Nora Atkinson takes us on a trip to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to see the beautifully designed and participatory art of Burning Man, revealing how she discovered there what's often missing from museums: curiosity and engagement. "What is art for in our contemporary world if not this?" she asks.
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How AI can save our humanity | Kai-Fu LeeAI is massively transforming our world, but there's one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution -- and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. "AI is serendipity," Lee says. "It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human."
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How we can use light to see deep inside our bodies and brains | Mary Lou JepsenIn a series of mind-bending demos, inventor Mary Lou Jepsen shows how we can use red light to see and stimulate what's inside our bodies and brains. Taking us to the edge of optical physics, Jepsen unveils new technologies that utilize light and sound to track tumors, measure neural activity and could eventually replace the MRI machine with a cheaper, more efficient and wearable system.
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You are fluent in this language (and don't even know it) | Christoph NiemannWithout realizing it, we're fluent in the language of pictures, says illustrator Christoph Niemann. In a charming talk packed with witty, whimsical drawings, Niemann takes us on a hilarious visual tour that shows how artists tap into our emotions and minds -- all without words.
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You may be accidentally investing in cigarette companies | Bronwyn KingTobacco causes more than seven million deaths every year -- and many of us are far more complicit in the problem than we realize. In a bold talk, oncologist Dr. Bronwyn King tells the story of how she uncovered the deep ties between the tobacco industry and the entire global finance sector, which invests our money in cigarette companies through big banks, insurers and pension funds. Learn how Dr. King has ignited a worldwide movement to create tobacco-free investments and how each of us can play a role in ending this epidemic.
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The death of America’s middle class: Sky-high rent, second jobs, and 1% TV | Alissa QuartRead more at BigThink.com:
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How to stop swiping and find your person on dating apps | Christina WallaceLet's face it, online dating can suck. So many potential people, so much time wasted -- is it even worth it? Podcaster and entrepreneur Christina Wallace thinks so, if you do it right. In a funny, practical talk, Wallace shares how she used her MBA skill set to invent a "zero date" approach and get off swipe-based apps -- and how you can, too.
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How AI is making it easier to diagnose disease | Pratik ShahToday's AI algorithms require tens of thousands of expensive medical images to detect a patient's disease. What if we could drastically reduce the amount of data needed to train an AI, making diagnoses low-cost and more effective? TED Fellow Pratik Shah is working on a clever system to do just that. Using an unorthodox AI approach, Shah has developed a technology that requires as few as 50 images to develop a working algorithm -- and can even use photos taken on doctors' cell phones to provide a diagnosis. Learn more about how this new way to analyze medical information could lead to earlier detection of life-threatening illnesses and bring AI-assisted diagnosis to more health care settings worldwide.
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Why doctors are offering free tax prep in their waiting rooms | Lucy MarcilMore than 90 percent of children in the US see a doctor at least once a year, which means countless hours spent in waiting rooms for parents. What if those hours could be used for something productive -- like saving money? Through her organization StreetCred, pediatrician and TED Fellow Lucy Marcil is offering free tax prep to parents right in the waiting room, reimagining what a doctor's visit can look like and helping to lift families out of poverty. Learn more about how free tax prep and guidance could be the best poverty prescription we have in the US.
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How to train employees to have difficult conversations | Tamekia MizLadi SmithIt's time to invest in face-to-face training that empowers employees to have difficult conversations, says Tamekia MizLadi Smith. In a witty, provocative talk, Smith shares a workplace training program called "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D." that will inspire bosses and employees alike to communicate with compassion and respect. Bottom line: always let people know why their work matters.
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Making cancer as harmless as the common cold | Michio KakuRead more at BigThink.com:
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Michio Kaku: I think we’re entering the fourth wave of scientific innovation and wealth creation. The first era was steam power, when we physicists worked out the laws of thermodynamics we could calculate how much energy you get from a lump of coal to energize a locomotive or a steam engine or a factory. That was the first big breakthrough.
The second wave of innovation and wealth generation was electricity and magnetism. When we physicists worked out the laws of electromagnetism that gave us the light bulb, it gave us television, radio, it gave us the electric age.
The third revolution took place when we physicists worked out the transistor and the laser, opening up the world of high technology.
The fourth wave is at the molecular level, and that is artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology.
In fact I think the synergy between biotechnology and artificial intelligence is going to revolutionize everything around us.
First of all the job market is going to explode in that area because baby boomers are aging, and baby boomers have disposable income; they want answers now to their problems not next year, and so there’s going to be plenty of money involved with people who want to find cures for horrible diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.
At the present time we have no cure for these, but a tremendous amount of effort is now being redirected toward illnesses of old age. Also, take a look at cancer research. We’re going to have a magic bullet against cancer using nano medicine, that is, individual molecules in cells that can target individual cancer cells using nanotechnology.
And the next big thing is when your toilet becomes intelligence. In the future your toilet will be your first line of defense against cancer because your bodily fluids—blood and your bodily fluids contain signatures of cancer colonies of maybe a few hundred cancer cells in your body maybe years before a tumor forms.
Think about it for a moment. There are people watching this program right now, right now who have cancer growing in their body. Maybe a few hundred cancer cells in a colony, but they won’t know it for perhaps ten years, when you have ten billion cancer cells growing in your body forming a tumor. We will have what is called liquid biopsies, DNA chips that allow us to search for the signatures of cancer colonies of a hundred cells, cancer genes, cancer enzymes, cancer protein circulating in our blood and bodily fluids.
So in other words one day your toilet will tell you that “You have cancer. Do something. You have ten years to do it.”
So another words ladies and gentlemen what I’m trying to tell you is in the future the word tumor will “disappear” from the English language. We will have years of warning that there’s a colony of cancer cells growing in our body.
And our descendants will wonder, how could we fear cancer so much?
Cancer is going to become like the common cold, that is we live with the common cold, it doesn’t really kill anybody except maybe if you have pneumonia, but for the most part we tolerate the common cold because it’s too difficult to cure 300 different varieties of rhinoviruses. In the future we may see cancer the same way.
There are probably thousands of different varieties of cancer, we can’t cure every single one, but we’ll live with it, we’ll tolerate it, and we’ll eradicate it in the same way that we live with the common cold.
How one company got $1 billion through secrecy, hacking, and fraud | John CarreyrouRead more at BigThink.com:
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John Carreyrou:
I don’t think it’s just about greed. I don’t think the Theranos scandal was just about greed, and I don’t think Elizabeth Holmes’ only motive was greed.
I think, more than riches, what she was after was fame. She wanted to be in the pantheon of these billionaire tech founders and her idol, as I detail in the book, was Steve Jobs. I mean she absolutely idolized him and Apple.
So I mean in Silicon Valley—and really in American society at large—there’s this reverence for the entrepreneur and for the successful entrepreneur. And this reverence has morphed into almost like a cult of these young bright-eyed tech founders dropping out of (usually) Stanford and going on to found their businesses and getting a lot of funding and then becoming billionaires. And she was on that same track.
The problem is that on the way there she cut a lot of corners and crossed some bright red lines. The biggest one was that in the fall of 2013 she went live with her blood tests in Walgreens stores, first in Palo Alto and then in the Phoenix area. And very few of the tests on the menu were done with actual Theranos technology. Most of them, the vast majority, in fact, were done with third party analyzers bought from other companies. But then they also hacked those machines to “adapt” them to the small finger stick samples, because they wanted to maintain the illusion that they did have this innovative technology that could test, do the full range of tests from just a drop or two of blood pricked from a finger.
And in hacking these commercial machines they made the testing less accurate and less reliable. And so essentially they put lives at risk. That’s one big piece of it, and that’s part of the wrongdoing here.
But another part of it is that by going commercial and then soliciting funding from investors Elizabeth Holmes used the fact that her services were in Walgreen’s stores to get investors on board, because it was like the validation that “Yes, this product was for real. How could it not be? They’ve gone live with it. It’s commercial!”
But I would say that there were two stages of Theranos.
There was a stage when she had just dropped out with this vision, and people like Tim Draper and Don Lucas and Larry Ellison gave her money and funded her. And that was your typical early startup where chances are it’s not going to work out, because nine out of ten of these companies fail, and one succeeds, and maybe it becomes a great success.
And those are the odds, and the investors who invested in the first few rounds in 2005 and 2006 knew what those odds were, and they knew that they were taking a flyer and a young kid who seemed smart and dynamic and seemed to have a great vision.
Where Theranos became a fraud is much later, when in 2013 she launched the blood tests in Walgreens stores and then went back to investors to solicit more money. And that’s actually when Theranos raised the lion’s share of the nearly billion dollars that it raised over its 15 year history. More than $700 million of that billion dollars was raised after 2013, and it was based on the premise that Theranos had a groundbreaking product, and the “proof” was that the product was commercialized—it was in Walgreens stores.
So on the one hand you have putting patients in harm’s way with inaccurate blood tests, and on the other you have defrauding investors, essentially securities fraud.
And in this cult of the startup founder that we have (and of entrepreneurialism) we tend to forget that there’s also something called business ethics, and that these people, even if they have great ambitions and great visions they still need to play by the same rules that we all play by—by society’s rules.
And this cult of the startup founder and this reverence we have for entrepreneurialism shouldn’t excuse wrongdoing. It shouldn’t excuse committing white collar crimes. You’re always going to have people who can find ways to get around rules and laws. And so I hope that the Theranos scandal remains a lesson in people’s minds, in VCs’ minds, and entrepreneurs’ minds in Silicon Valley—that cutting too many corners and not obeying regulations in healthcare is not okay.
"Dead Romance" | Boy Girl BanjoAcoustic duo Anielle Reid and Matthew Brookshire (playing together as Boy Girl Banjo) take the TED stage to perform their original song "Dead Romance," weaving together the sounds of Americana folk music and modern pop.
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Where are all the aliens? | Stephen WebbThe universe is incredibly old, astoundingly vast and populated by trillions of planets -- so where are all the aliens? Astronomer Stephen Webb has an explanation: we're alone in the universe. In a mind-expanding talk, he spells out the remarkable barriers a planet would need to clear in order to host an extraterrestrial civilization -- and makes a case for the beauty of our potential cosmic loneliness. "The silence of the universe is shouting, 'We're the creatures who got lucky,'" Webb says.
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What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media | Mikhail ZygarHistory is written by the victors, as the saying goes -- but what would it look like if it was written by everyone? Journalist and TED Fellow Mikhail Zygar is on a mission to show us with Project1917, a "social network for dead people" that posts the real diaries and letters of more than 3,000 people who lived during the Russian Revolution. By showing the daily thoughts of the likes of Lenin, Trotsky and many less celebrated figures, the project sheds new light on history as it once was -- and as it could have been. Learn more about this digital retelling of the past as well as Zygar's latest project about the transformative year of 1968.
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What your smart devices know (and share) about you | Kashmir Hill and Surya MattuOnce your smart devices can talk to you, who else are they talking to? Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu wanted to find out -- so they outfitted Hill's apartment with 18 different internet-connected devices and built a special router to track how often they contacted their servers and see what they were reporting back. The results were surprising -- and more than a little bit creepy. Learn more about what the data from your smart devices reveals about your sleep schedule, TV binges and even your tooth-brushing habits -- and how tech companies could use it to target and profile you. (This talk contains mature language.)
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The power of diversity within yourself | Rebeca HwangRebeca Hwang has spent a lifetime juggling identities -- Korean heritage, Argentinian upbringing, education in the United States -- and for a long time she had difficulty finding a place in the world to call home. Yet along with these challenges came a pivotal realization: that a diverse background is a distinct advantage in today's globalized world. In this personal talk, Hwang reveals the endless benefits of embracing our complex identities -- and shares her hopes for creating a world where identities aren't used to alienate but to bring people together instead.
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The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface | Will MarshallWhat if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses and everything else on Earth searchable, the same way you search Google. He shares a vision for how this database can become a living record of the immense physical changes happening across the globe. "You can't fix what you can't see," Marshall says. "We want to give people the tools to see change and take action."
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"The Last Serenade" | Lili HaydnIn a stirring, emotional performance, violinist Lili Haydn plays a selection from her musical "The Last Serenade."
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Eternal youth may be possible. Which age would you stay at forever? | Michio KakuRead more at BigThink.com:
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Michio Kaku:
Historically kings, queens and emperors have tried to find the fountain of youth; they failed.
Ponce de Leon instead founded Florida, emperor Qin of China, apparently he sent his princes to look for the fountain of youth with the order “if you don’t find the fountain of youth, don’t come back.” And apparently he founded Japan and he founded Korea as a consequence of that.
So we have a long history of people searching for the fountain of youth without success at all.
In fact, the tales of Gilgamesh, perhaps one of the oldest written tales predating parts of the Bible—the tale of Gilgamesh, well he had a mission and his mission was to find the secret of immortality.
So today we have two kinds of immortality: digital immortality and genetic/biologic immortality.
Digital immortality I think we will attain. It is an attainable goal. And that is to digitize our entire life. One day when you go to the library instead of getting a book about Winston Churchill you’ll talk to Winston Churchill, you’ll see a holographic image of him that has all the mannerisms, the speeches and maybe the memories of Winston Churchill.
In fact, one of these days your descendants could go to a library and talk to you, because you have been digitized.
I mean think of your credit card transactions, for example, if I know your credit card transactions I already know where you like to vacation, what kinds of wines you like to buy and drink, what you like to do in your spare time.
Think of what happens if I have the totality of your digital fingerprints, all the videos, all the vacations, everything—perhaps I can create a reasonable facsimile of you.
And then, of course, the question is: is that really you? Well, to paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, it all depends on how you define “you”.
If you define “you” as the biological entity with your memories then of course it is not you, but if you define your soul as entropy and information, that is, if you say that your soul is information that evolves with time via the laws of entropy, then you can be digitized—because your soul is digital.
The other immortality, of course, is biologic and genetic immortality. We have artificially intelligent systems that can scan tremendous amounts of data to look for patterns so in the future we will take the genomes of millions of old people and the genomes of millions of young people, run them through an AI system that look for patterns: where is error concentrated? Which genes control the aging process?
For example, take a car: where does aging take place in a car? Well, that’s obvious right? Most of the aging takes place in the engine, because that’s where you have moving parts, that’s where you have combustion, oxidation, that’s where all the action takes place.
Well, in a cell… where is the engine of a cell? It is the mitochondria. And where do we find error buildup, entropy building up in a cell?
And that is the mitochondria.
So, bingo, we now know more or less where to look when you look for the build up of error in a cell, because that’s what aging is.
Aging is the build up of error, cellular error, biological error, genetic error, error. Entropy, that’s what aging is.
Now, if you take a look at the Greenland shark, the Greenland shark has one of the world’s records for a vertebrate that lives so long you could barely measure it. By looking at the eye, the eye of the Greenland shark, you’re looking at the layers, they add layers once a year just like tree rings and you can actually date the life of a Greenland shark. The ones they’ve looked at so far are over 400 years old.
And so we already have examples of vertebrates that have life spans far beyond anything that we humans can muster.
Now, we also have other clues, we know that telomerase, for example, can “stop the clock”.
We have a clock in our cells called telomeres, they get shorter and shorter after every cell reproduction, after a certain point they simply unravel the chromosomes of the cell and the cell goes into senescence and eventually dies. That is the biological clock.
Skin cells, for example, reproduce about 60 times approximately, that’s the Hayflick limit for a skin cell.
But, in Menlo Park California they’ve immortalized these cells. We can now take ordinary human skin cells, apply telomerase on them, and they stop the clock; they simply reproduce forever.
Now what’s the catch? There’s always a catch someplace.
The catch is that cancer cells also use telomerase on the way to immortality.
An honest look at the personal finance crisis | Elizabeth WhiteMillions of baby boomers are moving into their senior years with empty pockets and declining choices to earn a living. And right behind them is a younger generation facing the same challenges. In this deeply personal talk, author Elizabeth White opens up an honest conversation about financial trouble and offers practical advice for how to live a richly textured life on a limited income.
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Why Congress doesn't do anything about gun violence in America | Steve IsraelRead more at BigThink.com:
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Steve Israel: Well, here’s why I wrote Big Guns: I had served in Congress for 16 years, and in those 16 years I witnessed a shooting at a university in Virginia, a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, a shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut—and after every single one of those mass shootings I and virtually every one of my colleagues were confronted with the same question, and that is: when is Congress going to do something about it? When will this stop?
Not necessarily “when will congress do everything about it,” but just “do something,” do universal background checks or some commonsense legislation.
And when my constituents in New York would ask that question I knew that the honest answer (and the painful answer) was: we’re not. Congress is not going to do anything because of the politics that surrounded the gun safety debate.
And I decided to try and answer that question in the best way I can, and that is with snark, with humor, and from the very inside of Congress.
I wrote this book during hearings on gun safety; I wrote this book on the floor of the House of Representatives; I wrote this book on that little balcony off the floor of the House of Representatives where members go to rest while they’re not beating each other up inside.
And so this book—really it’s a reflection of what I learned as a member of Congress, and it is my way of explaining to readers why Congress seems so paralyzed in the face of this mass violence that is effecting so many communities and so many of our constituents.
Ninety percent of the American people support strengthened background checks, about 80 percent of Republicans support strengthened background checks, a majority of an RMA members support strengthened background checks, and yet when we offered this amendment for stronger background checks in the Appropriations Committee it was defeated virtually in a party line vote.
And I was wrestling with this. Why would members of Congress vote against something that has such massive support?
Well, I learned the lesson, and the lesson is reflected in Big Guns. After that hearing I went to one of the most sacred places on Capitol Hill, not a church but the members-only elevator. And the reason it’s sacred is because on the members-only elevator you can’t have tourists in, you can’t have the media in, you can’t have staff in, and so you reach a real level of confidentiality in that cramped space.
And a bunch of members piled onto this elevator after the committee meeting, and one of the Republicans on this elevator said, “Why did you try and force us to vote for this amendment for background checks?”
And I said, “Well, we didn’t force you to do anything. You voted against it. My question to you is why would you vote against it?”
And this member looked at me and said, “I wanted to vote for it, but I can’t go home and explain that vote to my gun lobby voters. It would be the end of my career.”
That tells you everything you need to know about why Congress seems so paralyzed.
I did not want to write Big Guns as my personal screed against the NRA and the gun lobby.
I thought the best and most credible way of writing this book was to bring different characters in with different viewpoints.
And by the way, that’s what Congress is like. It’s different characters with different viewpoints.
And I felt that the best way to tell this story was as a satire, but all satire has to be based on a kernel of truth. And the truth in this book is the fact that Congress does nothing. The book was actually based on an extraordinary and shocking event after the Sandy Hook massacre that killed children in this elementary school in Connecticut. I was reading, sitting having breakfast right after that, I was so convinced that we in Congress were finally going to do something; when first graders are gunned down it would seem that Congress would do something.
And my confidence was really high and I was having breakfast and I was reading my New York Times one morning and I came upon this article, and I could have sworn that the New York Times had been infiltrated by the writers of The Onion, because it seemed so bizarre.
A new way to monitor vital signs (that can see through walls) | Dina KatabiAt MIT, Dina Katabi and her team are working on a bold new way to monitor patients' vital signs in a hospital (or even at home), without wearables or bulky, beeping devices. Bonus: it can see through walls. In a mind-blowing talk and demo, Katabi previews a system that captures the reflections of signals like Wi-Fi as they bounce off people, creating a reliable record of vitals for healthcare workers and patients. And in a brief Q&A with TED curator Helen Walters, Katabi discusses safeguards being put in place to prevent people from using this tech to monitor somebody without their consent.
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Is war with China inevitable? | David KangRead more at BigThink.com:
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David Kang: One of the most interesting patterns in East Asian history—which is quite different from the European pattern—is that when China is strong and big there’s a lot less fighting.
And when China falls apart then there’s some vicious fighting as everybody jockeys for position.
So whether we go back to the transition of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century or we get to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in the 20th century, when China is weak there’s a lot of fighting. When China is strong, in many ways countries get along better.
Well, the rise of China in the last 20 years in many ways has been accompanied with increasing stability around the region.
If you go back 40 years ago to 1978, that’s the beginning of China’s economic reforms and its phenomenal economic growth. Before then, China was a poor country caught in the throes of a cultural revolution where maybe a million Chinese died; they were fomenting revolution and supporting revolutionary groups around the region.
Since that time over the last 40 years China’s economy has exploded. 400 million Chinese have gone out of poverty. It looks nothing like it was before.
So China’s domestic situation is far more stable than before. At the same time, what’s happening to trade in the region? Everybody is now trading with China. Countries may not like what China is doing politically, but they don’t fear invasion. Vietnam isn’t worried about invasion. Korea is not worried about invasion. But what do they do? They are trying to rapidly expand their economic links with China.
So the region now is getting knit together in a way that it used to look like before, and so there’s more interaction among these countries, not less.
One the things that’s not that surprising —but also really important—is how little we in the West, we in the United States know about East Asian history. Almost all of our theories in IR, almost all of the history we learn, whether it’s in high school or college or even graduate school, is about Europe. And that’s fine. Sure. I understand why it is.
But the fact is there’s a lot of East Asian history that doesn’t look anything like European history. And if we want to understand that reason it might help to actually understand East Asian history.
You know, I do think that there is an incredibly important role for area studies knowledge, for scholars who know the region who have spent their lifetime studying.
In many ways this Eurocentric focus really does put us at a disadvantage in making policy towards Asia, because in some ways we are talking ourselves into conflicts that I don’t think necessarily have to exist. And the perfect example is this whole Thucydides trap.
If you go to DC right now or if you read almost any foreign policy magazine—or even scholarly journals—that talk about East Asia it is essentially a conventional wisdom now. Essentially I would say scholars and policymakers from the left and from the right, almost everybody takes for granted in the United States that “China’s rise can be a threat,” that “we better be prepared to contain,” that “there’s going to be some kind of a titanic struggle.”
But most of this is based not on what China is doing but is based on a belief that “it must inevitably happen, so just wait. It may not be happening now, but it’s going to happen in the future.”
So even when, for example, I’ll do a talk and I’ll show evidence over the last 25 years that in many ways East Asia is more stable and defense spending is not a big as people think, I’m met with a wall of skepticism where people are like, “No, no, no, you don’t understand, just wait. It’s going to happen in the future.”
It’s not based on any knowledge, it’s not based on any evidence, it’s based on a belief about the world, but that belief about the world is informed from Europe and not East Asia.
And so having real knowledge about the informal rules and lessons and places to avoid is incredibly important.
How to build synthetic DNA and send it across the internet | Dan GibsonBiologist Dan Gibson edits and programs DNA, just like coders program a computer. But his "code" creates life, giving scientists the power to convert digital information into biological material like proteins and vaccines. Now he's on to a new project: "biological transportation," which holds the promise of beaming new medicines across the globe over the internet. Learn more about how this technology could change the way we respond to disease outbreaks and enable us to download personalized prescriptions in our homes.
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How we study the microbes living in your gut | Dan KnightsThere are about a hundred trillion microbes living inside your gut -- protecting you from infection, aiding digestion and regulating your immune system. As our bodies have adapted to life in modern society, we've started to lose some of our normal microbes; at the same time, diseases linked to a loss of diversity in microbiome are skyrocketing in developed nations. Computational microbiologist Dan Knights shares some intriguing discoveries about the differences in the microbiomes of people in developing countries compared to the US, and how they might affect our health. Learn more about the world of microbes living inside you -- and the work being done to create tools to restore and replenish them.
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How farming could employ Africa's young workforce -- and help build peace | Kola MashaAfrica's youth is coming of age rapidly, but job growth on the continent isn't keeping up. The result: financial insecurity and, in some cases, a turn towards insurgent groups. In a passionate talk, agricultural entrepreneur Kola Masha details his plan to bring leadership and investment to small farmers in Africa -- and employ a rising generation.
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The rapid growth of the Chinese internet -- and where it's headed | Gary LiuThe Chinese internet has grown at a staggering pace -- it now has more users than the combined populations of the US, UK, Russia, Germany, France and Canada. Even with its imperfections, the lives of once-forgotten populations have been irrevocably elevated because of it, says South China Morning Post CEO Gary Liu. In a fascinating talk, Liu details how the tech industry in China has developed -- from the innovative, like AI-optimized train travel, to the dystopian, like a social credit rating that both rewards and restricts citizens.
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Elon Musk is fulfilling Thomas Edison's energy dreams | Michio KakuRead more at BigThink.com:
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How much money is enough? | Vicki RobinRead more at BigThink.com:
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Vicki Robin: We talk about the old roadmap for money, and the old roadmap was born really out of the industrial revolution.
It was born out of the sense of the “wild west,” of “anything is possible,” of manifest destiny, of American exceptionalism, whatever you want to say.
Or you can go back even further to capitalism itself. But the roadmap is: “growth is good, more is better, whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
It’s a materialist roadmap, and the part of the roadmap is not only that; it’s an empty world.
“Uh oh, there were people here before the white people came. And, you know animals. There was already a living mature society—“ “No, no, no. It was empty.”
And then the other part of it is that one of the essential ingredients of it that still people, even if intellectually they understand it they do not get it, is that in that roadmap the economy can grow forever and the Earth is like just sort of a toy chest. You just keep reaching in there and pulling out resources, reaching in and pulling out resources. So the economy can grow infinitely because the Earth is an infinite cornucopia of resources.
The fact of the matter is that the economy is a fabrication, our economy is a fabrication, a set of rules inside a finite planet.
There’s a way to measure. There’s a way to measure the human impact, the impact of human consumption on the Earth. It’s called the ecological footprint, and they can measure every little scintilla of, you know, my watch and my eyeglass. Everything I have, everything we sit in, everything we walk around on, they can measure that in terms of the amount of the planet it took to develop that.
So we have measured the amount of planet we have and humans are consuming more than the amount of planet we have every year (that can be regenerated) ever since 1986.
That, to me, that data about overshoot has been a central feature of my life. When I learned that, it was just sort of one of those things that’s obvious, like, “certainly we want to change.”
So the old roadmap this idea that the Earth is a set of infinite resources, and the economy can harvest those resources every which way from Sunday in order to produce economic growth.
That’s fundamental and then it trickles down to the human as: “More is better.”
And part of that is as the economy grew, as industrialization permitted more products to be produced with less human labor there was a sort of a peaking out of consumption around the 1920s and it became a problem, like what are we going to do?
Trump’s not the problem. He’s a symbol of 4 bigger issues. | Ian BremmerRead more at BigThink.com:
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Ian Bremmer: The problem is not Trump. Trump is a symptom.
If the problem were Trump it wouldn’t be happening in other places around the world. We actually see all sorts of countries advanced industrial democracies where people are getting angrier and they’re voting more and more against the establishment.
We saw that with the Brexit referendum, which was before the U.S. presidential election; We saw it in Germany with the rise of the Alternatives for Deutschland, an actively Euro-skeptic party for the first time since World War II; We have nationalists in the German parliament; We saw it with the recent Italian elections where they threw out all of the establishment parties and instead it’s the Five Star Movement and the League, again Euro-skeptic, anti-immigration, populist political forces.
This is very unusual and it’s not coincidence. So why is it happening? One reason is because you have lots of members of working and middle classes that feel like they are not doing well economically and no one in the establishment is going to help them. “So let’s vote for some change. Let’s vote against free trade. Let’s vote against the support of the establishment. Let’s bring in something new.”
Second point. A lot of this is anti-immigration. Demographics have changed an awful lot in the United States, in Canada and in Europe over the past decades and a lot of people feel – people that have come before say “Wait a second! You’re not taking care of me, but you’re going to bring in these new people and these new people who I don’t necessarily like or understand or trust? These new people who are getting benefits—but what about my benefits?! It’s going to cost a lot of money to bring them in. Are they going to steal my jobs? Are they going to cause crime?!” —Even though in the United States we know that first generation immigrants don’t actually cause more crime than those that have lived here.
Nonetheless the willingness to believe that those “other people are bad and a problem” goes up a lot when you feel like your government’s not taking care of you. So that’s been a big piece of it.
A third piece has been the military. You know the foreign policy establishment in the United States has been very willing to support the U.S. getting into wars around the world. But most of the sons and daughters of the foreign policy establishment don’t actually fight in those wars themselves—That’s also true of the political leaders that are responsible. As we know it’s the poor people, it’s the enlisted men and women. They get sent off, their families are left broken, their communities are hindered. They come back – Iraq, Afghanistan – billions upon billions of dollars wasted on these wars, enormous numbers of people that are killed or wounded or have post traumatic stress disorder. They come back they’re not seen as heroes. The Americans and the allies didn’t win these wars. The Veterans Administration doesn’t take care of them.
So as a consequence you see those people getting really angry and not voting for Hillary or Jeb. They’re voting for Bernie Sanders or for Donald Trump.
And then you have technology which is that technology today is increasingly driving people apart. We get most of our information in the United States from advertising companies that view us as commodities, products. They sell our eyeballs and our time on their sites to companies that pay money to ensure that we spend as much time as possible on Facebook and on Twitter and on the rest. That’s how we get our information.
We’ll spend more time on their sites if we are divided and we are narrower, and only follow the things we like, which means Democrats are watching pro-Democrat sites and conservatives and Republicans are watching pro-Republican sites. And there’s virtually no overlap. And so it’s fake news for everybody. It’s us versus them.
That’s happening across Europe. It’s happening in Canada. Those four factors are driving us apart.
They’re ripping at the fabric of civic nationalism across all of the advanced industrial economies. And by the way, it’s happening when the economy is doing really well. The United States today and the UK and Canada and Germany feel more divided than at any time in my lifetime. And yet that’s when we can spend a lot of money.
So if that’s true, what do you think it’s going to feel like when interest rates go up and growth goes down and we start laying people off and we don’t have the budgetary space to give everybody a tax break? It’s going to get worse.
So it’s very clear that this is a structural condition that we have been living with and ignoring for decades and it’s getting worse.
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Beauty and sex: Evolution isn’t as practical as you think | Richard PrumRead more at BigThink.com:
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A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is the evolution of ornament, especially sexual ornament.
And one way to look at that—how that evolves—is to ask, “Why are certain traits preferred?” The peacock’s tail, or the song of a wood thrush?
In The Origin of Species Charles Darwin proposed that organisms evolved by natural selection to become more and more adapted to their environment.
In proposing this mechanism Darwin articulated the concept of “fitness,” which was an aspect of the individual that allowed it to further its own survival or fecundity. It was like physical fitness: it was something the individual could do in order to further its survival.
However, later during the early 20th century with the development of modern population genetics, the idea of fitness, the concept of fitness was redefined in an abstract, mathematical way to mean “one’s relative contribution of one’s genes to subsequent populations.”
In this case fitness incorporated both survival and fecundity AND a differential reproductive success—or natural selection AND sexual selection.
This is okay, except that the new, revised concept of fitness kept its romantic association with the idea of adaptation by natural selection, even though it was being applied to both survival and mate choice, which Darwin saw as essentially an aesthetic process.
So what that means is in the early 20th century evolutionary biology and selection became synonymous with natural selection.
This had a number of problems, which, for example, it built right into the machinery of evolutionary biology the idea that mate choice is ALWAYS adaptive, or is (or should be) about adaptation.
100 percent of evolutionary biologists from about 1890 to 1938 were either ardent eugenicists or happy fellow travelers—Full stop.
And that unfortunate past is really part of our history as a discipline. And I think evolutionary biology has a special responsibility to scrutinize the intellectual developments during that period in the way in which those concepts influence the way we think about evolution today.
Animals have an opportunity for sensory perception, cognitive evaluation, and choice, and based on their choices certain kinds of ornament will evolve.
According to the beauty happens theory, beauty evolves merely because it’s preferred. And what that means is that in a population mate choice will create some norm, some standard that is preferred within the population. But also that standard is unstable over time; it can change.
Now, this theory “Beauty Happens” goes back to Charles Darwin, who proposed after The Origin of Species an alternative or new theory for the evolution of ornament through mate choice or sexual selection.
When Darwin proposed that mate choice was a force in evolution—back in the Victorian era—the idea was a big loser among his colleagues. They were very skeptical that animals could be even capable of choice, let alone the kind of aesthetic judgments that Darwin proposed.
Under the Wallacian view, all beauty is merely another kind of practical utility. That beauty, like the peacock’s tail, is preferred because it indicates something about that individual: either that he has good genes, or a good diet, or no sexually transmitted diseases—all sorts of things that mates need to know. The challenge, of course, is to try to figure out what’s actually happening in nature.
Modern evolutionary biologists are quite comfortable with the idea that animals are making choices, yet they are still by and large confident that the kinds of choices that animals make will ALWAYS be controlled by or determined by natural selection, that is, that mate choice will ultimately lead to the evolution of adaptive—or “honest”—ornaments.
This flattening or oversimplification of the Darwinian worldview directly contributed to the eugenic history of evolutionary biology. That is, during the late 19th and early 20th century, 100 percent of evolutionary biologists believed that human diversity had evolved as a result of adaptation to diversity of environments—and this meant that human populations, ethnic groups and races were actually adapted to different environments in a “hierarchy of quality”.
This of course was—this eugenic theory actually failed to be supported and has been scientifically rejected, and yet aspects of the “logic” of eugenics were built into the early or fundamental concepts of modern evolutionary biology through the concept of fitness.
So, how do we proceed forward? I think the best way is to define natural selection and sexual selection as distinct mechanisms, sometimes interacting.
