ENGAGE

The last session of TED was called ENGAGE.

I hearken back to the parting words I learned when I was young:

"Go in peace to love and serve."

Session 12: Engage- Liz Coleman

Liberal Arts: An education designed to foster a student's broadest intellectual and deepest ethical potential.

Liberal Arts no longer exists.

Technical skills are celebrated but these are viewed warily:

What kind of a world...
are we making?
should we be making?
can we be making?


Civic mindedness is treated as outside, not the core.


This nation with all its resources seems utterly helpless to stop the fall of all the major problems of society.

How is it that so many

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

[Note how many people here at TED have quoted good ole TJ... I think I need to re-read everything I ever read of his and kick myself for not reading all of it. Are these books at the TED bookstore? They need to be!]

The Reality:
None as the answers
Everyone has the responsibility.

The new cirriculum- my favorite, Venn diagram (!) to show that all of these things must be seen in combination of each other.
*equity
*education
*the environment
*governance
*the uses of force
*health

History provides a laboratory in which we see the actual and as well as the intended consequences of our actions.

The NEW liberal arts:
rhetoric
design
mediation
improvisation
quantitative reasoning
technology (which merges from these in concert)

"This new wine needs a new bottle."
Freshman Course Schedule becomes A Medieval Fair

The challenge for Bennington is to execute these values she's outlined here.

"We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness of our students, faculty, and stoff on the developing strategies for acting on the most critical challenges of our time."

"We cannot have a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators."

"Being overwhelmed is the first step if you are serious about trying to get at things that really matter on a scale that makes a difference." [thank you Anonymous for helping complete that quote]

I'm going to write her an email and request a full transcription now...

interstitial - Darius from Darius Goes West

* I’m not a disabled person, I’m a person with a disability.
* I’m not suffering. But you’re going to die. So is everyone else!
* It’s not a rare disease. It’s the number one genetic killer of children in the world

What stereotype are you comfortable with? Well it’s a Sony…

Session 12: Engage- Barry Schwartz

Title Slide: a collaboration with Ken Sharp for a book that someday... he hopes to finish

Obama appealed to each of us at his inauguration:
"The time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation..."

Barry's goals of this talk:
• Why Obama was right about virtue
• Practical wisdom (Aristotle) is the key virtue
• Nonetheless, we're making a war on wisdom (in the US and it's unwittingly
• But there are sources of hope

Example: the long list of a janitor's duties. Nothing on it involves other human beings. BUT janitors reported that their attitudes and actions in their jobs were purposefully a result of their relationships and respect for people at the hospital.

Practical wisdom is Moral Skill plus Moral Wisdom: A wise person knows when and how to improvise, a moral jazz to accommodate situations and this person is made, not born. you need to have/be mentors.

"Rules and procedures may be done, but they prevent you from having to think" -Scott Simon

Rules: we need better ones if we're going to use them. But they don't make things better in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away as the effects come down the line. They don't allow the wisdom of the people trying to convey the

Incentives the war on moral will: motivational competition. they don't promote peoples interest in doing the "right thing", but a moral drive alone causes people to

people lose morale and morality.

Good news: You don't need to be brilliant to be wise
Bad news: But brilliance doesn't mean you are wise

"We must ask, not just is it profitable, but is it right?" -Obama 12/18/08
people become addicted to and focused on the wrong thing.

We must re-moralize work: it's not about teaching ethics courses. it's about celebrating moral heroes. acknowledge and be proud of these people.

Aaron Feurrstein and Malden Mills had a devistating fire but he kept all employees at a profit loss because it was right. Ray Anderson turned his "evil empire" into a green company AND learned it made a greater profit too! Morality should be "ordinary" if not "extraordinary" so that when we do right it shouldn't be against the tide.

Ethics as lived, not as taught [KIPP]

As teachers must remember we're always teaching, the camera is always on. And we must always be an example of morality.

Kids need to respect themselves, their teachers, others and to respect learning. Teachers must always embody it. Kipp is great as a teacher because of it.

Honesty, kindness and courage are a natural follow to morality.
And hope is wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. We must pay attention to what we do, how we do it, why we do it.

Standing O.

interstitial- Gever Tulley

If you haven't seen it- there was a TED talk online that became a surprise hit last year and it was Gever Tulley's

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Now, carefully read that link...

quotable: "decoration of an unfinished project is sort of a gestational incubation"

He showed many things his kids did as a team and individuals... For the finale of this show of kids' works: "The things that kids build amaze even themselves, like a roller coaster by 7-year-olds."

Session 12: Engage- Jamie Cullum

Here he comes...

I Get A Kick Out Of You (yes we get the same out of you Jamie)... started out a capella with the mic so far away he was just a lonely voice in a large hall. The best way to get people's attention isn't to shout, it's to whisper. Did anyone notice if he made a little sneeze when he sang the line about getting a kick out of cocaine? Annie Hall, anyone?

I've Got A Woman (could probably have them all I'm guessing, you wild (piano) player)... he even makes a kick drum out of the leg of the piano and pounds out percussion barehanded on all parts of the grand piano.

Gene Kelly's Singing In The Rain as a segue into Rihanna's Umbrella was cute, clever and brought the house to its feet

All At Sea is an original he wrote when he broke up with his gf, skipped the commencement of his college graduation to work on a cruise ship. He changed on lyric in the sad song for the humor of it: "I gave away my iPhone..."

And again, to our feet! ...while he was going about the stage gathering the blazer and button down he managed to through off during the show...

Chris says we're going to try and squeeze an encore at the end!

Jamie Cullum has a website too of course, but I'm just going to link to his (disappointingly sparse) tour schedule....

interstitial - Jay Walker

"Let's talk about manias!"

Religious, sports, deadly, entertainment, age--

There's a new mania: learning English.

China will be the biggest English speaking country of the world.

80 million hs students in China take a test that determines the outcome of the direction of their lives and 25% of the grade depends on great English skills.

Is this good?

English is the language of problem solving. Not because we push, but because the world pulls. It is the world looking for a way to join together to solve its common problems.

Session 11: Predict- Dan Ariely

His massive burn injuries changed the ways he viewed predictability and irrationality.


He wasn't allowed to interfere with his treatments as they were "experts".

After 3 years he went home from the hospital, went home and started experimenting with other people and their reactions to pain. The result:

We don't encode duration as we encode intensity. If you get a break from what hurts, it makes pain more endurable.

One example: cheating. The experiment: if a simple test was given where people were able to cheat would they?

Did they do it less if big punishment for cheating was there? It didn't. If the probability of being caught cheating was up, it didn't color the amount of cheating. The thing that made them cheat less was their ability to look themselves in the mirror.

Decreasing the fudge factor: a moral sense and a value of the reward (money versus representative money).

Cheating was also affected by their belief that their honesty could be challenged by perceived equals.

The greater the distance from cheating the greater it is.

How does this affect behavioral economics?

When he was at the hospital his favorite nurse explained that his treatment wasn't just painful from him but also for her having to inflict it on him who she liked so much. However since she believed what she was doing was right so it made her not challenge her own behavior towards him in treatment.

The challenging of one's beliefs to improve a situation is so very important in all aspects of life, especially in behavior economics.

interstitial: Nicholas Negroponte

The OLPC is so usable in Africa it puts our own to shame.
Kids are teaching their parents.
The future? The world will move from the concept of OLPC to the reality of olpc wildly in the next 3 years.

And he got a standing O for his 3 minute talk.

Session 11: Predict- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

He called Tienamen Square before it happened. He sees a bigger picture with great clarity. Prediction of the future affect our ability to change it.

There are many ways of predicting but they are all mumbo jumbo (horoscopes, casting bones etc). We need to use and believe the wisdom of science. (That’s what Nate Silver did!)


We can scientifically engineer the future!

Who is rational? (Do what they think is in their best interest.) Most people are.

Who are influencers? Exhort them to be better. But we can’t look only to the leaders. We can look to their advisors. And the people who influence them. With 5 decision makers you get 120 interactions. The matrix of learning and influence 10 decision makers means 3.6 million interactions. We need the help of computers to examine such a great number.

What percent of the time is the model right when even the experts are wrong?: 90%!

What must we know in order to predict? Not much:
Who has a stake in the dcision
What they say they want
How focused are the issue- their priorities?
How much clout do they have with their opionions?

We all care about two things: outcome and credit.

We can get the information we need from the experts.

Now, Iran’s nuclear policy… what’s likely? Their ability to build is lower than their clout among their own people is. If we left them alone, their need for machismo among their people. Of course the world can’t/won’t do it. If Iran made enough weapons grade fuel they could get the clout they want without having enough to build the bombs. They gain power in their people when pushing towards building but drop entirely radically if they test.

Say to others: “If you say that’s impossible you’re confused with I don’t know how to do it.”

Chris asks if saying these predictions out loud will this discourage action against what we fear?

The short answer? No. With good reasons [I need help quote them here fellow bloggers/TEDsters.]