TED Thread (Page 1 of 2)

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom. . .

In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s western world is actually making us miserable.

Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.

Schwartz’s previous research has addressed morality, decision-making and the varied inter-relationships between science and society. Before Paradox he published The Costs of Living, which traces the impact of free-market thinking on the explosion of consumerism -- and the effect of the new capitalism on social and cultural institutions that once operated above the market, such as medicine, sports, and the law.

Both books level serious criticism of modern western society, illuminating the under-reported psychological plagues of our time. But they also offer concrete ideas on addressing the problems, from a personal and societal level.

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz … sdom.html#

                               Barry Schwartz on Our Loss of Wisdom.

About this talk

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

Transcript

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. But what did he appeal to? He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country. Invest, invest, invest." Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. And he appealed to virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word. It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean?

Let me begin with an example. This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. And all of the items on it are unremarkable. They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: Even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. Not one. The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital.

And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well.

Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means.

"Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers.

When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. At TED, brilliance is rampant. It's scary. The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else.

Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas. (Recorded at TED University during TED2009, February 2009 in Long Beach, California. Duration: 07:20.)

Let's talk trash.

You know, we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime. Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes.

Mental note to the liberators: throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade. Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest.

Plastics are also hard to recycle. A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. It's diddly point squat. That's the percentage we recycle.

Now, melting point has a lot to do with this. Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal. It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off oily contaminants for which it is a sponge. Half of each year's 100 billion points of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash. A large, unruly fraction of our trash will flow down rivers to the sea.

Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the airport. And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the de-sal plant we visited yesterday.

In spite of deposit fees, much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles. We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes, here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail.

Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California. Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja's sparsely-populated central coast. Notice that the bottles here have caps on them. Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, PET, will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization. Also, the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic, polypropylene. They will float in seawater, but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills.

Let's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo. After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific, while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas. After ten years, a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch, while ours litter the Philippines. After 20 years, we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre.

It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks. A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach. Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish like cigarette lighters ... but, mostly bottle caps. Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface.

The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals. This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans.
I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem, so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula at the east end of our long beach. We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown. I offered five cents each for bottle caps. I got plenty of takers. Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected. I thought I would spend 20 bucks. That day I ended up spending nearly 60.
I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pidro. Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display. In spite of my "girly man" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton.

Here's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like. Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this. And this. Now, when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this. And this particular beach is Kailua Beach, the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington.

Now, how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton? We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter. Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater.

We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach.

Now, you can buy certified organic produce. But no fish monger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish.

This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations. The throwaway society cannot be contained, it has gone global. We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff. We have to throw it away. Now, the market can do a lot for us, but it can't fix the natural system in the ocean we've broken. All the king's horses and all the king's men ... will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again.

Video: The levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the throwaway concept of living is proliferating, and it's showing up in the ocean.

Anchor: He offers no hope of cleaning it up. Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process. The solution, Moore says, is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, he doesn't hold out much hope for that, either. This is Brian Rooney for Nightline, in Long Beach, California.

. . . I have this neighbor that keeps me in touch with this. Because he's living, usually on his back, looking up at those grasses. And one time he came up to me, he was about seven or eight years old, he came up to me. And there was a wasp's nest that I had let grow in my yard, right outside my door. And most people knock them down when they're small. But it was fascinating to me. Because I was looking at this sort of fine Italian end papers. And he came up to me and he knocked. He would come every day with something to show me. And like, knock like a woodpecker on my door until I opened it up. And he asked me how I had made the house for those wasps. Because he had never seen one this big. And I told him, "You know, Cody, the wasps actually made that." And we looked at it together. And I could see why he thought, you know, it was so beautifully done. It was so archetectural. It was so precise.

But it occurred to me, how in his small life had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done, that we must have done it. How did he not know, it's what we've all forgotten, that we're not the first ones to build. We're not the first ones to process cellulose. We're not the first ones to make paper. We're not the first ones to try to optimize packing space, or to waterproof, or to try to heat and cool a structure. We're not the first ones to build houses for our young.

What's happening now, in this field called biomimicry, is that people are beginning to remember that organisms, other organisms, the rest of the natural world, are doing things very similar to what we need to do. But in fact they are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years. So these people, biomimics, are nature's apprentices. And they're focusing on function. What I'd like to do is show you a few of the things that they're learning. They have asked themselves, "What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'". . .

. . . One of the big ideas, one of the big projects I've been honored to work on is a new website. And I would encourage you all to please go to it. It's called AskNature.org. And what we're trying to do, in a TEDesque way, is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function.

And we're working with EOL, Encyclopaedia Of Life, Ed Wilson's TED wish. And he's gathering all biological information on one website. And the scientists who are contributing to EOL are answering a question. "What can we learn from this organism?" And that information will go into AskNature.org. And hopefully, any inventor, anywhere in the world, will be able, in the moment of creation, to type in, "How does nature remove salt from water?" And up will come mangroves and sea turtles, and your own kidneys.

And we'll begin to be able to do as Cody does, and actually be in touch with these incredible models, these elders that have been here far far longer than we have. And hopefully, with their help, we'll learn how to live on this Earth, and on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. . .

What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to these questions, and his answer is influenced by his faith as well as by his scientific turn of mind: We can train our minds in habits of happiness. Interwoven with his talk are stunning photographs of the Himalayas and of his spiritual community.

business professor David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form -- in schools, workplaces, even the driver's license bureau. . .

Now, what then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation.  It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level.

Look at the waves coming here to shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression, there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy, that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering.

So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, everything to be happy. To have everything, to be happy. That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.