Religion is often a divisive topic, but there are certain beliefs that are shared so closely between faiths that they can unify people across all backgrounds. The Golden Rule is one such belief.

Karen Armstrong

Official Spiel: As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.

My Spiel: The talk is largely about the Golden Rule, “treat others the way you would like
to be treated”, and about how compassion is at the heart of every major world religion. The speaker was in a convent, then left disenchanted. In time she came back to religion after studying other religions and realizing that it is action aligned with your beliefs that matters, not blind belief alone, and that everything else in a religion is mere window dressing to the application of the Golden Rule.

In talking to my atheist engineer/geek friends I have found that their disagreement with religion comes when religious people use religion to a)  forward non-religious political ends b) defend their own actions in the face of all logic to the contrary or c) to excuse hatred or bigotry.  Most atheists I know believe in the Golden Rule themselves and lost religion in their youth because they found hypocrisy instead of compassion in their Sunday sermons.

A compassionate talk, strongly recommended.

Sometimes it seems the world is just stuffed with good men and women.

Official Spiel: Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent’s creative potential, we can create a change in Africa’s future. Turok asks the TED community to help him expand the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences by opening 15 new centers across Africa in five years. By adding resources for entrepreneurship to this proven model, he says, we can create a network for progress across the continent — and perhaps discover an African Einstein.

My Spiel: This is an honest, good man, who is doing something effective by creating a postgraduate institution for learning in Africa in mathematics and asking TED to create 15 more institutions in other fields.

What really struck me in watching this video is how many brilliant TED speakers have come from an impoverished area, found a way to escape into higher education via Europe or the U.S. and then returned home to help their kinsmen with some brilliant, innovative idea. When they returned they carried contacts, knowledge and skills they could have never attained by staying home. I hear of the “brain drain” from time to time, and I can only think that if there is a chance, any chance, to return home and help their old neighbors with their new skills that many will choose to do so and have in fact done so.

When you watch the video pay particular attention to the equation he shows that summarizes all of the fundamental physics we know to be true in the universe. Note how few names go with each piece of the equation: Schroedinger, Feynman, Einstein, etc. There are a few men, men far brighter than I or, with my apologies you, that change the way we define the universe or the structure of society and livingness. We waste these precious resources in impoverished nations by starving them with lack of opportunity.

I am sitting in a darkened room at work at 9:30pm on a Wednesday, surrounded by robotic parts and wiring diagrams, and wondering how I could possibly channel anything I do into something as significant as Neil Turok’s work.

Well, any young/brilliant/inspired/hopeful/unappreciated/other folks out there with a fire for robotics, drop me a line- I’ll show you my robots. It’s a start.

Ever wanted some “grim inspiration”, or to hear from someone whose “optimism is based on cynicism”? Then this talk is for you.

Official Spiel: Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says — but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.

My Spiel:

The speaker Robert Wright is a fairly morose fellow with what I thought a very inspirational message. Being a bit dark he sees the danger and threat around us, but particularly coming after Steve Pinker’s talk I think there is cause for optimism, that man is moving closer to increased happiness and not the apocalypse as Wright fears.

A zero sum game is a game where one team wins every time the other team loses. This would be basketball or boxing. By contrast, a non-zero sum game is where the players win or lose together, like in dancing or raising a family. Most games of life are non-zero sum games.

His main point is that we need to get better about understanding each other, because violence and hatred hurt all parties involved.

He has a great quote (paraphrased), “I don’t want us to bomb Japan because they built my car.” This is why he says he is cynically hopeful- he fundamentally believes in people’s urge to help themselves, even if it means helping others. He is worried that current events show a decay in understanding between East and West that will result in decreased survival and a ‘lose-lose’ for both groups.

Now, for my brief rambling. I love the contrast between a non-zero sum game and a zero sum game. In a zero sum game you are trying to win against an opponent. In a non-zero sum game you play with teammates toward a common goal. In business you will occasionally see the career climber, “only out for No. #1″. Enough of these people damage the company, weakening the overall structure as the career climbers fight for position instead of productivity.

Even in sports, the classic zero sum game, there is an aspect of cooperation between the two teams that makes the game playable and fun. No weapons, cheating, poor sportsmanship or violence even if you could get away with it and increase your own odds. Those that break these rules damage the entire sport (steroids commentary insert here).
Life, in general, is a non zero sum game. Play to win.

If you connect this concept with the statistical evidence behind Steve Pinker it looks like part of the reason the world has improved over the centuries (in terms of reduced war and violence) has been due to increased communication and interconnectedness between nations and groups. As trade improves the benefit to self of helping others becomes more obvious- we don’t like anything bad happening to the guy we do business with, making our movies or buying our produce. It implies that the way to more peace, more understanding and less violence is by increased and more open communication.

While you might hope the Internet would be the obvious answer to this problem you run into the unfortunate element mentioned in a prior post about Anonymity + Audience… People display even less tolerance and more bigotry in online forums than in face to face encounters. But on the plus side, the business side of the Internet has done wonders for the

Every few days I read some newspaper article which says “in this age of senseless violence” or some such nonsense.  I always wonder what age in between the trenches of WWI and the race riots of the 60’s they are comparing the present to.  Was there perhaps some period before industrialization I am unaware of when everyone got along in Utopian harmony?  Or are things better now than they used to be, or indeed have ever been?

Official Spiel: In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we’ve come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.

My Spiel: Steven Pinker and I don’t exactly hold eye to eye on some issues, but here we line up perfectly.  Things are apparently better than they used to be, all the way back since the hunter gatherer cultures in terms of safety, peace and personal danger.  It is simply very, very safe these days.  Anyone who says differently is selling something.  (Quick aside: the only thing which is substantially worse than it has been in centuries past is the environment, which is not related to safety but to long term survival of a species.  Still, it is a problem worthy of many other TED talks.)

Free speech, human rights, religious freedom and average lifespan are all up.  Deaths by murder and war are way down.  Pinker has a great observation on this, which paraphrased is that the better interconnected and in communication you are with your peers the less harm you will tend to do them and the more you will treat them the way you would like to be treated.  

In Oregon a thousand years ago you would only have to go a few hundred miles to find “others”, or another tribe of Indians that was not part of yours and considered dangerous or an enemy.  How far outside of Oregon would you have to go now before you can find someone from an opposing society?  Californians might be ‘different’ but they’re still on the same side- even the Canadians are considered pretty friendly.

Unfortunately, this relative peace is only true as an average across the whole of humanity.  There are large pockets of inequality, hatred and war that fill our screens and our hearts with dismay, allowing the merchants of death a way to fix our attention, cut our enthusiasm and hide the otherwise positive trend of improvement across humanity.  We have a long, long way to go, but we are on the right path- so says the history book of times far worse than now.

I find passion absolutely fascinating.

Dave Eggers: Once Upon a School

Official Spiel: Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us — it’s as simple as asking a teacher “How can I help?” He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School.

My Spiel:

I’ve read Dave’s book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and what really struck me was that a) it was well written, b) I didn’t like it but c) that it showed true passion. I have nothing but admiration for someone who cares that much about something, anything.

The more talks I listen to and books I read by educators the more I am struck by the fact that the successes had passion delivered by the teachers into the students. It almost doesn’t matter what you teach as long as you teach it like you care. From football coaches who build discipline and character to dance instructors who inspire a sense of manners to Shakespeare for inner city kids the common element is that the teachers who make a difference have a passion for their subject.

The trick of education, then, is to combine students with teachers of passion until some common interest between teacher and student is found. For me it was books, and my teachers were authors. Easy enough, all they had to do was introduce me to the library. For many of my engineering peers there was one or two science teachers along the way that set the spark. This is why I think TED is such a good educational tool- somewhere among those many lecturers there is a speaker with your student’s passion coursing through their veins, waiting to be heard.

I am envious, deeply envious, of the enthusiasm that these speakers can inspire in others.

In a business there is always a balance to be struck between offering enough choices to your customers and overwhelming them.  There are two great TED talks that in their contrast describe the merits and dangers of choice.  First, in favor of more choice-

Their spiel: In this witty monologue, Malcolm Gladwell follows the career of a food industry consultant who uncovered a key secret to what eaters like. Running huge focus groups to find customers’ truest tastes, Gladwell’s hero draws a radical conclusion, an epiphany that has defined food marketing ever since. Note: The theme of the 2004 conference was “The Pursuit of Happiness” — hence the talk’s quirky presence.

The brilliant observation that Gladwell and his food consultant hero make is that people like distinct categories of things, and an effort to find the “perfect” combination ends in mediocrity.  For spagetti sauce there are categories based on spice, viscosity, “visual chunkiness”, etc.  Depending on their mood or preference people can like a rather bland and thin sauce or a meaty, thick and smooth sauce.  There is no “perfect” sauce.  The food industry embraced this with a passion and made a fortune.

This applies to all tastes, all activities for which people can have a preference.  It is genius.  Example- Entertainment.  Certain types of entertainment can be combined to good results, like a football-comedy movie.  But try and combine the joy of watching your daughter perform in her very first play and the rowdy pleasure of a Superbowl party and both will predictably suffer. 

The problem comes in choosing which categories to present to the customer, finding which “types of sauce” are popular as distinct categories.  You may miss a category altogether and miss out on some business, combine two categories improperly and ruin both or you can bury the customer in a sea of choices.  Which brings us to Talk #2-

Their spiel-Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We 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, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

I think Barry missed an important point, which is that it is not the freedom of choice which makes you miserable, it is the uncertainty of making the right choice which makes you unhappy.  More choices to some degree makes it harder to be right, but it does not scale directly with choice.  In his opening example he describes how jeans used to come in only one basic style and even though they did not fit all that well he felt content in his selection.  One day he goes to buy jeans and there are a dozen styles.  He ends up buying a pair that fit better than before but is miserable because he isn’t sure that he really bought the ‘right pair’.  The contrast I want to make is that a sixteen year old hipster would not only have been delighted at all the new options but would have bought multiple outfits, for the first time finding exactly what they had always wanted. 

The trick in my mind seems to be providing the most popular categories of your product while making it as clear as possible what the differences between each product are so that every customer can choose their selection with confidence.  Windows Vista Ultimate/Basic/Premium/Business/Enterprise, you have failed this test.

Official Spiel: “Looking back over a long career, architect Moshe Safdie digs deep into four extraordinary projects to talk about the unique choices he made on each building — choosing where to build, pulling information from the client, and balancing the needs and the vision behind each project. Sketches, plans and models show how these grand public buildings, museums and memorials, slowly take form.”

In truth I have always had difficulty appreciating architecture- which is why I carefully listen to every TED talk on the subject with the hope that someday it will make sense to me.  At the end of this talk the speaker gives a quote and a personal poem, which I found quite good.  The rest of the talk sadly made little more impact upon me than the 4 prior architects’ talks.

To quote morphologist 1917 Theodore Cook: “Beauty connotes humanity.  We call a natural object beautiful because we see that its form expresses fitness, the perfect fulfillment of function.”

Architect Moshe Safde’s Poem:

“He who seeks truth shall find beauty

He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification

He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow being will find the joy of self expression

He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature

Through nature and the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek truth
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.”

I have found that education is one of the most passionate subjects that you can bring up in day to day conversation.  Why?  Because everyone’s experienced it, you had to go, and what happens in education seems to dictate your life path.  There are more opinions on education than there are people, but some opinions are more valuable than others.

Ken Robinson- do schools kill creativity?

Official spiel- Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: “If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, please stop whatever you’re doing and watch it now.”

My spiel- He gives a quote from Picasso half way through, “All children are born artists.  The problem is to remain an artist when we grow up.”  Above and beyond the (noble) desire to have artists in our society it is the ability to do something that is the purpose of education.  Creativity, the soul of an artist, is being able to put one’s own work, one’s own idea, out there in contest with the world to survive or fail.  A school does not need to make a musician or a dancer out of a pupil to have that pupil benefit from creativity and the teaching of creativity.

If you look at the true geniuses of our day in any subject- medicine, science or business- you will find that the titans of their field are not only passionate about their own subject but have an artistic talent that they pursue or a creative hobby that while not typically labeled ‘art’ is nonetheless an expression of their mind and not merely ‘work’.  The entire linux revolution I credit to the joy and excitement that comes with being able to change the code yourself and not merely tred where others have gone.

Do not confuse Creativity and Art.  Art is a beautiful Creation.  Creation itself is necessary to be effective in any field, artistic or not.

For other educational success stories I also recommend “Teach like your Hair’s on Fire” or “There are no shortcuts” by Rafe Esquith, who is an educator down in Los Angeles who teaches his underprivileged inner city 5th graders to perform Shakespeare while getting them to score in the top five percent in the country academically.  I’ve been talking with him by e-mail and he’s asked me to help him find donations to purchase XO laptops (from the One Laptop Per Child program) for his students.  If you want to help him, leave a comment here or visit his site.

This is a combination of two talks, Hans Rosling’s second talk and Bjorn Lomborg’s talk.

There is a correlation that doesn’t get much press coverage- given the current technology in use in the world today, CO2 emissions rise as GDP rises. This is across the entire globe, over the last decade. This says that CO2 emissions become more of an issue the more wealthy and successful the world becomes unless we radically change the way we produce energy. This is shown in Hans Rosling’s data using the Gapminder tool.

This is a factor in Bjorn Lomborg’s talk, (posted previously). His economists placed global warming at the bottom of the list of problems we should solve first. This is based in part off the data showing that a small reduction in CO2 emissions would only postpone the day that most of Bangladesh and India goes under water- it won’t prevent it. The economists thus concluded that the solutions to date (such as the Kyoto treaty) would only delay the inevitable trend by a few years and are thus of little value.

His economists ignore the fact that most of the other solutions to global problems would tend to improve GDP and thus speed up global warming because CO2 emissions (with current technology) go up with GDP. So if we absolutely must solve global warming by limiting CO2 emissions then we should focus all our energy on technology to make the production of cheap, CO2 free energy a commonplace standard across the globe, because we are going to need only more energy as time goes on.

American news tends to portray global warming as a problem created by the developing world using dirty energy sources like coal. Not really. The USA creates more CO2 emissions per person than any other nation, not because we’re bad people but because we’re filthy rich. As the poor nations become less poor (China, India, I’m looking at you) they will consume more energy, driving up CO2 emissions to approach US levels.

CO2 emission is a problem of the rich nations. It is exacerbated by more people becoming rich, which is a problem worth having.

Here’s the premise- there are many problems in the world, and only so much money and effort with which to solve them. Given that, what should you solve first?

I like this approach because it breaks down solving global problems into separate pieces: (1) how much of a problem is it? (2) What specifically can you do to solve that problem and (3) with a fixed amount of money, how much good could you do towards solving that problem?

Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world.

Official spiel: Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg put this question to economists and students around the world, and the answers they came up with may surprise you. Ranking our toughest problems not on any moral scale but simply by how effectively they can be solved, Lomborg and his colleagues demand we take a fresh look at doing good.

My spiel: Bjorn Lomborg made a list of the big problems that people are nervous about and got 3 ideas on how to solve them from the most influential people he could get his hands on. Then he handed those solutions to a team of economists and had them rate the solutions, not the problems, for their benefit to society. This is basically saying that instead of taking a problem you are passionate about and pushing for funding, take the viewpoint of a government or a huge charity and look at all the solutions out there and see where you can do the most good.

Before we go too far though, I should warn you that Bjorn Lomborg first got his fame for claiming that the environment isn’t nearly as bad as scientists would like to claim via his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. His opinions on Global Warming are thus quite controversial.

Now, assuming that he didn’t mess with the economic panel that he put together (and with 4 Nobel laureates on the panel it doesn’t look like he did) and that he let them come to their own conclusions, the Cophenhagen consensus came up with the following fascinating results:

(1) Global warming solutions are not very good. They cost a ton and do little good as compared to other efforts. He summarizes it in better in the talk, but keep in mind that it is not that Global warming is not a terrible problem, but that our solutions to date do less good than other known solutions.

(2) Preventative efforts get you more bang for the buck than cures. Obvious, no? But this would indicate that malaria nets and HIV prevention should far outrank HIV cures or medical treatments.

If global warming is a touchy subject for you, ignore that part. The rest of the talk is fascinating and honest.