03 March 2008

A new meme unfolds

Photo: David Geller/whatcounts

Memeticist Susan Blackmore uses the hotel-bathroom toilet-paper fold as an example of a useless meme -- a meme that has spread throughout the world, even though there is no human reason for it to exist. The persistence of this meme easily disproves the comfortable notion that we humans only spread ideas that are useful or interesting -- it shows that, once a meme takes on life, it spreads itself.

Inspired by Blackmore's research, origamist and TEDster Bruno Bowden created a combinatorial meme -- linking Blackmore's ideas with the sophisticated folding techniques discussed by origami master Robert J. Lang onstage at TED. See photo at left.

+ To learn more about dangerous memes, listen to
Dan Dennett's awesome 2002 TEDTalk >>

+ To learn more about toilet-paper origami, check out this devoted student of the art >>

+ To see what happened when Ze Frank was attacked by this meme on Day 4 of TED@Aspen, visit our Flickr set >>

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01 March 2008

TED2008: And The Point?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.)

The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals to inflect the political debate:

John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for the Earth -- and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I've been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars -- and that's quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you're just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon -- 500 miles -- and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I'd written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn't have the money and I didn't speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.
I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn't ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change -- and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn't know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we've gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives a 3-minutes talk about  "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far".

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past, trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of happiness and of the meaning of life -- and that they are quite coherent with modern science.
He studies morality and emotion in the context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?
Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.
What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:

• Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others
• Fairness/reciprocity
• Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate
• Authority/respect
• Purity/sanctity

If these are the five best candidates for what's written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We've put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.
What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease" (Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us".
Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can't just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.

British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he's become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people".
There can't be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we're moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn't enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate.  The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it's rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It's almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something's gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.
Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.
All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they're gone. We can't let that continue (see also Wade Davis' speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that's what I'm gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we're going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.

This is the last TED in Monterey. Final show of TED2008, live from TED@Aspen, with singer Jill Sobule and comedians Rives, Zé Frank and the Raspyni Brothers.

The next TEDs:

TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?" Information and registration here.

TED2009: Long Beach, California, 4-7 February 2009. Theme: "The Great Unveiling". It's already sold out.

TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.

TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.

What a week! Time to pack and off to SFO. Find all my posts from TED2008 here -- and of course those of the other TED bloggers. Bye!

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01 March 2008

Lost in the stars: TED@Aspen Day 3

Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute

Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint carbon calculator, Reto Schnyder and his thoughts on Max Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and the Raspyni Brothers -- who put on a completely terrifying show that risked the life of the world's greatest poker player, as they juggled bowling balls over Phil Gordon's head.

The TED Prize lunch at Aspen Meadows was buzzing with great ideas, with a rich cross-pollination and connection among the three winners and their wishes. After we rocked the entire Doerr-Hosier Center with the "Ode to Joy," we rode the Silver Queen gondola, 3,000 feet up Aspen Mountain into an amazing starry sky, for dancing, drinking and more amazing conversation.

Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute

See TED's flickr set for more portraits from TED@Aspen >>

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29 February 2008

TED2008: What will tomorrow bring?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session nine)

Jim Marggraff gives a demo of the Livescribe smartpen, which looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. So it can record what you write and simultaneously it captures the surrounding sounds/voices. It requires a special paper with "buttons" and navigational tools. It can also be loaded with other features, like on-the-fly translation (click on a word in a language and the pen spells it out on the display and by voice in the other desired language), interactive books, and more.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of "The Black Swan", one of the most influential current books (first chapter available here). In it, he argues that it's the random, unlikely and unexpected events ("black swans") that generally have the most extraordinary impacts on the future and our ability to model and decide what the future will be -- and that our blindness with respect to this randomness has a price. Taleb -- a former Wall Street trader -- classifies numerous events as part of the "black swan" phenomenology, including the emergence of Google and the  9/11 attacks, Viagra and the Macintosh, the Beatles and Harry Potter.
"The law of large numbers tells you that when the number is very large, no single element can make a difference. That's why if you take 1000 persons chosen randomly and add the heaviest person in the world, that person will represent only a tiny fraction of those 1001 people's total weight.  But take 1000 persons randomly chosen, and add the richest person in the world: that person would represent almost all the wealth in that group of 1001. This is the difference between mediocristan (the former) where things fit neatly under a bell curve, and extremistan (the latter) where extreme phenomenons are dominant.
Why are we moving into extremistan. The information age will be dominated by winner-take-all effects. Take books: a few dozen of them represent half the sales. We have to have alot of respect for the unobserved. Experts often can't predict because they miss on large deviations, that extreme outcomes and major discontinuities are so rare that we can almost ignore them.
I advocate the following: don't disturb a complex system, don't mess with it. Complex systems know about probability more than us. Consider WW2 or Irak: we don't see the link between action and consequences. We don't understand nature. This advocates conservatism.
Plato and Karl Marx tried to teach us to use our knowledge to make decision; and I'm trying to convince them to use our lack of knowledge -- our ignorance and our awareness of it -- to make decisions. We're never gonna understand the world, or the climate: all we can is focus on our decision process and try not to mess with complex systems.

Chris Anderson -- the editor of Wired magazine -- has just published a must-read cover story on "Free", which is a sort of preview of his next book, about "Freeconomics". He talks 3 minutes about developing small, cheap (less than 100 USD) blimps, fitted with sensors, infrareds, etc, that can fly indoors."

Peter Schwartz is a specialist in drawing roadmaps of the future. He is a co-founder of the Global Business Network think-tank. His last book, "Inevitable Surprises", champions quick thinking and adaptability in a world in flux.
"The future isn't what it used to be. I'm amazed that many of the most prosperous, most successful people in the world have become pessimistic about the future. People have lost confidence. Why have we lost confidence in the future? The future is more uncertain. There are really 4 big questions for the future and if we find an answer we can have a better sense of the future:

• War: Will there be a big world war involving US/China/islamic world/India/Russia? (Schwartz's answer: war is unlikely, too much common interests among countries)
• Prosperity: Will the global economic growth we have seen in the second half of the 20th century continue? (Yes, says Schwartz, but it's the spread of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge productively that mattes, yet he makes his point by comparing Singapore and Nigeria, which of course aren't really comparable)
• Equity: Will the fruits of economic growth be relatively evenly spread? (Yes, he says, hundreds of millions of people are likely to climb out of poverty in the next 15 years in BRIC countries)
• Environment: Will we be available to achieve growth in an ecologically sustainable manner? (Schwartz answers through Paul Ehrlich's equation: environmental impact = population x affluence x technology (i=pxaxt). Population won't double again, will reach 9 billion and plateau. Affluence is going to go up. So the real lever is technology; Craig Venter is the James Watt of our era, Stamets' fungi in the previous session was very inspiring, we will see a transition to a bioindustrial era, there is a good chance that we will be able to make the world richer without destroying the environment).

Gregory Petsko is a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University, gives a 3-minutes speech. Unless we do something, he says, over the next 20 years we are going to see an epidemics of neurologic diseases -- because of population aging. Neurological diseases for which we don't have  a cure yet (such as Alzheimers) already cost  half a trillion dollars, and that cost will improve rapidly.

In Western countries, few women die of cervical cancer: regular exams catch it early. But in poorer countries, it's one of the top causes of cancer death for women. Harvard's Sue Goldie applies decision science and cost-benefit analysis to finding ways to model public health scenarios and make decisions about where to best spend limited resources.
Consider three viruses of public health importance: HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and Human Papilloma Virus. HPV, which leads to cervical cancer, is the most common viral sexually-transmitted disease in the world. Fighting it has been a success in some countries in the world, and a failure in others, mostly poor. There are several alternatives: low-tech screening, high-tech screening, vaccine (which is the most expensive). What's the optimal program? Her model for cervical cancer, which she describes in details, shows that a simple exam done once in a patient's lifetime would reduce the death rate by a third. But the consequences of delaying access to cures will be enormous (million of deaths).

TEDster Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, gets 3 minutes to talk about plug-in hybrids. Electricity is cheaper, cleaner and domestic (BG: as long as it is produced from renewables). We can have plug-in hybrids today, with no new technology, just converting existing cars by adding a battery, that you can charge overnight from an ordinary socket, and if you want to go to the mountains you still have the fuel engine. The planet can't wait for perfection.

Larry Burns of GM presents the self-driving Chevy SUV that has won the Darpa Urban Challenge last year (see this previous post or the Wikipedia page). He shows a video of the car, and it's really impressive. It's on display at TED:

Walter Isaacson, the director of the Aspen Institute, has written a few magistral biographies of great men: Benjamin Franklin and, more recently, Albert Einstein. He's speaking from TED@Aspen, which the Institute is hosting in its Doerr-Hosier Center.
What could the future hold for the art of narration? Narration is about making sense of the world, connecting the dots. In the past 15 years narrative has been dismissed, as in "imposing a narrative on events". But those of us that believe in narrative think that we are weaving a narrative. It works not only in novels and fiction, but in all sectors of life. One of the salient characteristics of most narratives is that they tend to be chronological. In fact, perhaps the greatest of all narratives begans with the most simple three words, "In the beginning" (Bible). So they tend to be linear. Now that we are entering a digital -- interactive, hypertextual, collaborative -- age, how do we preserve the beauty of narrative? A long time ago, narrative was interactive and collaborative storytelling process, and over the years and decades the story evolved, and that applies to most great narratives of the ancient times (the Song of Roland) to plays (the interplay between actors and public at the Globe theatre), etc. Then something happens, the invention of the printing press, and that makes narrative less collaborative, less iterative, less interactive process. It makes narrative more carved in stone (or written on paper). So this notion of a broadcast-type phenomenon, where we have a centralized production of a narrative that goes out to a mass audience, begins with the invention of the printed press. The same with movies, with broadcast television. With the digital age, can we restore the great qualities of narrative of time past? So far, alot of what we have done is old wine poured  into old bottles. As wonderful as YouTube can be is still people producing videos and finding a new distribution channel. Likewise most websites. We haven't really changed the essence of what narrative can be in the digital age. Where do we see glimmers of the new narrative? In the wiki phenomenon, where people collaborate. My next book will be an experiment in this, not only a multimedia product but also which allows people to add their own thoughts and informations, an always-evolving book. No idea what the business model will be, but that's probably how the Iliad and the Odyssey were written.

Comedian Zé Frank closes the session with a hilarious standup routine.

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