One of the newly posted Ted09 talks Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise (person) – Barry Schwartz articulates something that I often hear friends attempting to articulate, and often try to articulate myself; that we need to apply humanistic common sense to our lives. He uses a word I don’t like “Morals” for the topic. I prefer the word “Ethics, it (at least in part) avoids the implications of innate valuation (good v. bad), normative synchronization, and external enforcement(higher power). That said, he has an excellent point; that people do ridiculous things because they follow rules instead of reasoning. He uses my one of my favorite examples for the topic, education; that the highly “scripted, lock-step curriculum” is set to stave off disaster, but at the same time enforces mediocrity. I have heard from friends that the remedial curriculum designed by the woman who taught me 9th grade advanced English, who apparently only teaches people at least 2σ out from the norm in either direction, has been adopted as the STANDARD curriculum. Aside from the problems with the idea that a curriculum aimed at abnormal people will work well for “normal” people, and the concrete evidence of lowered standards, prevents teachers from tailoring to the individuals they are teaching. It implies a lack of trust in teachers which, while sadly often well founded, is demoralizing to the exceptional people, driving them out of education, perpetuating the system’s decline. There are several other good topics packed into his 20 minutes as well, its well worth the time to watch.
On a related note, I HATE his 2006 TED talk Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice, which basically argues that people are too stupid and petty to handle choice. Especially irritating is the idea that raised expectations and individual responsibility (from selection) lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction with objectively better outcomes; the thesis in general that, and I quote, “The secret to happiness is low expectations” is awful and defeatist; to me real pleasure comes from meeting high expectations, there is less satisfaction in meeting low(er) expectations. Then again, I am, for lack of a better schema, a Myers-Briggs INTJ (groups in to “Green” in the pyramid-scheme looking but easier to handle TrueColors system), and he does make reasonably compelling arguments that his thesis IS the case for a great many people, so perhaps it is just me being an outlier.
