esalesky/ted-im2im-zhcn-en · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 3 289	filename stringlengths 8 13	image imagewidth (px) 256 256
How did you do both?	en-193101.png
NL: Here's where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished.	en-193102.png
which we're trying to save and it requires saving.	en-193103.png
But...	en-193104.png
anything I may have accomplished is — my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut.	en-193105.png
I am convinced we're all responsible for doing as much as I may have accomplished.	en-193106.png
And I understand what you're saying — EH: It's an articulate deflection — NL: But you have to really buy into the size and scope of the creator's enterprise, here.	en-193107.png
EH: But here on this planet you have really mattered.	en-193108.png
NL: I'm a son of a gun.	en-193109.png
(Laughter) EH: So I have one more question for you.	en-193110.png
How old do you feel?	en-193111.png
NL: I am the peer of whoever I'm talking to.	en-193112.png
EH: Well, I feel 93.	en-193113.png
(Applause) NL: We out of here?	en-193114.png
EH: Well, I feel 93 years old, but I hope to one day feel as young as the person I'm sitting across from.	en-193115.png
Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Norman Lear.	en-193116.png
(Applause) NL: Thank you. (Applause)	en-193117.png
Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second.	en-193118.png
How does light look in slow motion?	en-193119.png
Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on.	en-193120.png
Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves.	en-193121.png
As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside.	en-193122.png
So, Superman can fly.	en-193123.png
Some other heroes can become invisible.	en-193124.png
And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light.	en-193125.png
And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it.	en-193126.png
There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door.	en-193127.png
Can we see it in full 3D?	en-193128.png
Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes.	en-193129.png
A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired.	en-193130.png
The book is called " The Blank Slate, " based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience.	en-193131.png
The " blank slate " was an influential idea in the 20th century.	en-193132.png
There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense.	en-193133.png
As many people have told me over the years, anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesn't all come from the outside.	en-193134.png
Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet won't, presumably because of some innate different between them.	en-193135.png
And anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable.	en-193136.png
There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, we're not born blank slates.	en-193137.png
One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals.	en-193138.png
If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a — kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here.	en-193139.png
But if you instead look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6,000-odd cultures.	en-193140.png
The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all, and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning, weapons, weather, attempts to control, the color white and a worldview.	en-193141.png
Also, genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured.	en-193142.png
This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they — using MRI — measured the distribution of gray matter — that is, the outer layer of the cortex — in a large sample of pairs of people.	en-193143.png
They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme, in which no difference is coded as purple, and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation.	en-193144.png
Well, this is what happens when you pair people up at random.	en-193145.png
By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex.	en-193146.png
This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA — fraternal twins.	en-193147.png
And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin.	en-193148.png
And here's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA — namely, clones or identical twins.	en-193149.png
And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter.	en-193150.png
Now, these aren't just differences in anatomy, like the shape of your ear lobes, but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams: "Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally."	en-193151.png
As you can see, there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap, meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney.	en-193152.png
Now, the cartoon is not such an exaggeration, because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities.	en-193153.png
And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied — but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth.	en-193154.png
My favorite example is a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad.	en-193155.png
Now — the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results — namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities.	en-193156.png
Now, given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question, why should it have been such an appealing notion?	en-193157.png
Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial.	en-193158.png
The foremost is that if we're blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal, because zero equals zero equals zero.	en-193159.png
But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others, and according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality.	en-193160.png
Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates, we can perfect mankind — the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering.	en-193161.png
Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence.	en-193162.png
Well, in the book, I argue that these are, in fact, non sequiturs.	en-193163.png
And just to make a long story short: first of all, the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness.	en-193164.png
Also, even if we were born with certain ignoble motives, they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior.	en-193165.png
That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts, and some of them can inhibit others.	en-193166.png
For example, there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense, and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history.	en-193167.png
So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed, that's not the only thing in the skull, and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them.	en-193168.png
And needless to say, there were certain risks in taking on these subjects.	en-193169.png
When I wrote a first draft of the book, I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments, and here are some of the reactions that I got: "Better get a security camera for your house."	en-193170.png
" Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies. " " Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio. " "Do you have tenure?"	en-193171.png
(Laughter) Well, the book came out in October, and nothing terrible has happened.	en-193172.png
I — I like — There was indeed reason to be nervous, and there were moments in which I did feel nervous, knowing the history of what has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences.	en-193173.png
There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings.	en-193174.png
And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps.	en-193175.png
My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers, and published some data showing that left-handers are, on average, more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan.	en-193176.png
It's not clear, by the way, since then, whether that is an accurate generalization, but the data at the time seemed to support that.	en-193177.png
the night is young, but the book has been out for half a year, and nothing terrible has happened.	en-193178.png
None of the dire professional consequences has taken place — I haven't been exiled from the city of Cambridge.	en-193179.png
But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received.	en-193180.png
I'll just put that list up for a few seconds, and see if you can guess which two — I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews.	en-193181.png
It's not violence and war, it's not race, it's not gender, it's not Marxism, it's not Nazism.	en-193182.png
They are: the arts and parenting.	en-193183.png
(Laughter) So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses, and I'll let you decide if whether they — the claims are really that outrageous.	en-193184.png
Let me start with the arts.	en-193185.png
I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art.	en-193186.png
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts.	en-193187.png
Visual arts — decoration of surfaces and bodies — appears to be a human universal.	en-193188.png
Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the 20th century, the arts are frequently said to be in decline.	en-193189.png
And I have a collection, probably 10 or 15 headlines, from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time.	en-193190.png
And a more recent one: " The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical.	en-193191.png
Well, in fact, the arts are not in decline.	en-193192.png
I don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room, but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent.	en-193193.png
There are, of course, entirely new art forms and new media, many of which you've heard over these few days.	en-193194.png
The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres.	en-193195.png
One of them is in elite art since the 1930s — say, the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras, where most of the repertory is before 1930, or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums.	en-193196.png
In literary criticism and analysis, probably 40 or 50 years ago, literary critics were a kind of cultural hero; now they're kind of a national joke.	en-193197.png
And the humanities and arts programs in the universities, which by many measures, indeed are in decline.	en-193198.png
Students are staying away in droves, universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities.	en-193199.png
Well, here's a diagnosis.	en-193200.png

How did you do both?

en-193101.png

NL: Here's where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished.

en-193102.png

which we're trying to save and it requires saving.

en-193103.png

But...

en-193104.png

anything I may have accomplished is — my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut.

en-193105.png

I am convinced we're all responsible for doing as much as I may have accomplished.

en-193106.png

And I understand what you're saying — EH: It's an articulate deflection — NL: But you have to really buy into the size and scope of the creator's enterprise, here.

en-193107.png

EH: But here on this planet you have really mattered.

en-193108.png

NL: I'm a son of a gun.

en-193109.png

(Laughter) EH: So I have one more question for you.

en-193110.png

How old do you feel?

en-193111.png

NL: I am the peer of whoever I'm talking to.

en-193112.png

EH: Well, I feel 93.

en-193113.png

(Applause) NL: We out of here?

en-193114.png

EH: Well, I feel 93 years old, but I hope to one day feel as young as the person I'm sitting across from.

en-193115.png

Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Norman Lear.

en-193116.png

(Applause) NL: Thank you. (Applause)

en-193117.png

Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second.

en-193118.png

How does light look in slow motion?

en-193119.png

Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on.

en-193120.png

Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves.

en-193121.png

As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside.

en-193122.png

So, Superman can fly.

en-193123.png

Some other heroes can become invisible.

en-193124.png

And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light.

en-193125.png

And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it.

en-193126.png

There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door.

en-193127.png

Can we see it in full 3D?

en-193128.png

Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes.

en-193129.png

A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired.

en-193130.png

The book is called " The Blank Slate, " based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience.

en-193131.png

The " blank slate " was an influential idea in the 20th century.

en-193132.png

There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense.

en-193133.png

As many people have told me over the years, anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesn't all come from the outside.

en-193134.png

Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet won't, presumably because of some innate different between them.

en-193135.png

And anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable.

en-193136.png

There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, we're not born blank slates.

en-193137.png

One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals.

en-193138.png

If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a — kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here.

en-193139.png

But if you instead look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6,000-odd cultures.

en-193140.png

The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all, and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning, weapons, weather, attempts to control, the color white and a worldview.

en-193141.png

Also, genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured.

en-193142.png

This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they — using MRI — measured the distribution of gray matter — that is, the outer layer of the cortex — in a large sample of pairs of people.

en-193143.png

They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme, in which no difference is coded as purple, and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation.

en-193144.png

Well, this is what happens when you pair people up at random.

en-193145.png

By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex.

en-193146.png

This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA — fraternal twins.

en-193147.png

And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin.

en-193148.png

And here's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA — namely, clones or identical twins.

en-193149.png

And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter.

en-193150.png

Now, these aren't just differences in anatomy, like the shape of your ear lobes, but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams: "Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally."

en-193151.png

As you can see, there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap, meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney.

en-193152.png

Now, the cartoon is not such an exaggeration, because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities.

en-193153.png

And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied — but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth.

en-193154.png

My favorite example is a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad.

en-193155.png

Now — the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results — namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities.

en-193156.png

Now, given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question, why should it have been such an appealing notion?

en-193157.png

Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial.

en-193158.png

The foremost is that if we're blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal, because zero equals zero equals zero.

en-193159.png

But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others, and according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality.

en-193160.png

Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates, we can perfect mankind — the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering.

en-193161.png

Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence.

en-193162.png

Well, in the book, I argue that these are, in fact, non sequiturs.

en-193163.png

And just to make a long story short: first of all, the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness.

en-193164.png

Also, even if we were born with certain ignoble motives, they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior.

en-193165.png

That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts, and some of them can inhibit others.

en-193166.png

For example, there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense, and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history.

en-193167.png

So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed, that's not the only thing in the skull, and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them.

en-193168.png

And needless to say, there were certain risks in taking on these subjects.

en-193169.png

When I wrote a first draft of the book, I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments, and here are some of the reactions that I got: "Better get a security camera for your house."

en-193170.png

" Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies. " " Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio. " "Do you have tenure?"

en-193171.png

(Laughter) Well, the book came out in October, and nothing terrible has happened.

en-193172.png

I — I like — There was indeed reason to be nervous, and there were moments in which I did feel nervous, knowing the history of what has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences.

en-193173.png

There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings.

en-193174.png

And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps.

en-193175.png

My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers, and published some data showing that left-handers are, on average, more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan.

en-193176.png

It's not clear, by the way, since then, whether that is an accurate generalization, but the data at the time seemed to support that.

en-193177.png

the night is young, but the book has been out for half a year, and nothing terrible has happened.

en-193178.png

None of the dire professional consequences has taken place — I haven't been exiled from the city of Cambridge.

en-193179.png

But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received.

en-193180.png

I'll just put that list up for a few seconds, and see if you can guess which two — I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews.

en-193181.png

It's not violence and war, it's not race, it's not gender, it's not Marxism, it's not Nazism.

en-193182.png

They are: the arts and parenting.

en-193183.png

(Laughter) So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses, and I'll let you decide if whether they — the claims are really that outrageous.

en-193184.png

Let me start with the arts.

en-193185.png

I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art.

en-193186.png

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts.

en-193187.png

Visual arts — decoration of surfaces and bodies — appears to be a human universal.

en-193188.png

Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the 20th century, the arts are frequently said to be in decline.

en-193189.png

And I have a collection, probably 10 or 15 headlines, from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time.

en-193190.png

And a more recent one: " The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical.

en-193191.png

Well, in fact, the arts are not in decline.

en-193192.png

I don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room, but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent.

en-193193.png

There are, of course, entirely new art forms and new media, many of which you've heard over these few days.

en-193194.png

The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres.

en-193195.png

One of them is in elite art since the 1930s — say, the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras, where most of the repertory is before 1930, or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums.

en-193196.png

In literary criticism and analysis, probably 40 or 50 years ago, literary critics were a kind of cultural hero; now they're kind of a national joke.

en-193197.png

And the humanities and arts programs in the universities, which by many measures, indeed are in decline.

en-193198.png

Students are staying away in droves, universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities.

en-193199.png

Well, here's a diagnosis.

en-193200.png