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http://www.ted.com/webcast/watch/event/tedprize

[ video of the talk ]

In modern times, the number of choices available to the consumer has increased tremendously, paralleled by a sharp decrease in the consumer’s time to choose. The consumer’s natural reaction to more choices and less time is to ignore more choices. That explains why advertising often leaves the consumer cold, and must be repeated ad nauseaum to elicit a ‘buy’ response. TV ads are much less effective nowadays.

You’re driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving. Because you’ve seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who’s going to pull over and say “Oh! Look! A cow!”? Nobody. But if the cow was purple… ! If the cow was purple, you’d notice it… for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple, you’d get bored with those too.

Still, there are products and ideas that penetrate into the consumer’s sphere of attention – the weird stuff. To draw attention, a product or service must be remarkable – the consumer must remark it.

Remarkableness doesn’t mean the product has to be very good; “very good” is boring and is no longer the safe choice of a manufacturer. The safe choice has become the fringe, the unusual, the idea that spreads. “Remarkable” means worth making a remark about – spreading the idea.

A 12-meter bush sculpture of a dog is not an art masterpiece, but it’s special. Today, the artist, Jeff Koons, had his drawing “Tulips” featured on Google’s home page. Funnily enough, Seth Godin talks at some point about “[...] if only we could on Google’s home page”.

You have to be unique. The fastest-growing business in the mortuary sector is making fake diamonds out of cremation remains. “Like this diamond on my ring? It’s grandma!”

“Silk” (a brand of soy milk that doesn’t require refrigeration) tripled sales when they moved their Silk cartons among the milk cartons in the refrigerated area, because people noticed it: “Milk, milk, milk, NOT milk”.

If one divides the market into innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and laggards, then successful marketing will address the early adopters, because they care and listen. Mainstream consumers will tend to ignore any sort of advertising, and the best way to reach them is through their early adopter friends (the “Otaku”) – people who are passionate or even obsessed about something. If you’re not into computers but want to buy one, will you turn on the TV and watch some ads, or will you ask your computer geek friend?

[transcript] ; [video of the talk]

Humans have tripled their brain mass in the last 2,000,000 years. That has led to the emergence of the prefrontal cortex, which is an experience simulator. No other animal can imagine an experience in their heads before trying it out in real life.

The problem with the experience simulator is that it greatly overestimates the impact of the experience on the individual’s happiness: impact bias – the tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events (elections, romance, promotions, college tests, medical tests, insults, gambling, moving to California…)

However, a study on lottery winners and paraplegics showed that a year after winning the lottery, and a year after losing their legs, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.

Generally, research shows that, with a few exceptions, if a major event or trauma happened in your life 3 months ago, it has almost no effect on your happiness now.

Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Human beings have a “psychological immune system”. A system of largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help us change our views of the world so that we can feel better about the world. We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is something to be pursued.

• Jim Wright: “I’m so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every way” – chairman of the House of Representatives, resigned in disgrace after a shady scandal
• “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious * experience” – Moreese Bickham, 78, who spent 37 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit
• “I believe it turned out for the best” – Harry S. Langerman, 83, who in 1949 couldn’t get the money to open the first McDonald’s franchise. Ray Kroc opened the franchise and ended up managing the chain and earning $500M.
• “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.” – Pete Best, 1994, original Beatles drummer, rejected in favor of Ringo Starr.

If your reaction is “yeah, right, he didn’t really want the job”, that’s because we believe that “synthetic happiness” somehow inferior to “natural happiness”. Natural happiness is produced when we get what we want, and synthetic happiness is produced when we don’t get what we want. Why do we believe that synthetic happiness is inferior? Because what economic system would keep churning if we didn’t want stuff? (A shopping mall full of zen monks wouldn’t be particularly profitable because they don’t want stuff enough)

1. subjects are presented with 6 paintings and are asked to order them from the most liked to the least liked. They order the paintings 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. After the experiment, they are offered as a prize one of paintings 3 or 4. It’s a difficult choice, because none was strongly preferred over the other, but most subjects still chose painting #3. The experimenters told the subjects they would mail the print at the end of the entire experiment. Two days or two weeks later, in the second part of the experiment, the subjects are presented with the same 6 paintings and asked to rate them again… and this is happiness in the making: the resulting order is 1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 6. Notice how the painting that was rated 4 jumped to the second position in the top, and the painting that was rated 4, jumped to the 5th. “The one I got was really better than I thought; the one I didn’t get, sucks” – the synthesis of happiness.
2. If your reaction is “yeah, right” because the subjects would obviously remember their choices, you’re wrong. The same experiment was repeated with patients with anterograde amnesia, who can’t form new memories.
   To check if they’re really amnesic, they were asked 30 minutes after the first part of the experiment to name which painting they chose to own in the first part. All of them guessed. After confirming they didn’t form the memory, they were asked again to rank the paintings. The results were exactly the same as those of the first experiment. The shocking result is that the amnesics liked better the print they owned, but they didn’t know they owned it! When these people synthesized happiness, they truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reaction to that poster. They didn’t say they liked it because they owned it, because they didn’t know they owned it.

The psychological immune system works best when you have no choice. This is the difference between going on a date and being married. You go out with someone on a date, they pick their nose, you don’t go out with them again. If your spouse picks their nose… they’re a heart of gold and a great person blah blah. You find a way to be happy with what’s happening.

• subgroup 1 was asked to decide which of the 2 prints to keep, but they had 4 days during which to change their mind and decide to keep the other print. After the 4th day, the decision became final.
• subgroup 2 was asked to decide on the spot which print to keep, and their decision would become final right then.

As you may guess, subgroup 2 ended up being happier with their choice of a print, because subgroup 1 kept thinking, even after the 4th day, that they could have made the other choice.

1. having 4 days to decide which print to keep
2. deciding on the spot which print to keep, and the decision being final.

66% of the students chose option #1, which allowed them more choice. 66% of the students, in actuality, set themselves up for unhappiness.

• 001 – Al Gore on the climate crisis
• 002 – Amy Smith – preventing cooking fire fumes using briquettes
• 003 – Ashraf Ghani – What kind of foreign aid does Afghanistan need to combat opium production. An interesting mention here: Ghani claims at 13:20 that over 91% of the men in Afghanistan and 86% of the women listen to at least 3 radio stations each day. However, you can see at Nationmaster that Afghanistan is the LAST (212th) country with regards to radios per capita (5 radios per 1,000 people). The source of this statistic is the CIA World Factbook 2003 and the TED talk took place in July 2005. How exactly do about 90% of the Afghan population manage, every day, to gather in groups of 200 around 1 radio?

Talk #93: Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice

Summary

The current dogma is that to maximize the welfare of every citizen, we must maximize freedom, and for that, we must maximize choice.

In a typical supermarket, you will find 175 salad dressings. In an electronic store, we can construct 6.5 million stereo systems.

1. Life becomes a continuous sequence of choices that can be made every second.Your doctor won’t tell you what to do, but present you with options. This leads to “patient autonomy”, but in effect is shifts the decision-making from someone who knows something (the doctor) to someone who knows nothing, and is almost certainly sick and not in the best shape to be making decisions. You can work virtually from anywhere in the world. Should you pick up a call or draft a letter on your laptop while you watch your child’s game?
2. Choice paralysis: in a study done on 1,000,000 employees in 2,000 different workplaces on choosing mutual funds for their retirement plan, for every 10 extra mutual funds that employees were offered, 2% more did not choose anything. These employees lost in the process up to $5,000, the matching money from their employer.
3. If a decision turns out imperfect, it is easy to imagine there was a better decision to be made. Hence, regret will very likely occur, as well as anticipated regret.
4. Opportunity cost: even if the choice we made is great, we could have made an even better choice. Cartoon: if all millionaires living on a busy New York street with scarce parking went on vacation, each can think “Damn, if I were home, I could park anywhere”.
5. Unrealistic expectations: With so many options, one has to be perfect. It is very easy to imagine there exists a “perfect” product, service, or lifestyle choice; hence, reality will prove any actual choice to be a disappointment. It becomes impossible to be pleasantly surprised.
6. Self-blame: If there are so many choices and you make a choice that turns out bad, who is to blame? You. Clinical depression has exploded in industrialized nations.

The key to happiness: low expectations.

The cause of the choice paradox is affluence. On the other hand, in other parts of the world, choice is too little. The proposed solution is income redistribution. This will make happier not only the beneficiaries of extra income, but those who would have less money and less choices to make.

Talk #86: Julia Sweeney – Letting go of God

Very entertaining and clever talk. Atheist comedian Julia Sweeney smoothly starts her deconversion story with the Mormon story… which seems truly ridiculous, in the probable agreement of the audience. Then, she relates the hilarious childhood story of discovering her astrological sign… but I can’t tell more about that without spoiling the fun.

It’s a pity the video is incomplete, but there is some extra audio at http://www.digitalfreethought.com/Audio/juliasweeney.mp3.

No ground-breaking ideas here, but very entertaining talks, like every single other TED talk I’ve seen so far.

Tony Robbins made a good point that people complain about lack of resources (time, money, technology, contacts, experience, management), but in actuality what they lack is resourcefulness (creativity, determination, love, curiosity, passion, resolve).

You know how they say “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?” Uh-uh. Your call may be recorded… so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. Which they do!

The attached screenshot is Microsoft Word with all toobars enabled. The moral is: Simplicity sells.

A speech by Hans Rosling from GapMinder.org.

Yes, things have become much better in Africa or South-east Asia, than you would have thought. Hans presents and excellent piece of software for intuitively visualizing global statistics data. Google has seen the opportunity and made it available at http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Transcript of a key section of Dr. de Grey’s speech:

“Most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to a 1,000 or more, they think that I’m saying that we’re going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging, that we’re going to live to 1,000 or more. I’m not saying that at all.

I’m saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. They’ll never be perfect, but we’ll be able to fix the things that 200 year olds die of, before we have any 200 year olds.”

Fits nicely with my purpose in life.

See also the synopsis at live forever.

My first TED video:

Interface-free touch-driven computer screen
Awesome! Go watch it!

Jeff Han is a research scientist for NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the inventor of an “interface-free” touch-driven computer screen. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32)

2008 EDIT: Apple’s iPhone has has tremendous success using this multi-point touch screen interface.