How to build (and rebuild) trust | Frances FreiTrust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress," Frei says.
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Is tech addictive? It won't be for long. | Joscha BachDo we want to be at the mercy of our devices, or do we want to be fulfilled? Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach explains how the big decision we're coming to in tech ethics will mimic another moment in tech history: the battle of the search engines. In the late 1990s, AltaVista was one of the world's most used search engines—at least until a "small and inconsequential" startup called Google came along. AltaVista served ads, and Google didn't (not back then). For the public, the choice was easy; there's a reason you "Google" the weather rather than "AltaVista" it. We face the same decision now: will we choose tech that harvests our attention and sells it, like highly addictive social media apps; or will we choose tech that is useful to us—products that help us achieve our own goals? "Right now we mostly build applications that utilize the cravings of people, that make them addicted. People start checking their smartphones every few seconds to see if a new email arrived. But this new email is not going to make them more happy and fulfilled." In the long run, says Bach, technology that aligns with what people want wins. As long as we want the right things, the days of addictive tech are numbered. Joscha Bach's latest book is Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures)
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Joscha Bach: I remember when the first search engines came around, and back then AltaVista was a very big thing. AltaVista tried to strike a balance between the inconveniences—in terms of advertising and so on that could put off the user—and the utility had for the user. So it would, for instance, mix search results with advertising.
And at this point Google came along. Google was very small and inconsequential, and nobody really took it seriously. But it did an amazing thing: it did give people exactly what they wanted. It gave them a pretty much ad-free experience. It gave them exactly the search results that they wanted, the best ones, the closest ones to what people wanted to have. And Google dramatically outperformed AltaVista. AltaVista disappeared.
That was an amazing insight, to see that if you are in the dramatically scalable economy, like the Internet, where you have the biggest amount of competition that you can possibly have, you need to build a product that is optimally aligned with the interest of the users—unless you manage to get some kind of monopoly and can drive out other competition.
And so when we build new products in that space we have to think about how to build the most useful product. Not necessarily just the product that is going to make the biggest amount of money, that is going to have the most efficient business model in some sense or the best business case. Eventually, it’s going to be the product that is getting the most use by people. And people will find out that they will use what is most useful to them. In the long run, that’s going to be the stuff that is not addictive, that is hygienic, that serves the actual needs, that makes them more happy and fulfilled. And right now we mostly build applications that utilize the cravings of people, that make them addicted. People start checking their smartphones every few seconds to see if a new email arrived. But this new email is not going to make them more happy and fulfilled. Instead, it takes away their attention.
So I believe the next big movement in how we build technical systems will be hygienic technology. It will be how to build systems that are careful with our attention and how we use it, and that is careful with our way of living and what we want to achieve with the tools that we are building.
Why you don’t like the sound of your own voice | Rébecca KleinbergerYour voice is indistinguishable from how other people see you, but your relationship with it is far from obvious. Rébecca Kleinberger studies how we use and understand our voices and the voices of others. She explains why you may not like the sound of your own voice on recordings, the differences between your outward, inward and inner voices -- and the extraordinary things you communicate without being aware of it.
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To design better tech, understand context | Tania DouglasWhat good is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment to people in Africa if it can't handle the climate there? Biomedical engineer Tania Douglas shares stories of how we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology -- and how a deeper understanding of the context where it's used can lead us to better solutions.
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It's time for the law to protect victims of gender violence | Laura L. DunnTo make accountability the norm after gender violence in the United States, we need to change tactics, says victims' rights attorney and TED Fellow Laura L. Dunn. Instead of going institution by institution, fighting for reform, we need to go to the Constitution and finally pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would require states to address gender inequality and violence. By ushering in sweeping change, Dunn says, "our legal system can become a system of justice, and #MeToo can finally become 'no more.'"
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3 proofs that debunk flat-Earth theory | NASA's Michelle ThallerHey flat Earthers, it's time to put your theory to bed once and for all! A curious stargazer by the name of Oscar has submitted a question to Big Think's 'Ask an astronomer' series with NASA's Michelle Thaller. Oscar wants to know: "What would be the easiest proof that the Earth isn’t flat, that I could come back with whenever I get challenged on this issue?" Thaller sets the record straight.
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So, Oscar, you asked the question, “What are some of the easiest ways that you can prove that the Earth is round?” Because apparently, this is something that we’re debating—I have no idea why.
That’s a hard thing for me to even start talking about because there are so many proofs that the Earth is round, it’s difficult to know where to start. And it’s not okay to think that the Earth is flat. This is not a viable argument.
I have friends who have been on the International Space Station, they have orbited the Earth once every 90 minutes; I've had personal experience with people who have been up in space and can see with their own eyes that the Earth is round. And of course, we‘ve taken all of these amazing pictures from space; they’re so beautiful, all those pictures of the Earth.
So I don’t really know what’s going on right now with this 'Earth is flat' thing, but I will tell you that this is one of the things I really enjoyed teaching my own astronomy class about because there are proofs all around you. It is not difficult to know that the Earth is round. In fact, people have known of this for way more than 2,000 years. The ancient Greeks actually had a number of really elegant, wonderful proofs that the earth was a sphere.
So let’s start from the simple to the slightly more complicated. One of the things you can see yourself, with a pair of binoculars, is if you actually go out to a lake and there are boats on that lake, the farther away a boat is the more the bottom of the boat will disappear, and you’ll basically just see the mast of the boat. And as a boat goes farther and farther away the last thing you will see is the very top of the mast of that boat, and that’s because the boat is actually going over the horizon that’s curved—and that means that as it goes farther and farther away you see less and less of the bottom of it, and more of the top of that. You can see that with binoculars by an ocean, by a lake, it’s really easy. That wouldn’t happen if the Earth were flat—you would simply see the boat getting smaller and smaller and smaller as it went farther away, but you’d be able to see the whole thing with the same proportions.
Now, another way that you can tell that we’re on a sphere is to think about how there’s something called the tropics on the Earth, and the tropics are places near the equator of the earth were sometimes the sun is overhead in the sky. This was actually something that the Greeks used, not only to prove that the Earth was round about 2000 years ago, but they actually measured the circumference of the Earth, accurate to within just a couple percent. 2,000 years ago we’ve known that the Earth was round.
There was a really brilliant Greek scientist called Eratosthenes, and Eratosthenes noticed that there was a town called Syene, and on a certain date the sun would actually shine straight down to the bottom of a well. That meant the sun was directly overhead; you could look down a well and see the sun shining back at you.
And on the very same date, farther away in the city of Alexandria, that didn’t happen. The sun was not directly overhead, it was a slight angle, and all that Eratosthenes did was he measured the difference in the angle of the sun. It was straight overhead in Syene; in Alexandria it was a little bit less than overhead, and he rationed that that change in angle from one city to another was probably indicative of us being on a curved surface, and you could make all kinds of measurements even between those two cities and see that the angles were different—the sun was at a different place in the sky. Using this, he actually measured the circumference of the Earth, and he got it right 2,000 years ago.
So another really simple proof is that on any given date, at different cities and different places around the world, the sun is at different angles in the sky. That wouldn’t happen if the Earth wasn’t round.
How a male contraceptive pill could work | John AmoryAndrologist John Amory is developing innovative male contraception that gives men a new option for taking responsibility to prevent unintended pregnancy. He details the science in development -- and why the world needs a male pill.
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Why tech needs the humanities | Eric BerridgeIf you want to build a team of innovative problem-solvers, you should value the humanities just as much as the sciences, says entrepreneur Eric Berridge. He shares why tech companies should look beyond STEM graduates for new hires -- and how people with backgrounds in the arts and humanities can bring creativity and insight to technical workplaces.
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Right-wing politics has a new secret weapon. Can the Left harness it? | Jeremy HeimansThe election of Donald J. Trump surprised many, most of all the Democrats. Jeremy Heimans, a political activist and the Founder of the online media company Purpose, explains it simply: Donald Trump won the internet, and thus won the presidency.
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The game of politics for many decades has been played as one in which you’re supposed to keep your head down, you’re supposed to be bland, you’re supposed to be uncontroversial; your job is to court as many people as you can in the middle.
Donald Trump from the very beginning took a different posture, everything he did was about unleashing the agency of a small number of intense supporters.
This was going to be a campaign in which you could unleash the things that you’d been thinking—maybe your mad uncle muttering at the television—and suddenly every mad uncle muttering at the television was empowered—was sent a signal by this man that those private thoughts could now be made public.
As Donald Trump’s candidacy unfolded he built and created a symbiotic relationship with what we think of as a vast, decentralized social media army that did his bidding during the campaign.
These were mostly young white men on forums like Reddit and 4chan and they developed a kind of culture of competing with each other, vying with each other, to produce the most creative, the most sticky, the most intrusive meme or message that would penetrate social media and then seep into the mainstream media.
So every day they would do this and in response to the events of the news cycle, be it Hillary Clinton’s latest comments, be it Donald Trump’s latest policy pronouncements, they would go take that moment and elevate it.
The mainstream media were generally confident that Hillary would win the election: she was ahead in the polls fairly consistently and because she had much higher favorables.
While both candidates were unpopular, Hillary’s favorables in public opinion polls were generally about ten points higher than Donald Trump’s.
But the people doing social media sentiment analysis, firms like ForeSee, were tracking and finding something very different. Their job is to track net sentiment on social media in connection to political debates. And what they were finding throughout the campaign was that while Donald Trump’s favorables were about ten points lower than Hillary, his net favorability on social media was about ten points higher than Hillary.
One of the most striking facts we discovered when researching this book was that the day that Donald Trump had the highest net favorability on social media was his darkest day of the campaign. It was the day of the Access Hollywood tape being released. And it was because at that day his supporters, who had such intensity of commitment to him, rallied around him. They surged to his defense.
And even though it seemed in the mainstream media like this was the day that was all losing for Donald Trump, on social media that day Donald Trump actually won.
He was elected because he intuitively understood what we call New Power. And New Power is this ability to harness the energy of a connected crowd.
And while Hillary Clinton had a very traditional relationship with her crowd, Donald Trump had a relationship that reflects what we now know you need to do in order to really build depth of commitment politically.
So the NRA understands intensity in the same way that Donald Trump does.
One of its great strengths is, in addition to its old power brand (the fact that it’s a feared institution that politicians kind of quiver at the thought of), it also has an incredibly powerful New Power arm. And that arm goes beyond just its membership, it actually has been very effective at cultivating the most extreme elements of its support base.
Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven PinkerWas 2017 really the "worst year ever," as some would have us believe? In his analysis of recent data on homicide, war, poverty, pollution and more, psychologist Steven Pinker finds that we're doing better now in every one of them when compared with 30 years ago. But progress isn't inevitable, and it doesn't mean everything gets better for everyone all the time, Pinker says. Instead, progress is problem-solving, and we should look at things like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. "We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one," he says. "But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."
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The fascist philosopher behind Vladimir Putin’s information warfareYale University Professor Timothy Snyder gives a crash course in Ivan Ilyin's philosophy of fascism and explains why this worldview is so appealing to Putin: it defines freedom as knowing your set place in society, asserts that democracy is a ritual and not a reality, and maintains that there are no facts in the world. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this is how new technology—like Facebook—is turning old fascism into political warfare.
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Ivan Ilyin was a fascist philosopher of the '20s, '30s, and '40s, but he’s probably the most important example of how old ideas can be brought back in the 21st century or in a postmodern context.
Ilyin had three very important ideas. The first was that social advancement was impossible because the political system, the social system, is like a body. So you’re a cell, you’re an embryo, you’re an organ, you have a place in this larger body, and freedom means knowing your place. That’s what freedom means.
A second idea that he had is that democracy is a ritual. So we can vote, but we only vote in order to affirm our collective support for a leader. The leader is not legitimated by our votes or chosen by our votes, the voting is just a ritual by which we collectively, every couple of years, endorse a leader who has emerged from some other place, from some—in fascism, a leader is some kind of hero who emerges from fiction, who emerges from myth.
The third idea Ilyin had, which is very useful, is that the factual world doesn’t count. It’s not real. Ilyin says that God created the world, but that was a mistake. The world was a kind of aborted process. The world is a horrifying thing because it’s full of this and that and the other thing, what we call facts, and those facts can’t be unified into some kind of larger whole so the world is actually horrifying, and those facts are disgusting and of no value whatsoever.
So, if you were Vladimir Putin and you’re governing as the head of an oligarchical clan it’s very comfortable to be able to say, “Well, look, freedom consists in knowing your place in society. There’s no possibility for social advance.”
If you’re Vladimir Putin and you don’t have serious democracy or you don’t want to have it, it’s very comfortable to do, as he, in fact, has done, it’s very comfortable to transform elections into a kind of ritual.
And, likewise, if you can’t have the rule of law and if Russians are basically stuck in a certain place economically and politically, the idea that the world is not factual, that the world is just subjective, that it’s just a matter of this opinion, that opinion and the other opinion, is very comfortable.
And Ilyin adds the even more comfortable conclusion that the only true thing is Russian nationalism. The only hope to bring the whole world together is that somehow Russia—which is an innocent victim of the rest of the world—will somehow restore itself in some totalitarian form and then bring order back to the world.
So interestingly—it’s not the only thing which is going on—but interestingly these kinds of ideas help Mr. Putin as he consolidates a certain kind of authoritarianism by spectacle at home and also help him as he broadcasts it abroad.
The fundamental way that Russia works in American politics is by transmitting the idea that’s nothing is real. So it’s true that the Russians did support Trump. It’s true that there were all kinds of very specific interventions in the election of 2016. But the fundamental idea is to take new technology and transmit this old idea that we can’t really trust ourselves, that there aren’t really facts out there in the world, that the only thing that really matters is our preferences, or really our biases, or really our hatreds.
How to build an A.I. brain that can conceive of itself | Joscha BachA.I. can perform tricks, but can it truly think? Cognitive scientist Joscha Back explains where we are on the path to artificial general intelligence, and where we need to be. The human mind can invent its own code and create models of arbitrary things—including itself—but we don't know how to build a mind quite like that just yet. To achieve A.G.I., will programmers have to re-create every single functional mechanism of the human brain?
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If you look at our current technological systems they are obviously nowhere near where our minds are. They are very different. And one of the biggest questions for me is: What’s the difference between where we are now and where we need to be if we want to build minds—If we want to build systems that are generally intelligent and self-motivated and maybe self-aware? And, of course, the answer to this is 'we don’t know' because if we knew we’d have already done it. But there are basically several perspectives on this. One is our minds as general learning systems that are able to model arbitrary things, including themselves, and if there are this, they probably need a very distinct set of motivations, needs; things that they want to do. I think that humans get their specifics due to their particular needs. We have cognitive and social and physiological needs and they turn us into who we are. Our motivations determine where we put our attention, what we learn and what we actually do in the world—what we model, how we perceive, what we are conscious of. In a similar sense, it might be that it’s sufficient to build a general learning architecture and combine this with a good motivational system.
And we are not there yet in building a general learning architecture. For instance, our minds can learn and create new algorithms that can be used to write code and invent code, programming code for instance, or the rules that you need to build a shop and run that shop if you’re a shopkeeper, which is some kind of programming task in its own right. We don’t know how to build a system that is able to do this yet. It involves, for instance, that we have systems that are able to learn loops and we have some techniques to do this, for instance, a long- and short-term memory and a few other tricks, but they’re nowhere near what people can do so far. And it’s not quite clear how much work needs to be done to extend these systems into what people can do. It could be that it’s very simple. It could be that it’s going to take a lot of research. The dire view, which is more the traditional view, is that human minds have a lot of complexity, that you need to build a lot of functionality into it, like in Minsky's society of mind, to get to all the tricks that people are up to. And if that is the case then it might take a very long time until we have re-created all these different functional mechanisms. But I don’t think that it’s going to be so dire, because our genome is very short and most of that codes for a single cell. Very little of it codes for the brain. And I think a cell is much more complicated than a brain. A brain is probably largely self-organizing and built not like clockwork but like a cappuccino—so you mix the right ingredients and then you let it percolate and then it forms a particular kind of structure. So I do think, because nature pulls it off pretty well in most of the cases, that even though a brain probably needs more complexity than a cappuccino—dramatically more—it’s going to be much simpler than a very complicated machine like a cell.
How I turn negative online comments into positive offline conversations | Dylan MarronDigital creator Dylan Marron has racked up millions of views for projects like "Every Single Word" and "Sitting in Bathrooms With Trans People" -- but he's found that the flip side of success online is internet hate. Over time, he's developed an unexpected coping mechanism: calling the people who leave him insensitive comments and asking a simple question: "Why did you write that?" In a thoughtful talk about how we interact online, Marron explains how sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is actually speak with people you disagree with, not simply at them.
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"RainMakers" | Qudus Onikeku and The QTribeQudus Onikeku and The QTribe summon a downpour with a poetic, powerful dance performance. Set to a composition of singing, drums and strings, the dancers radiate energy -- moving in circles, in shapes and in unison as they consume the TED stage.
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What I've learned about parenting as a stay-at-home dad | Glen HenryGlen Henry got his superpowers through fatherhood. After leaving behind a job he hated and a manager he didn't get along with, he went to work for an equally demanding boss: his kids. He shares how he went from thinking he knew it all about being a stay-at-home parent to realizing he knew nothing at all -- and how he's now documenting what he's learned.
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Aboard the ISS: Why cross-cultural communication is a matter of life or death | Chris HadfieldLook up—you can see the greatest feat of human cooperation orbiting 254 miles above Earth. As commander of Expedition 35 aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield understands the difficulty of cultural barriers in team work, and the life or death necessity of learning to communicate across those divides. The ISS is a joint project between five space agencies, built by people from 15 different nations—and each of them has a different take on what is "normal". Hadfield explains the scale of cultural differences aboard the spaceship: "What do you do on a Friday night? What does “yes” mean? What does “uh-huh” mean? What is the day of worship? When do you celebrate a holiday? How do you treat your spouse or your children? How do you treat each other? What is the hierarchy of command? All of those things seem completely clear to you, but you were raised in a specific culture that is actually shared by no one else." Here, Hadfield explains his strategy for genuine listening and communication. Whether it's money, reputation, or your life that's at stake, being sensitive and aware of people's differences helps you accomplish something together—no matter where you’re from. Amway believes that diversity and inclusion are essential to the growth and prosperity of today’s companies. When woven into every aspect of the talent life cycle, companies committed to diversity and inclusion are the best equipped to innovate, improve brand image and drive performance. Chris Hadfield features in the new docuseries One Strange Rock and is the author of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything
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Transcript: High above our heads is the International Space Station. It’s an amazing, complex thing—the most complicated thing we’ve ever built in space, one of the most complex international projects ever conceived and ever completed. But the keyword of that is international. It is a place built by people from all around the planet, 15 different countries.
And that just sounds sort of theoretical, until you start thinking: different languages, different units measurement systems—is it inches or is it meters? Different electrical systems—is it 220, is it 110, is positive ground, is it negative ground? But the most complex problem to deal with, often, is just people who have come from a wildly different cultural background, a completely different sense of what is normal.
What do you do on a Friday night? What does “yes” mean? What does “uh-huh” mean? What is the day of worship? When do you celebrate a holiday? How do you treat your spouse or your children? How do you treat each other? What is the hierarchy of command? All of those things seem completely clear to you, but you were raised in a specific culture that is actually shared by no one else.
If you have brothers or sisters, ask your brother and sister in detail about some stuff and they will disagree with you. They have a different culture than you do, so imagine if the people that you’re flying a spaceship with come from a wildly different part of the world, trying to find a way to share a sense of purpose so that you can overcome the natural barriers of a difference of culture to do something really difficult—that’s one of the biggest tasks that an astronaut faces.
You can start by just by learning language. It’s obvious if it’s as discrete as learning English or learning Russian or learning Japanese, that’s a clearly defined language, but have someone from Louisiana talk to someone from Brooklyn; they both speak English but the language is very different.
And if you want to speak clearly and communicate with that person you have to recognize that the culture with which they interpret the world is absolutely necessary for you to understand if you want to clearly communicate with them.
And for me the only real measure of clear communication and successful communication is a change of behavior of the listener. If all they did was go “uh-huh,” then you have no understanding of whether they actually comprehended and internalized what it was you were trying to communicate to them.
But if you can see that their actions now reflect a different idea, then you can measure whether what you were intending actually got communicated across, then the loop is complete and you’ve successfully crossed whatever cultural barrier was there. And so that requires a lot of extra effort.
How work kept me going during my cancer treatment | Sarah DonnellyWhen lawyer Sarah Donnelly was diagnosed with breast cancer, she turned to her friends and family for support -- but she also found meaning, focus and stability in her work. In a personal talk about why and how she stayed on the job, she shares her insights on how workplaces can accommodate people going through major illnesses -- because the benefits go both ways.
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A woman's fury holds lifetimes of wisdom | Tracee Ellis RossThe global collection of women's experiences can no longer be ignored, says actress and activist Tracee Ellis Ross. In a candid, fearless talk, she delivers invitations to a better future to both men and women.
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Michio Kaku: Who is right about A.I.: Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?In mid-2017, Elon Musk spoke these words at a National Governors Association meeting and sparked what is now a famous A.I. debate between himself and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react.” Musk wants governors to legislate A.I. now, believing it to be an existential threat to humanity's future and likening it to “summoning the demon.” Zuckerberg, on the other hand, called Musk's predictions "pretty irresponsible" and made the case for A.I. as a tool to vastly improve people's quality of life, adding that tech companies should not slow down. To which Musk tweeted: I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited. And that's the battle of the billionaires in a nutshell, a battle that has divided experts and pundits alike into many sides of an epic debate about the future of A.I. So where does theoretical physicist Michio Kaku stand? Kaku thinks both are right—Zuckerberg in the short term, and Musk in the long run. The tipping point from Team Zuck to Team Musk for Kaku is the moment A.I. achieves self-awareness, which he suspects could be at the end of this century. And what should we do then? "When robots become as intelligent as monkeys I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they begin to have murderous thoughts," says Kaku. What do you think of Kaku's take on the Musk vs. Zuckerberg A.I. debate and his solution? Michio Kaku's latest book is the awesome The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth
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Michio Kaku's Universe in a Nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NbBjNiw4tk
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Transcript: Recently, I was on the Richard Quest show on CNN TV and I was asked the question that we have the battle of the billionaires; on one hand we have Mark Zuckerberg saying, “Don’t worry, artificial intelligence will give us new jobs, new industries, create wealth, prosperity.” And then we have people like, well, Elon Musk, who says, “Watch out. They pose an existential threat to humanity.” Who knows, maybe one day they’ll put us in zoos and throw peanuts at us and make us dance, make us dance behind bars like we do with monkeys and with bears.
Well, my personal point of view is that both points of view are in some sense correct. In the short term, I think Zuckerberg is right. Artificial intelligence will open up whole new vistas, it will make life more convenient, things will be cheaper, new industries will be created. I personally think the A.I. industry will be bigger than the automobile industry.
In fact, I think the automobile is going to become a robot. You’ll talk to your car. You’ll argue with your car. Your car will give you the best facts, the best route between point A and point B; the car will be part of the robotics industry. Whole new industries involving the repair, maintenance, servicing of robots, not to mention robots that are software programs that you talk to and make life more convenient.
However, let’s not be naïve. There is a point, a tipping point at which they can become dangerous and pose an existential threat. And that tipping point is self-awareness.
You see, robots are not aware of the fact that they’re robots. They’re so stupid they simply carry out what they are instructed to do because they’re adding machines. We forget that. Adding machines don’t have a will. Adding machines simply do what you program them to do.
Now, of course, let’s not be naïve about this, eventually adding machines may be able to compute alternate goals and alternate scenarios when they realize that they are not human. Right now, robots do not know that.
However, there is a tipping point at which point they could become dangerous. Right now, our most advanced robot has the intelligence of a cockroach—a rather stupid cockroach.
However, it’s only a matter of time before robots become as smart as a mouse, then as smart as a rat, then a rabbit, then a cat, a dog, and eventually as smart as a monkey. Now, monkeys know they are not human. They have a certain amount of self-awareness. Dogs, especially young dogs, are not quite sure. One reason why dogs obey their masters is because they think the master is the top dog, and so they’re a little bit confused about whether or not we humans are part of the dog tribe. But monkeys, I think, have no problems with that; they know they’re not human.
So when robots become as intelligent as monkeys I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they begin to have murderous thoughts. When will that happen? I don’t know.
Visions of Africa's future, from African filmmakersBy expanding boundaries, exploring possibilities and conveying truth, films have helped change Africa's reality (even before "Black Panther"). Dayo Ogunyemi invites us to imagine Africa's future through the lens of inspiring filmmakers from across the continent, showing us how they can inspire Africa to make a hundred-year leap.
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Has our ability to create intelligence outpaced our wisdom? | Max Tegmark on A.I.Some of the most intelligent people at the most highly-funded companies in the world can't seem to answer this simple question: what is the danger in creating something smarter than you? They've created AI so smart that the "deep learning" that it's outsmarting the people that made it. The reason is the "blackbox" style code that the AI is based off of—it's built solely to become smarter, and we have no way to regulate that knowledge. That might not seem like a terrible thing if you want to build superintelligence. But we've all experienced something minor going wrong, or a bug, in our current electronics. Imagine that, but in a Robojudge that can sentence you to 10 years in prison without explanation other than "I've been fed data and this is what I compute"... or a bug in the AI of a busy airport. We need regulation now before we create something we can't control. Max's book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is being heralded as one of the best books on AI, period, and is a must-read if you're interested in the subject.
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Transcript: I’m optimistic that we can create an awesome future with technology as long as we win the race between the growing power of the tech and the growing wisdom with which we manage the tech.
This is actually getting harder because of nerdy technical developments in the AI field.
It used to be, when we wrote state-of-the-art AI—like for example IBM’s Deep Blue computer who defeated Gary Kasparov in chess a couple of decades ago—that all the intelligence was basically programmed in by humans who knew how to play chess and then the computer won the game just because it could think faster and remember more. But we understood the software well.
Understanding what your AI system does is one of those pieces of wisdom you have to have to be able to really trust it.
The reason we have so many problems today with systems getting hacked or crashing because of bugs is exactly because we didn’t understand the systems as well as we should have.
Now what’s happening is fascinating, today’s biggest AI breakthroughs are a completely different kind where rather than the intelligence being largely programmed in an easy-to-understand code, you put in almost nothing except a little learning rule by which a simulated arc of neurons can take a lot of data and figure out how to get stuff done.
This deep learning suddenly becomes able to do things often even better than the programmers were ever able to do.
You can train a machine to play computer games with almost no hard-coded stuff at all. You don’t tell it what a game is, what the things are on the screen, or even that there is such a thing as a screen—you just feed in a bunch of data about the colors of the pixels and tell it, “Hey go ahead and maximize that number in the upper left corner,” and gradually you come back and it’s playing some game much better than I could.
The challenge with this, even though it’s very powerful, this is very much “blackbox” now where, yeah it does all that great stuff—and we don’t understand how.
So suppose I get sentenced to ten years in prison by a Robojudge in the future and I ask, “Why?”
And I’m told, “I WAS TRAINED ON SEVEN TERABYTES OF DATA, AND THIS WAS THE DECISION,” It’s not that satisfying for me.
Or suppose the machine that’s in charge of our electric power grid suddenly malfunctions and someone says, “Well, we have no idea why. We trained it on a lot of data and it worked,” that doesn’t instill the kind of trust that we want to put into systems.
When you get the blue screen of death when your Windows machine crashes or the spinning wheel of doom because your Mac crashes, “annoying” is probably the main emotion we have, but “annoying” isn’t the emotion we have if it’s myself flying an airplane and it crashes, or the software controlling the nuclear arsenal of the U.S., or something like that.
And as AI gets more and more out into the world we absolutely need to transform today’s packable and buggy AI systems into AI systems that we can really trust.
War and what comes after | Clemantine WamariyaClemantine Wamariya was six years old when the Rwandan Civil War forced her and her sister to flee their home in Kigali, leaving their parents and everything they knew behind. In this deeply personal talk, she tells the story of how she became a refugee, living in camps in seven countries over the next six years -- and how she's tried to make sense of what came after.
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SpaceX's plan to fly you across the globe in 30 minutes | Gwynne ShotwellWhat's up at SpaceX? Engineer Gwynne Shotwell was employee number seven at Elon Musk's pioneering aerospace company and is now its president. In conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson, she discusses SpaceX's race to put people into orbit and the organization's next big project, the BFR (ask her what it stands for). The new giant rocket is designed to take humanity to Mars -- but it has another potential use: space travel for earthlings.
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Why bankers are like time travelers who grab value from the future | Yanis VaroufakisLike it or not, banks — and the bankers they employ — hold incredible sway over the economy of the world. The former Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, has a great way of describing how they continue to consolidate this huge amount of power. He posits that bankers time travel. Not by a DeLorean traveling at 88mph, but by taking value from the future—for instance, how much the housing market is going to be—and apply it to the present to essentially create value out of thin air. It's economic black magic. And it can lead to major consequences for the rest of us... but rarely for the bankers themselves. Yanis's new book is the fascinating Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works-and How It Fails.
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Transcript: Ever since humanity emerged, we've all had debts to one another. We are a collaborative species. We survived the evolutionary struggle in the jungle and in the steppes, in the desert only through collaboration.
Collaboration requires reciprocity. I do something for you today, you do something for me tomorrow. That is a debt. It’s a form of debt but it’s a nonfinancial, noneconomic debt. It’s an ethical debt. It’s the good side of debt.
As society became commodified and all activity started getting channeled through the anonymous market most of this reciprocity took the form of financial debt. What turbocharged the economy once the economy got separated from society through this process of commodification was banking.
Because, let’s face it. Bankers have a fantastic power over the rest of society by definition, by way of existence, to create money. When you get a loan from a bank it is a crazy idea that you are getting it from “somebody else”. You’re not getting it from somebody else. It is not true. This is a major fallacy that occupies most people’s minds, infects most people’s minds, that you are being given money that somebody has saved. That is not true. What the bank does it creates money from thin air. It just types into your account, you know, $20,000 if you borrow $20,000. It comes literally out of thin air.
And the hope of the banker is you will be able to repay it, because what happens is you take that $20,000, you buy equipment for your studio, you buy a new bicycle, a new car, whatever. So the money goes from your bank account to the bank account of the company or the person that sold you something.
And the idea is that through this circular flow of income and through this economic activity a new income is going to begin, new value will be created. You will be able to repay the bank. The bank will have obtained the interest and therefore the bank is going to profit. So the more they lend to you the more profits they make.
So it is a little bit—and that’s why I’m trying to explain to my daughter in the book—It’s a little bit like the bank is having a capacity to push their arm through the timeline into the future and grab value that has not been created yet, bring it to the present, invest it into some productive activity, hopefully to create the value that we need to replay the future.
But to the extent that this is successful—and it has always been successful—bankers suddenly get the idea that the more they reach into the future, the more value they snatch from the future to bring it into the present, the greater their own personal profit. But when they overdo it—and, of course, they always overdo it, they overreach—they take too much value from the future, bring it into the present. That value is not realized, and then you have a banking crisis.
And because they play such a crucial and powerful role in society they have the political clout – political clout that you and I don’t have because they usually are the ones for finance our politicians to get elected to congress and so on—that can use the political system in order to have themselves bailed out—you know, socialism for the bankers, and austerity for everybody else.
A Parkland teacher's homework for us all | Diane Wolk-RogersDiane Wolk-Rogers teaches history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, site of a horrific school shooting on Valentine's Day 2018. How can we end this senseless violence? In a stirring talk, Wolk-Rogers offers three ways Americans can move forward to create more safety and responsibility around guns -- and invites people to come up with their own answers, too. Above all, she asks us to take a cue from the student activists at her school, survivors whose work for change has moved millions to action. "They shouldn't have to do this on their own," Wolk-Rogers says. "They're asking you to get involved."
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Why a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un could backfire on the U.S. | Ronan FarrowNobody hopes the eventual face-to-face meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un works out more than Ronan Farrow. Farrow's new book War on Peace in part details the history of diplomatic efforts between past White House administrations and the North Korean regime, and how fragile and fraught with lies that relationship has been. Trump's "saber-rattling" style may be fresh enough to inspire change, but there is a very good chance the U.S. will get played by North Korea's hollow promises. "We are going to need a core of experts who are experienced in the ways in which these regimes, one after another, are difficult and lie to the rest of the world and pose a threat to that region," says Farrow. The potential meeting between Trump and Jong-un will also be the first time a sitting American president will meet face-to-face with a leader of the North Korean regime, and in doing so, the U.S. might give North Korea what it wants most: legitimization. "The risk with this meeting is that we play into their hands and say, “Yeah, sure, we acknowledge you as an equal on the international stage,” and we give up some of our leverage in having them want that contact, want that leader-to-leader access, which could make the nitty-gritty work of actually implementing diplomacy and making sure that they are contained as a nuclear power that much more difficult," says Farrow. Ronan Farrow is the author of War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
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Transcript: War on Peace tells the stories of a number of the diplomats who have been deeply engaged in North Korea diplomacy over the last several administrations. And I think it’s ahistorical when you hear people say, “Those were all failures, we didn’t get anything done.”
Under the Clinton administration, we had a really substantive framework agreement with the North Koreans where they made a lot of commitments that would have been very important in the long-term to slowing their progress as a nuclear power, and the United States actually reneged on a lot of the commitments that we made on our end. We were in no small part responsible for the collapse of that deal.
Then subsequently during the George W. Bush administration, you had a situation where Bush, after the disasters of Iraq, set about doubling down on diplomacy and they lead six-party talks. A career diplomat named Chris Hill went over there and spent countless hours talking to all of the players, and they actually shut down some of the reactors for the first time in years. They were starting to give us some information about their nuclear development. In the end, they did cheat, it did fall through, and that wasn’t our fault, but we did make some inroads. Particularly in our conversation with China about North Korea, which is going to be a pivotal part of any solution going forward.
Now you see the Trump administration coming in with this kind of madcap approach: diplomacy by tweet, all of this saber rattling, and now potentially a meeting between leaders.
And the reality is, we don’t know how that’s going to pan out. Could it work? Sure. And I, and I think everyone else invested in this problem, sincerely hope that it does.
But what those experts whose stories are in War on Peace say, one after another, is we are flying blind now and we don’t have to be. You can have the same kind of saber-rattling and tough approach, you could have the same kind of leader-to-leader meeting and also insulate yourself against some of these pitfalls.
Make sure that we are not accidentally legitimizing the North Koreans as a nuclear power. Make sure that we are hip to the fact that they very often lie about the kinds of commitments they’re making now and have done so in the past. There is a real risk here that we get played.
Look, North Korea will continue to be perilous. It was perilous under the previous regime; it is perilous now. I think that the thaw in relations between the North and the South is one of the most positive developments to come along, and that’s due to a number of factors, not just what’s happening in the United States right now.
But ultimately, regardless of who is in the seat of power there, we are going to need a core of experts who are experienced in the ways in which these regimes, one after another, are difficult and lie to the rest of the world and pose a threat to that region.
And I have complete confidence in one thing, which is: whoever comes along next in terms of North Korean leadership, we’re going to need some people who are really well-versed in dealing with that region if we want to keep them contained.
Why it's worth listening to people you disagree with | Zachary R. WoodWe get stronger, not weaker, by engaging with ideas and people we disagree with, says Zachary R. Wood. In an important talk about finding common ground, Wood makes the case that we can build empathy and gain understanding by engaging tactfully and thoughtfully with controversial ideas and unfamiliar perspectives. "Tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away," Wood says. "To achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity."
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The "dead zone" of the Gulf of Mexico | Nancy RabalaisOcean expert Nancy Rabalais tracks the ominously named "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico -- where there isn't enough oxygen in the water to support life. The Gulf has the second largest dead zone in the world; on top of killing fish and crustaceans, it's also killing fisheries in these waters. Rabalais tells us about what's causing it -- and how we can reverse its harmful effects and restore one of America's natural treasures.
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Why you should make useless things | Simone GiertzIn this joyful, heartfelt talk featuring demos of her wonderfully wacky creations, Simone Giertz shares her craft: making useless robots. Her inventions -- designed to chop vegetables, cut hair, apply lipstick and more -- rarely (if ever) succeed, and that's the point. "The true beauty of making useless things [is] this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is," Giertz says. "It turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. Maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question."
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The harm reduction model of drug addiction treatment | Mark TyndallWhy do we still think that drug use is a law-enforcement issue? Making drugs illegal does nothing to stop people from using them, says public health expert Mark Tyndall. So, what might work? Tyndall shares community-based research that shows how harm-reduction strategies, like safe-injection sites, are working to address the drug overdose crisis.
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A printable, flexible, organic solar cell | Hannah BürckstümmerUnlike the solar cells you're used to seeing, organic photovoltaics are made of compounds that are dissolved in ink and can be printed and molded using simple techniques. The result is a low-weight, flexible, semi-transparent film that turns the energy of the sun into electricity. Hannah Bürckstümmer shows us how they're made -- and they how could change the way we power the world.
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What's missing in the global debate over refugees | Yasin KakandeIn the ongoing debate over refugees, we hear from everyone -- from politicians who pledge border controls to citizens who fear they'll lose their jobs -- everyone, that is, except migrants themselves. Why are they coming? Journalist and TED Fellow Yasin Kakande explains what compelled him and many others to flee their homelands, urging a more open discussion and a new perspective. Because humanity's story, he reminds us, is a story of migration: "There are no restrictions that could ever be so rigorous to stop the wave of migration that has determined our human history," he says.
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What if we ended the injustice of bail? | Robin SteinbergOn any given night, more than 450,000 people in the United States are locked up in jail simply because they don't have enough money to pay bail. The sums in question are often around $500: easy for some to pay, impossible for others. This has real human consequences -- people lose jobs, homes and lives, and it drives racial disparities in the legal system. Robin Steinberg has a bold idea to change this. In this powerful talk, she outlines the plan for The Bail Project -- an unprecedented national revolving bail fund to fight mass incarceration. Her ambitious plan is one of the first ideas of the Audacious Project, TED's new initiative to inspire global change.
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How we need to remake the internet | Jaron LanierIn the early days of digital culture, Jaron Lanier helped craft a vision for the internet as public commons where humanity could share its knowledge -- but even then, this vision was haunted by the dark side of how it could turn out: with personal devices that control our lives, monitor our data and feed us stimuli. (Sound familiar?) In this visionary talk, Lanier reflects on a "globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake" companies like Google and Facebook made at the foundation of digital culture -- and how we can undo it. "We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them," he says.
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Why religion is literally false and metaphorically true | Bret WeinsteinWhere do your beliefs come from? There's a school of thought that sees religion as a mind virus that wastes the time and effort of human beings, but evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein offers a more reasonable explanation: "belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved," he says. Religious people are evolutionarily fitter than non-believers, not because they are protected by a deity but rather because religion is a form of adaptive evolution. Religion is so widespread because it has massive survival advantages beneath the supernatural elements—that's what Weinstein refers to as "literally false and metaphorically true". For example, believing in heaven is literally false—there is no such place—but believing in it keeps your descendants in good standing in the religious community after you're gone, thus setting your lineage up to continue. The thought itself may be untrue, but the result of the thought is evolutionarily effective. "Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have," Weinstein says. For more from Bret Weinstein, visit http://www.bretweinstein.net.
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Transcript: We have minds that are programmed by culture that can be completely at odds with our genomes. And it leads to misunderstandings of evolution, like the idea that religious belief is a mind virus, that effectively these beliefs structures are parasitizing human beings and they are wasting the time and effort that those human beings are spending on that endeavor rather than the more reasonable interpretation, which is that these belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.
Our belief systems are built around evolutionary success and they certainly contain human benevolence, which is appropriate to phases of history when there is abundance and people can afford to be good to each other. The problem is if you have grown up in a period in which abundance has been the standard state you don’t anticipate the way people change in the face of austerity. And so what we are currently seeing is messages that we have all agreed are unacceptable reemerging because the signals that we have reached the end of the boom times, those signals are everywhere, and so people are triggered to move into a phase that they don’t even know that they have.
Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have rather than to match our best instincts—when we are capable of being good to each other because there’s abundance, we have those instincts and so it’s not incorrect to say that human beings are capable of being marvelous creatures and being quite ethical.
Now I would argue there’s a simple way of reconciling the correct understanding that religious belief often describes truths that, in many cases, fly in the face of what we can understand scientifically, with the idea that these beliefs are adaptive. I call it the state of being literally false and metaphorically true. A belief is literally false and metaphorically true if it is not factual but if behaving as if it were factual results in an enhancement of one’s fitness. To take an example, if one behaves in let’s say the Christian tradition in such a way as to gain access to heaven one will not actually find themselves at the pearly gates being welcomed in, but one does tend to place their descendants in a good position with respect to the community that those descendants continue to live in. So if we were to think evolutionarily, the person who is behaving so as to get into heaven has genetic interests. Those genetic interests are represented in the narrow sense by their immediate descendants and close relatives, in the larger sense they may be represented by the entire population of people from whom that individual came, and by acting so as to get into heaven, the fitness of that person, the number of copies of those genes that continue to flourish in the aftermath of that person’s death will go up. So the belief in heaven is literally false—there is no such place—but it is metaphorically true in the sense that it results in an increase in fitness.
How language shapes the way we think | Lera BoroditskyThere are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
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How a team of chefs fed Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria | José AndrésAfter Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, chef José Andrés traveled to the devastated island with a simple idea: to feed the hungry. Millions of meals served later, Andrés shares the remarkable story of creating the world's biggest restaurant -- and the awesome power of letting people in need know that somebody cares about them.
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The Standing Rock resistance and our fight for indigenous rights | Tara HouskaStill invisible and often an afterthought, indigenous peoples are uniting to protect the world's water, lands and history -- while trying to heal from genocide and ongoing inequality. Tribal attorney and Couchiching First Nation citizen Tara Houska chronicles the history of attempts by government and industry to eradicate the legitimacy of indigenous peoples' land and culture, including the months-long standoff at Standing Rock which rallied thousands around the world. "It's incredible what you can do when you stand together," Houska says. "Stand with us -- empathize, learn, grow, change the conversation."
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Why you’re probably reading the Bible wrong | Rob BellReligious scholar, pastor, and all-around fascinating guy Rob Bell thinks that most everyone teaching religious texts these days is teaching it wrong. It's a lot of parables and metaphors, he posits, and there's no way that people should be reading religious texts like the Bible or the Quran literally.
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Yeah, oftentimes when people talk about sacred texts, for many people the sort of thing that you say to show how serious you are is “Well, you know, we take it literally.”
That actually has caused an extraordinary amount of destruction in the world. So I begin with, I try to take it LITERATELY. So if it’s a poem, then it’s a poem. And if it’s a letter, who wrote it, and when did they write it, and who are they writing it to?
What was the world like at that time? If it was history but the writer is kind of winking along the way like “This is what I’m really saying,” then you take it with that subtlety and nuance and even humor.
So all religious texts have to be interpreted, and the really dangerous thing is when someone says “I’m not giving you my opinion. I’m just telling you what it says.” Because that’s actually their opinion!
If you deny human agency it generally leads to some sort of oppression or exploitation. So everything gets way more interesting when you start reading it literately because you then don’t have to do those awkward explanations.
One of the greatest examples of this is there’s this ancient story about Jonah who gets swallowed by a fish. Not a whale, a fish. Because that’s what it says in the ancient text. And so the question often becomes a debate on whether or not a guy really got swallowed by a fish.
And you have the literalists going “it says he got swallowed by a fish, he got swallowed by a fish.” And then you have the others going “no, it’s a larger metaphor.”
But what’s interesting: as the story begins, the Assyrians were the worst neighbors. They were the cruel oppressors who had made life miserable. And so this man Jonah is told go and bless Nineveh, and Nineveh was the capital of Assyria.
So the story begins with a man being told “go bless your worst most heinous enemy.” And he doesn’t. He goes the other direction. He runs away, which I think the original audience would have cheered this man Jonah on. “You go the other direction! Whatever you do don’t go bless the person who has made your life a living hell.”
So he eventually gets on a boat. There’s a storm and he’s thrown overboard and he’s swallowed by a fish. I think the power of the story is not arguing about whether or not he was swallowed by a fish. I think the story was told to a group of people to confront them with how they cannot forgive their worst enemy.
And will the past and the wounds that you have suffered define you and hold you back, or can you forgive? Can you move towards your enemy, not with violence, but with love? Do the things that have happened to us define us, or is there a love that can transcend even this?
So this would be a classic example to me where there’s an ancient text and a story where you can in your attempt to defend it literally actually avoid the more interesting questions of the heart that I think are the questions the storyteller is trying to get at.
And yes, in our world to this day, taking some of these texts literally has caused so much violence.
You read the ancient text. You also use your mind. You listen for what new thing might be happening in the world. You read it as a fully orbed experience, and then it actually gets quite inspiring.
How I use the drum to tell my story | Kasiva MutuaIn this talk-performance hybrid, drummer, percussionist and TED Fellow Kasiva Mutua shares how she's breaking the taboo against female drummers in Kenya -- and her mission to teach the significance and importance of the drum to young boys, women and girls. "Women can be custodians of culture, too," Mutua says.
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Should we create a solar shade to cool the earth? | Danny HillisIn this perspective-shifting talk, Danny Hillis prompts us to approach global issues like climate change with creative scientific solutions. Taking a stand for solar geoengineering, he looks at controversial solutions with open-minded curiosity.
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The death of democracy: Why the radical Left may end up killing what it lovesEvolutionary biologist Heather Heying rose to prominence as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web after she and her husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, spoke out against a planned "Day of Absence" at Evergreen State College, where white students, staff and teachers would vacate campus and only minority students would remain. Their opposition to the event led to accusations of racism and a string of protests, threats, and violence, leading The Seattle Times to call the college a "national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism." Democracy depends on protest, Heying asserts above, but a new strain of unintelligent protest on the Left may damage the very values liberals are trying to protect. "Increasingly we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done," she says. "... But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme Right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous—but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy." In this video, Heying looks at tribalism and dissent from an evolutionary perspective, and highlights how technology has hijacked our ancient brain to create a more polarized society than ever before. Follow Heather on twitter: @HeatherEHeying and on Medium and through her website, http://www.heatherheying.com.
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Transcript: Society-wide, people are becoming ever more tribal. And tribalism is as old as social groups, which is older than humans. So it’s no surprise that people are looking to find those who sound the most like them, and who they imagine will be the most likely to keep them in their heads when things go wrong. But the way that it’s manifesting is a particularly modern instantiation that I don’t think we’ve seen before.
So protest is old and is honorable and is important; we must be allowed, in any system that calls itself democratic, to dissent. Increasingly, we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done, and that’s dangerous, and it comes from a place of fear, and fear is very powerful evolutionarily. It rises to the top of the emotions when it shows up, and it’s hard to get through the fear with an argument that is rational. Emotion and rationality don’t tend to interface with one another very well, and some of the language that we’re hearing from the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum—I’m not sure that calling it a spectrum is really apt, but everyone is familiar with it.
So the extremes on the right and on the left are both using fear to further polarize people, and the people on the right, the people on the far right, the extremists on the right are both, I think, a smaller group and better armed and thus in some ways more terrifying, but there are so many fewer of them that they don’t seem to have as much voice in society as the growing numbers of extremists on the left who are using words and increasingly, in the case of some of the groups, violent tactics.
But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous, but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy.
So why does it work? It works because since people have been social, which is to say since before people were people, since we were great apes and before that primates that weren’t great apes, and whatever social mammals came before that, we have been splintering into groups and watching out for our own. And it wasn’t just kin groups, it was kin groups and extended family, and then friends and family.
But the tribes that we see forming now are able to garner more power because they can use modern technology to move into old, old circuits.
So social media can be used to mobilize a group and to enrage a group, to inflame a group, where a town crier 500 years ago or a roving storyteller thousands of years ago might have brought news that would have alarmed a group of townspeople or a village or a hunter-gatherer tribe when they came together in their annual fusion event with lots and lots of tribes together, they might hear something that struck them as dangerous
To eliminate waste, we need to rediscover thrift | Andrew DentThere's no such thing as throwing something away, says Andrew Dent -- when you toss a used food container, broken toy or old pair of socks into the trash, those things inevitably end up in ever-growing landfills. But we can get smarter about the way we make, and remake, our products. Dent shares exciting examples of thrift -- the idea of using and reusing what you need so you don't have to purchase anything new -- as well as advances in material science, like electronics made of nanocellulose and enzymes that can help make plastic infinitely recyclable.
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My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it | Drew PhilpIn 2009, journalist and screenwriter Drew Philp bought a ruined house in Detroit for $500. In the years that followed, as he gutted the interior and removed the heaps of garbage crowding the rooms, he didn't just learn how to repair a house -- he learned how to build a community. In a tribute to the city he loves, Philp tells us about "radical neighborliness" and makes the case that we have "the power to create the world anew together and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse."
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Math can help uncover cancer's secrets | Irina KarevaIrina Kareva translates biology into mathematics and vice versa. She writes mathematical models that describe the dynamics of cancer, with the goal of developing new drugs that target tumors. "The power and beauty of mathematical modeling lies in the fact that it makes you formalize, in a very rigorous way, what we think we know," Kareva says. "It can help guide us to where we should keep looking, and where there may be a dead end." It all comes down to asking the right question and translating it to the right equation, and back.
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How we can teach computers to make sense of our emotions | Raphael ArarHow can we make AI that people actually want to interact with? Raphael Arar suggests we start by making art. He shares interactive projects that help AI explore complex ideas like nostalgia, intuition and conversation -- all working towards the goal of making our future technology just as much human as it is artificial.
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Why I choose humanism over faith | Leo IgweAs a humanist, Leo Igwe doesn't believe in divine intervention -- but he does believe in the power of human beings to alleviate suffering, cure disease, preserve the planet and turn situations of poverty into prosperity. In this bold talk, Igwe shares how humanism can free Africans from damaging superstitions and give them the power to rebuild the continent.
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The role of faith and belief in modern Africa | Ndidi NwuneliNdidi Nwuneli has advice for Africans who believe in God -- and Africans who don't. To the religious, she advises against using God to outsource responsibility for what happens in their lives. To the non-religious, she asks that they keep an open mind and work with faith-based organizations, especially on issues like health care and education. "There's so much potential that can be realized when we walk across the divide of faith and, hand in hand, try to solve many of our problems," Nwuneli says.
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How Spanish, not English, was nearly the world's language | John Lewis GladdisWant to know the reason North America speaks English and not Spanish? It all boils down to a single day in the English Channel in August of 1588, says Yale University history professor John Lewis Gaddis. The Spanish Armada was cleverly chased out of British waters by a rag-tag British fleet that set old ships on fire and pointed them right at the anchored Spanish fleet, causing the Spaniards to cut anchor and flee. Because of the way the wind was blowing, the Spanish ships had to sail all the way around the British Isles (about 2,000 nautical miles) to get home and were soundly defeated.
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I think the favorite lesson that I like to teach is the Spanish Armada in 1588, sent there by King Philip II of Spain, and the defense against the Spanish Armada led by Queen Elizabeth I, and what happened to the Spanish Armada in that situation.
The reason I like to teach it is because Spain was the global superpower in that period. Spain had conquered almost the entire new world. Britain had not—England as it was at that time—had not even begun to develop colonies.
And the issue, of course, was Catholicism, and was Catholicism going to be brought back to England after it had been kicked out by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII.
So this was what led Philip (believing that he was an agent of the Almighty) to send this largest of all naval forces north into the English Channel as a launch pad for the reconquest by Catholicism of England. And that’s August of 1588.
Elizabeth’s strategy was not to attempt to directly confront that fleet, because she didn’t have a fleet that was capable of doing that. She certainly could not have confronted directly a Spanish army because she had virtually no army of her own.But she is thinking in terms of geography. She’s thinking in terms of what direction the winds blow in normally in the English Channel.
And she saw that if she just allowed the Spanish fleet to advance slowly up the English Channel—which it had to do because it was cumbersome—with a few English ships pursuing it and then pick them off as they pursue, and then as they got up to the border of what’s now Belgium and France (where they were going to disembark their troops) realized that taking advantage of the winds, if you just set a few old English ships on fire with explosives on them and send them into the middle of this huge Spanish fleet, that’s going to cause terror and that in itself will be enough to defeat the Spanish.
So it’s all happening on one evening with the winds in the right direction with eight ships used, and the Spanish completely panicked to the extent of cutting their own anchor cables so more than 100 ships self-destructed in terms of losing control of the ability to navigate.
The only thing they could do then was to flee, but because of the winds, they had to flee around all of England, around Scotland, down the Irish coast. And by the time they staggered back into Spain they were profoundly depleted. That’s the turning point.
That’s the moment at which it can be said the Spanish Empire reached its high point and then started descending.
And it’s also the moment at which we can say the English began to become very gradually a superpower.
And I’m fascinated by the fact that it all can be reduced to a single night in the English Channel, and to the direction in which the winds blew. So that testifies to the importance of seizing the moment. It testifies to the importance of not micromanaging but macromanaging in the sense of delegating authority to the experts, in this case, her own sea captains. Trusting them to do the right thing. Trusting them to take advantage of spontaneous moments. They didn’t have time to consult Elizabeth about the fire ships.
They didn’t have time to wonder if they sacrificed eight ships, will she get mad and cut off their heads? They figured no, it’s unlikely because she’s a strategist herself. She will understand what that sacrifice achieved. And, of course, that’s what happened. So it’s her great triumph. It’s Spain’s great failure, and you can argue it leads to the development of North America by the British and to the fact that we are sitting here speaking English and not Spanish now.
My descent into America’s neo-Nazi movement -- and how I got out | Christian PiccioliniAt 14, Christian Picciolini went from naïve teenager to white supremacist -- and soon, the leader of the first neo-Nazi skinhead gang in the United States. How was he radicalized, and how did he ultimately get out of the movement? In this courageous talk, Picciolini shares the surprising and counterintuitive solution to hate in all forms.
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Academic research is publicly funded -- why isn't it publicly available? | Erica StoneIn the US, your taxes fund academic research at public universities. Why then do you need to pay expensive, for-profit journals for the results of that research? Erica Stone advocates for a new, open-access relationship between the public and scholars, making the case that academics should publish in more accessible media. "A functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed," Stone says. "Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us?"
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How fungi recognize (and infect) plants | Mennat El GhalidEach year, the world loses enough food to feed half a billion people to fungi, the most destructive pathogens of plants. Mycologist and TED Fellow Mennat El Ghalid explains how a breakthrough in our understanding of the molecular signals fungi use to attack plants could disrupt this interaction -- and save our crops.
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Why populism is the greatest con in America | Martin AmisThere is no substitute for thinking—although modern-day America may have you believing otherwise. Novelist Martin Amis attributes the recent surge in anti-intellectualism to the populist politics sweeping the United States. "Populism relies on a sentimental and, in fact, very old-fashioned view that the uneducated population knows better in its instincts than the over-refined elite. That leads to anti-intellectualism, which is self-destructive for everyone." The rejection of rationality and analysis is something politicians can easily capitalize on, and Amis refers to President Trump as a plutocrat in populist's clothing. "It’s profoundly hypocritical because his policies do not favor the working man... It’s an act, populism. Always an act." Are the American people being conned, and is a return to elitism the answer? Martin Amis is the author of The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017.
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Transcript: Is snobbery due for a comeback? Well, not—I don’t mean class snobbery. All that rubbish is, at least in England, it’s more or less a thing of the past. But I think intellectual snobbery has been much neglected and I was pleading for more care about how people express themselves, and more reverence—not for people of high social standing, but for people of decent education and training.
Populism relies on a sentimental and, in fact, very old-fashioned view that the uneducated population knows better in its instincts than the over-refined elite. That leads to anti-intellectualism, which is self-destructive for everyone.
I mean, this is as old as democracy, you know: should you get the able-est and most intellectually agile leader, or should you get the most average leader? This was discussed in Rome in classical antiquity.
And in every other developed nation brain has won the battle over instinct. It’s ridiculously old-fashioned to think that there’s some core instinct that is going to be wiser than an analytical and rational approach. “I go with my gut,” you know. Bush Jr. took us into Iraq. He said, “I went with my gut,” which was watched with approval by probably the majority of Americans.
Now, in every other nation brain has won over gut but in America it still splits the nation, and the idea that Donald Trump has cast off these shackles and we can go back to being brutes again is a terrible prospect. “Telling it like it is.” What does that mean? I never know what he’s going on about when he says that: “I tell it like it is,” and his supporters say, “He tells it like it is.” Tells WHAT like WHAT is?
In fact, since his mendacity rate is about 80 percent at the best of times he’s telling it how it ISN’T.
And what that means, decoded, “telling it like it is,” is being a blundering loudmouth who gives voice to the sort of low grumble in the common mind. I can see no virtue in that. And it’s profoundly hypocritical because his policies do not favor the working man. He’s a plutocrat to his core, and those are the policies he’ll follow. It’s an act, populism. Always an act.
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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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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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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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 communication error we all make, and how it intensifies conflict | Esther PerelEver had an argument that never ends? There's a reason for that. Esther Perel, the Belgian-born psychotherapist and author, posits that in order to be heard correctly you have to approach the other party as neutral. Too often, she says, people approach conversations with agendas and expectations. Because of this, arguments can easily fracture into two sides parroting what their talking points are without actually listening to each other. Esther says that the best way to communicate is to sincerely listen to the other person as you would want to be listened to.
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Transcript: There are conversations that will intensify conflict or the potential thereof. And there are conversations who will intensify understanding, potentially even resolution. Conversations that are sure to polarize in which for everything you say I come back with what I have to say, without ever taking into account what you just said. You know what happens. When people disagree they literally have the capacity to listen to ten seconds of what the other side has to say. Ten seconds – that’s three sentences. And by then they already are busy creating their rebuttal. They are no longer listening. They are just preparing their return, their retort. When you have that kind of conversation here is what happens. One is I am constantly just going to come back at you. I am not integrating what I heard from you and it doesn’t influence anything of what I’m saying. So basically you’re saying the same thing over and over again and I’m saying the same thing over and over again and those two never meet. And the more I say X, the more I make you say Y. It’s like I’m going to – it’s me who is reinforcing you saying the fundamental thing with which you disagree with.
I come with expectations of what I think you think or may say or may want. All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter as well as my mood is a filter. We in communication have the ability to set the other people up because we will draw from them the very things with which we expect from them even when it’s the opposite of what we really want. We create the others in relationships and in communication. It isn’t just that’s who they are and that’s who we are. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication is how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship and why we are not the same person with different people. Because those people make part of who we are.
When we are in conflictual relationships we will often be prone to negative attributions which is that when you speak to me a certain way it’s because you have a bad temper or you have a nasty personality. When I speak to you in a certain way it’s because I had a lot of traffic getting here this morning and because I’m having a bad day. You are a bad person, I have just bad circumstances. I essentialize you and I contextualize me. All of these things will intensify conflict. It’s the opposite that will create the potential for understanding. Is my ability to take in what you say, to mull it over, to include it in my response so that I make you feel that you matter, that what you say makes a difference, that it enters me, that you’re not just talking to the wind.
What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us. If I’m talking to someone who is on their phone I will be expressing myself and experiencing the communication completely different than if I am speaking to someone who is looking at me in the eyes, who is shaking their head, who says to me I get it, I understand. Not necessarily I agree. So when you listen to me the first thing I need to know is that I have your attention. The second thing I need to know is that maybe you can acknowledge the validity of my point of view. That doesn’t mean you agree with my point of view but my point of view makes sense. And potentially you may even empathize with my point of view. You can understand why I would think or feel or experience things the way I do. That reflecting back, acknowledging, validating, empathizing. That sequence is where the depth of communication takes place. Because ultimately if I speak to you and in the end I leave feeling even more alone I’m literally in an existential crisis. There is nothing worse than to be alone in the presence of another.
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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