diff --git "a/data/IWSLT.TED.dev2010.en-de.en.xml" "b/data/IWSLT.TED.dev2010.en-de.en.xml" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data/IWSLT.TED.dev2010.en-de.en.xml" @@ -0,0 +1,965 @@ + + + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_warns_on_latest_climate_trends +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: At TED2009, Al Gore presents updated slides from around the globe to make the case that worrying climate trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on "clean coal." +talks, Natural resources, alternative energy, climate change, ecology, energy, environment, presentation, science, sustainability, technology +535 +Al Gore: What comes after An Inconvenient Truth? + + + Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. + But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. + The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. + It expands in winter and contracts in summer. + The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. + The permanent ice is marked in red. + As you see, it expands to the dark blue -- that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. + The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. + In 25 years it's gone from this, to this. + This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. + Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. + Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. + Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. + Video: Whoa! Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be. + And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. + This is an annual melting river. + But the volumes are much larger than ever. + This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. + If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. + These flows are increasing very rapidly. + At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. + Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. + And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. + That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. + In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. + 40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. + In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. + The flows have increased. + But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. + In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. + This is hitting the reservoirs. + And the predictions, as you've read, are serious. + This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. + And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. + Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. + This is a completely unsustainable pattern. + If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing. + In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours -- 25 million tons every day to the oceans. + Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. + The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. + Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. + The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. + And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. + But we're beginning to see a sea change. + Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. + However there is a political battle in our country. + And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. + That image reminded me of something. + Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. + You probably saw it on the news. + This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. + This happened around Christmas. + One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. + Video: ♪♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. + He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. + Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. + He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay. + Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. + The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. + Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about. + Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. + This is one of them, part of one of them. + Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. + That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. + The fact is, coal isn't dirty. + We think it's clean -- smells good, too. + So don't worry about climate change. + Leave that up to us. + Video: Actor: Clean coal -- you've heard a lot about it. + So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. + Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. + But that's the sound of clean coal technology. + And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. + Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology. + Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. + Video: Narrator: America is in crisis -- the economy, national security, the climate crisis. + The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. + But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. + Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. + A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. + Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. + Repower America. Find out more. + Al Gore: This is the last one. + Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. + One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. + Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. + Man #2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. + Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real. + Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. + If you want to go far, go together." + We need to go far, quickly. + Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this short talk from TED U 2009, Brian Cox shares what's new with the CERN supercollider. He covers the repairs now underway and what the future holds for the largest science experiment ever attempted. +talks, astronomy, energy, exploration, physics, science, technology +531 +Brian Cox: What went wrong at the LHC + + + Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. + And I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. + So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted -- 27 kilometers in circumference. + Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. + It's nothing if not ambitious. + This is the machine below Geneva. + We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. + This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector -- 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. + Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale. + On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time. + And this picture was taken by ATLAS. + It caused immense celebration in the control room. + It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately, and showering particles into the detector. + In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. + I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer, or this, when someone went onto Google and saw the front page was like that. + It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact. + About a week later we had a problem with the machine, related actually to these bits of wire here -- these gold wires. + Those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power. + Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, "No they don't. They're small wires." + They can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire. + So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current. + In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect. + So the wire heated up slightly, and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. + This was the result. + Now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons, and they moved about a foot. + So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. + We had to take them out, which we did. + We reconditioned them all, fixed them. + They're all on their way back underground now. + By the end of March the LHC will be intact again. + We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July, and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are. + Now of course, in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute. + I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC. + I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, when defending his protege's useless experiments -- his protege was Michael Faraday -- said this, "Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer." + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning? +talks, art, business, children, computers, design, education, invention, music, technology, toy +457 +David Merrill: Toy tiles that talk to each other + + + I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid, playing with blocks. + As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. + Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us. + So, as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects -- along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi -- I started to wonder -- what if when we used a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, + arranging it the way we wanted? + This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer, by building Siftables. + In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. + They're able to be moved around by hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. + Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. + And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. + And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. + So, I'm going to start with some simple examples. + This Siftable is configured to show video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way; if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards. + And these interactive portraits are aware of each other. + So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. + If they get surrounded, they notice that too, they might get a little flustered. + And they can also sense their motion and tilt. + One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize, was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. + So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets and I can use them to pour color into that central one, where they get mixed. + If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back. + There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly, and view the results immediately. + So here I'm -- This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program. + Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle. + Basically, in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable, and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary. + Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try. + Thank you. + So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video. + They really loved it. + And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. + All you have to say is, "Make words," and they know exactly what to do. + So here's another few people trying it out. + That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right. + Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up. + So to him, they were just blocks. + Now, this is an interactive cartoon application. + And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. + And this is Felix, actually. + And he can bring new characters into the scene, just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. + Here, he's bringing the sun out. + David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene. + Good job! Yeah! + DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact -- Video: Woof! + DM: inventing his own narrative. + DM: It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds. + DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which Siftables act as sounds like lead, bass and drums. + Each of these has four different variations, you get to choose which one you want to use. + And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. + And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable. + There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. + You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. + And then, overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence. + So let's have a look. + Video: DM: We'll start by putting a lead into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. + Now I put a bass line in. + Video: DM: Now I'll put some percussion in. + Video: DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live. + Video: DM: I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other. + Video: DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression. + Video: DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. + So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, making it longer or shorter as I go. + And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left. + Thank you. + So, as you can see, my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. + And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space, and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. + So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. + Thank you very much. + I look forward to talking with all of you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk. +talks, creativity, culture, entertainment, personality, poetry, work, writing +453 +Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius + + + I am a writer. + Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. + It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. + And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. + But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. + And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. + The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. + Seriously -- doomed, doomed! + Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? + Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" + So that's reassuring, you know. + But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. + And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? + Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? + Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" + Like that, you know. + The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." + Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. + And I always have been. + And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. + But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? + You know, is it rational? + Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. + And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? + Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? + "That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" + It just didn't come up like that, you know? + But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. + We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. + And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? + And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. + Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." + An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. + But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. + And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? + Are you comfortable with that? + Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know -- I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. + I think it's odious. + And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. + I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. + And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. + Which is -- you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. + I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. + And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? + I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. + So Jesus, what a thought! + That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. + I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. + And so, the question becomes, how? + And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? + I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. + And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. + And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. + So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. + But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? + People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. + The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." + Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. + The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. + Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. + They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. + So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. + And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? + So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? + If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. + If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? + Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. + And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. + And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. + And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. + And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. + And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. + You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. + It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. + It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. + And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. + And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? + Can we do this differently? + Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. + Maybe not. + Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. + And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. + I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. + But the question that I kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? + Why not think about it this way? + Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. + A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something -- which is to say basically everyone here --- knows does not always behave rationally. + And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. + I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. + And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. + And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. + And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. + She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." + And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. + And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." + And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? + So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. + She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. + And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. + So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. + That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline! + I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. + But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. + And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. + You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. + And what is that thing? + And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? + And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. + And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. + But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. + And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. + He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder. + So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. + I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." + And instead of panicking, he just stopped. + He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. + He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" + "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? + If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. + Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. + Go bother Leonard Cohen." + And his whole work process changed after that. + Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. + But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. + It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. + When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. + It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. + Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. + And I started to think I should just dump this project. + But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. + So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. + And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? + Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. + If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. + But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. + I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. + And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." + Because -- Because in the end it's like this, OK -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. + They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? + But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. + And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. + It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. + And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. + He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. + And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. + They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." + That's God, you know. + Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. + In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. + Which is great, because we need that. + But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. + He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. + And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? + This is hard. + This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. + But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. + But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. + And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything. + This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. + And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. + Don't be daunted. Just do your job. + Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. + If your job is to dance, do your dance. + If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" + And if not, do your dance anyhow. + And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. + I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. + "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. + Thank you. + Thank you. + June Cohen: Olé! + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: "Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" Craig Venter asks. His answer is "yes" -- and pretty soon. He walks through his latest research and promises that we'll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome. +talks, alternative energy, creativity, energy, genetics, global issues, invention, science, technology +227 +Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life + + + You know, I've talked about some of these projects before -- about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. + We're actually starting at a new point: we've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life. + So, we've always been trying to ask big questions. + "What is life?" is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. + We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. + We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years; when we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. + Now we're trying to ask, "Can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe?" + This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory, and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. + We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. + When we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours -- trust me, this is simple -- but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. + So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. + And so we started down the road of: can we synthesize a chromosome? + Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? + And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? + A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. + So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace. + Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing, and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve. + We started this over 15 years ago. + It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. + But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. + There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA -- 30 to 50 letters in length -- and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. + So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors. + And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of phi X174. + It's a small virus that kills bacteria. + We designed the pieces, went through our error correction and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. + The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria, and the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. + The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. + I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model. + They laughed more than you guys are. And so, we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. + But we wanted to go much larger: we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome -- it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code -- so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. + Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. + When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. + We actually found, on resequencing it, 30 errors; had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. + Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together. + We design unique elements into this. + You may have read that we put watermarks in. + Think of this: we have a four-letter genetic code -- A, C, G and T. + Triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, such that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. + So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. + Initially, all we did was autograph it. + Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. + We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together. + And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000. + At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. + We're trying to get to the point of automation. + So, this looks like a basketball playoff. + When we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli -- it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology -- and so we turned to other mechanisms. + We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. + Here's an example of it: there's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation. + You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. + Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. + We have thousands of organisms that can do this. + These organisms can be totally desiccated; they can live in a vacuum. + I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. + In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there. + Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in; yeast puts them together automatically. + This is not an electron micrograph; this is just a regular photomicrograph. + It's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope. + These are pictures over about a six-second period. + So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago. + This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code; it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. + It's over 300 million molecular weight. + If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. + Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? + Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple; it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. + It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves: you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, and that's what you've all heard about with cloning. + With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. + We purified a chromosome from one microbial species -- roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice -- we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell -- and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. + The new chromosome went into the cell. + In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further. + This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. + We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. + So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology. + There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. + The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one; the chromosome we put in does. + It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome. + It turned blue because of the genes we put in it. + And with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. + All the proteins changed, the membranes changed; when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in. + So, this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software of DNA around, change things quite dramatically. + Now I've argued, this is not genesis; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution. + And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design. + Why do this? + I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. + We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. + To put it in context for myself: I was born in 1946. + There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within 40 years, there'll be four. + We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. + It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. + We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil -- that's a hundred million barrels a day. + When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. + Then of course, there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere. + We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes, and I like to think of these as the design components of the future. + The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. + We're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination. + We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. + We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. + When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals, new vaccines, we can just with a small team, do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science. + And it's just standard selection: we can select for viability, chemical or fuel production, vaccine production, etc. + This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. + You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like: we know exactly what their genetic code looks like. + We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels. + You've seen recently, corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. + We have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol. + But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock, and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. + And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months. + Sunlight and CO2 is one method ... + but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods. + This is an organism we described in 1996. + It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling-water temperatures. + It takes CO2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. + We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process. + So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of "What is life?" + We truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry -- Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? -- become a major source of energy ... + But also, we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. + You've seen this year with flu; we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. + I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. + Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing, now, the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, Archaea and, eventually, eukaryotes. + We're a ways away from improving people: our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them. +talks, collaboration, demo, microsoft, photography, software, technology, virtual reality, visualizations +129 +Blaise Agüera y Arcas: How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images + + + What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. + This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data. + We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in, panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want. + And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. + Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. + It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. + It's also very flexible architecture. + This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data. + This is "Bleak House" by Dickens. Every column is a chapter. + To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. + Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book. + I wouldn't recommend it. + This is a more realistic case, an issue of The Guardian. + Every large image is the beginning of a section. + And this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper, which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium. + We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. + We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution -- much higher than in an ordinary ad -- and we've embedded extra content. + If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. + Or other models, or even technical specifications. + And this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate. + We hope that this means no more pop-ups and other rubbish like that -- shouldn't be necessary. + Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. + And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. + But those are all the roads in the U.S. + superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image. + So let's pull up, now, something else. + This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out. + This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. + One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. + and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration. + And so this is live on the Web. It's powered by Seadragon. + You can see that when we do these sorts of views, where we can dive through images and have this kind of multi-resolution experience. + But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful. + The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots -- all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies -- all these shots were taken. So you see elements here of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been related spatially. + I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. + Some are much more spatial. + I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets -- this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer -- to show you what I think is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology, It's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments we've put up on the website. + We had to worry about the lawyers and so on. + This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr. + You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on. + And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model. + And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. + We can just navigate in this very simple way. + You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. + It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here. + I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. + If I can find some of the sort of weird ones -- So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. + Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs -- here we go. + This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly. + We can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment. + What the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment. + This is now taking data from everybody -- from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like -- and link all of that together. + Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. + You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth. + Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work. + And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it. + Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. + If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. + And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory. + Thank you so much. + Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right? What your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together? + BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering, creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. + It's doing that based on the content inside the images. + And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information a lot of images have. + Like when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of. + What if that picture links to all of your pictures? + The amount of semantic interconnection and richness that comes out of that is really huge. + It's a classic network effect. + CA: Truly incredible. Congratulations. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. +talks, anthropology, culture, environment, film, global issues, language, photography +69 +Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures + + + You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. + Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, + the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. + And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. + We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. + We go through initiation rites. + We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. + But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. + And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara -- this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago -- or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, + Everest, the goddess mother of the world. + All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. + And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. + Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. + And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. + The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. + It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. + And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere -- and, if anything, at a far greater rate. + No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity -- scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. + And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. + When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. + Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. + A language is a flash of the human spirit. + It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. + Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. + And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. + They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. + What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? + And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. + And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. + Let's make it Kogi." + And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. + And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. + Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. + Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. + Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. + They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called "linguistic exogamy:" you must marry someone who speaks a different language. + And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses, where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. + They simply listen and then begin to speak. + Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. + In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. + They dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. + They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. + But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. + They speared each other. + 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. + We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. + Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind. + In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. + In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. + On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. + It's interesting. + If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? + Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. + There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. + But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. + So, the living give birth to the spirits. + The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. + That's why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. + We dance in the temple and become God." + And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit -- how can you be harmed? + So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. + Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. + Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. + In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. + To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. + The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. + And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. + And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back + and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. + It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." + They call themselves the "elder brothers" and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. + Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. + Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the "noble savage," which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. + Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. + There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. + Now, what does that mean? + It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. + Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. + What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. + I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. + That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. + Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. + It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. + This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. + What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic -- to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness -- but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family + called Psychotria viridis. + This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. + If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. + To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. + In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s -- I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally + because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. + They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. + Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. + How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? + Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. + But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." + Well, what does that mean? + This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. + And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. + I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." + Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. + Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. Now -- -- the problem -- the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. + Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. + All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. + And the problem is not technology itself. + The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. + It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. + Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, + and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest -- or, in the case of the Yanomami, + it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. + Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. + You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. + And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. + I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. + This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. + That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. + His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. + His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. + He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. + The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. + One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. + The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. + And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? + Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. + And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. + The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- is only 10,000 years ago. + The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. + Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. + When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. + And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism. + This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. + The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. + This old man's grandfather refused to go. + The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. + Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. + The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. + So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. + He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. + He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. + He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. + Talk about getting by with nothing. And this, in many ways -- -- is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world. + The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. + It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. + It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. + An amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people. + And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. + They're homelands of somebody. + They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. + So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. + We think that polemics -- -- we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. + 156 nations carry our television channel. + Our magazines are read by millions. + And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world + where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. + Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. +talks, business, choice, culture, decision-making, economics, happiness, personal growth, potential, psychology +93 +Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice + + + I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them. + But I want to start with what I call the "official dogma." + The official dogma of what? + The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. + And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. + The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. + And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. + The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. + The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. + This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. + And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. + I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. + This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. + I want to say just a word about salad dressing. + 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. + So this is what the supermarket is like. + And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier -- and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. + We can construct six-and-a-half-million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. + You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. + In other domains -- the world of communications. + There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. + You rented your phone. You didn't buy it. + One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. + And those days are gone. + We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. + These are cell phones of the future. + My favorite is the middle one -- the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. + And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. + And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. + And do you know what the answer to this question now is? + The answer is "no." + It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. + So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. + Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. + Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, "Well, we could do A, or we could do B. + A has these benefits, and these risks. + B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?" + And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" + And the doc says, "A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. + What do you want to do?" + And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?" + And the doc says, "But I'm not you." + And the result is -- we call it "patient autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing, but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something -- namely, the doctor -- to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions -- namely, the patient. + There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. + Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? + The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. + Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. + We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. + And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. + And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. + With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. + The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. + Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. + I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. + And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. + It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? + Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?" + All of these are consuming questions. + And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. + And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. + Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet -- except the Randolph Hotel. + There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. + I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. + So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. + We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. + And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? + Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" + And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. + So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. + And the world we used to live in looked like this. + That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. + And the world we now live in looks like this. + And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? + And the answer is, "yes." + We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. + All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. + One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. + With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. + I'll give you one very dramatic example of this: a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. + A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual-fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. + And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. + You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? + Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. + And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. + Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. + By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. + So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. + And I think it makes the world look like this. [And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?] You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? + You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or the wrong salad dressing. + So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. + And there are several reasons for this. + is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and what salad dressing is? -- it's easy to imagine you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, + even if it was a good decision. + The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. + Second, what economists call "opportunity costs." + Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. + Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. + Here's an example. [I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th street] Sorry if you're not New Yorkers. + Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. + Here's this couple on the Hamptons. + Very expensive real estate. + Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. + What could be better? + "Well, damn it," this guy is thinking, "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. + I could be parking right in front of my building." + And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. + subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. + And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. + Here's another example. + Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. + It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. + But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. + Third: escalation of expectations. + This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. + I wear jeans almost all the time. + There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, they were incredibly uncomfortable, if you wore them and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. + I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size." + And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? + You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? + Do you want them distressed? + You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah." On and on he went. + My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind." + He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth! -- with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. + I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. + But -- I felt worse. + Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. + The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. + I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. + When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. + And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. + And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. + Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. + And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. + Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. + [It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.] Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. + The truth is more like this. + [Everything was better back when everything was worse] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. + Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. + You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. + The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is low expectations. + I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. + I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. + But settling isn't always such a bad thing. + Finally -- One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. + What could you do? + When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible? + It is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." + You could have done better. + With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. + And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. + Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. + I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. + And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. + So let me remind you. + This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. + There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. + There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. + I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. + Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. + There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. + Their problem is that they have too little. + So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. + And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. + It's a waste of money. + What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. + They actually hurt. + They actually make us worse off. + If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also, which is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move." + Income redistribution will make everyone better off -- not just poor people -- because of how all this excess choice plagues us. + So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits] You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? + You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl." + Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- and that's the way I read it at first. + The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. + Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. + If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. + You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. + Everybody needs a fishbowl. + This one is almost certainly too limited -- perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. + But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. + Thank you very much. + + +