Anti-Blind: How do you see what you can't see? | Tristan Harris | TEDxSanFrancisco

how do you see what you can't see I want to talk to you about something that goes under the radar at places like Ted and in general in the technology industry which is that no matter how incredible our technology gets or the new things coming down the pipe blockchain artificial intelligence medicine there's something that's not changing which is something that I spent the last few years of my life studying and that's the invisible blind spots or invariant parts of how our mind works so I learned to think this way when I was a magician as a kid this is my mother's birthday party and I was fascinated because magic teaches you about these consistent blind spots these things that all minds don't see right it's it's it you could be a quantum physicist doesn't matter what age you are doesn't matter what language you speak you could even be a psychologist and study the mind every day and you still wouldn't see how a magic trick works which is fascinating right because it's not about what our mind knows it's about how our mind works and there's blind spots consistent ways that our mind doesn't see what it doesn't see and that's why the whole conversation is in our blind spot and I wanted to talk about it let me give you an example first if I tell you don't think of an elephant and just tell yourself don't think of an elephant immediately your mind sort of automatically thinks of an elephant right and that's one of the features of this sort of automatic processing so it turns out there was a study done that 70% of Facebook users actually only read the headline of science stories before commenting but the funny even funnier thing about this story is that the actual remainder of this story was filled with Latin nonsense and it was 10:00 and it was a test to see how many people would share it and it was shared by 50,000 people and generated a firestorm of comments sort of a joke on the whole thing except the thing is that this is actually our daily internet life six out of ten links on the Internet are shared without ever having been clicked in other words people are more likely to have shared an article than to have Reddit so we're we're basically spreading our blind spots all around and having these things spread and now it might seem small but if you actually bubble it all the way up to the top of Facebook about a month ago Facebook fired its entire human editorial news team there used to be a team of people working at Facebook who checked the headlines and said you know there anything inappropriate we should monitor and they fired that team and they let an algorithm run what should be seen and what they found was that the algorithm saw things just like we do that the more people share something means it's at the top and the number one story that day was a totally fabricated story that had no bearing in reality and if you think about this for a second the number one news source for 40 percent of the American population in an election year is Facebook so do we want things that just see things by how we share them for what it could share the most to be the way we see our world or make a concrete example in medicine we have more medical technology and surgery and knowledge than we've ever had before and at the same time human errors still persist in fact about 25% of hospitalized patients will be further harmed by just totally accidental human errors if you go in for surgery there's 40 surgeries every single week in the United States where someone walks out with surgery on the wrong part of their body all do by simple human mental accidents the things we don't see that we don't see if we called it a disease it would be the number three leading cause of deaths in the United States behind heart disease and cancer so this is totally in our blind spot if you had another public issue of concern and let's say you were a business and you didn't want people to know about it what would you do if there's some big public issue well one strategy you can use almost like a magician would think is you can cast doubt about an issue and you can say well the science isn't really clear the jury's still out its controversial we don't really know yet right this is a strategy and in fact this is the exact strategy that the tobacco company used saying that doubt is product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the minds of the general public so these things work and they're not changing and that's why I wanted to talk about it today because while all of this other stuff gets better the human condition stays the same and no amount of technology can can hide that so one of my favorite media theorist is Neil postman and he wrote this in 1980s there is no escaping from ourselves the human dilemma is as it has always been and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves and technological glory now I am a technologist I actually believe a lot in the power of technology but the reason I wanted to talk about this topic is because if we strap technology onto our blind spots then we end up with the kinds of things that we're seeing here and so I wanted to talk about two reasons why this matters now so if we've always had blind spots we've always had them they're part of our nature why should we care about them now right we've always had marketing and advertising we've always had these tactics well the two reasons are that the consequences are getting bigger right big issues in society are actually stopped by our inability to call out these kinds of tactics as they're being used and the second issue is that it's as if we're plugging our technology we're filling in our blind spots into the amplifier that is our technology so we're spreading our blind spots around and we can't see what we can't see at a massive scale so I think that this signals a kind of new period of human development in human history in the sense that if we have human beings growing up from this whole lineage and we had the Enlightenment in which we put all new Authority in daring to know we essentially put Authority in the power of the human mind we said individuals the power of the individual to choose their life to make choices to use reason and that got us really far I don't want to discount that that's an amazing thing but what we're coming up against is essentially the limits of reason itself we're coming up against the limits of our own instrument of our own mind and what I'd like to talk to you about today is why we need to dare to know ourselves and not just that we're bigger and better and we stand taller but we actually look back at what we are and see ourselves honestly for the little tiny mistakes and quick quirks that we that we have and I think this involves also having a new identity as a person almost like I became sort of vegetarian recently in that moment when you think of yourself as a vegetarian you actually think of yourself in a different way I think we need to think of ourselves as being built into is built into our nature is that there are things that we don't see that we're not seeing now what would that do well today we have this blind spot based world and imagine if instead of that beyond that we focused on creating an anti blind world I don't mean anti blind like against I mean anti blind by putting blind spots at the center of how we design all of our institutions by putting blind spots at the center of what we want our world to look like and acknowledging our true nature and not just in a negative way but actually to help us see all the things that we can't see so what would that look like well one of my favorite metaphors for this is actually a blind spot mirror in a car you know when we have these things we acknowledge that there's something we don't see that we don't see and we put it right there and it requires not just this but also that the person knows this right we all accept that there's just things we don't see that we don't see but imagine we could instrument our whole environment to do this for ourselves everywhere and it would be an empowering thing a good example of this in medicine is in Atul Gawande book the checklist manifesto where he said he basically demonstrated that by introducing a quick safety checklist before during and after surgeries you can simply you can reduce these kinds of medical accidents in huge dramatic ways just having doctors voice their names to each other before a surgery reduces death and complications by 35% because it it quiets invisible power dynamics and makes it safer for people to talk to each other so just these tiny changes but imagine this is anti blind medicine imagine anti blind an anti blind internet that saw that there was more to people than just what they clicked on that we actually desire more than simply the feedback loop of what we click on imagine anti blind media that acknowledge that people are persuadable and they called out persuaded persuasive tactics as they were being used imagine anti blind organizations that that knew about the the narrowing qualities of groupthink and the blind spots that groupthink creates and created practices and strategies to diversify thinking to create counter teams red teams that help the regular group see more of what they're not seeing this is used by many different successful companies and anti blind science that dealt with the issues of null submits and yeah so sometimes this is also not easy I'm not saying this is easy by the way in fact for me personally I have a story in which this was highly uncomfortable so when I was 24 living here in San Francisco I was CEO of a startup company that I really deeply deeply believe in and I was so good at convincing people whether there were investors or my employees or you know anyone about the ideas and selling my ideas to them that I didn't see how I was selling the ideas to myself and when you're running a company there's a lot of pressure obviously to sort of know what you're doing to be certain about what you're doing and there's never a safe place to go about your doubts about what you're doing or to even question your own thinking and I think this was highly highly important and I I had a kind of a Hungerford and talked to some friends and it turned out they had it too so we started something called doubt club and doubt club was basically a support group where we just met highly confidential to talk about our doubts about our companies our products our missions in our lives and it led to really profound changes in directions in our lives for all of us including frankly the reason I'm probably here on stage today is be cuz of doubt Club and it really think I really think that it helped instrument a different way of seeing myself I mean I started to see myself as someone it took it took me seeing myself as someone who didn't see the whole picture right it helped me realize that there's always more to be seen than what I'm seeing and you can imagine if a whole society did that imagine if a whole society realized that we can lean on each other to help us see more of what we're not seeing and that there's always more to see we've changed our collective identity before in subtle ways but one example that I like is when this picture was taken in 1968 when the Apollo moon mission turned around from the moon and it took this picture of Earth and the astronauts who experienced this had a profound intimate felt experience which they later called the overview effect there was something about seeing the earth as this thing that you're obviously it's not like the earth was new but when you're on it you see it as this big indestructible thing and when you're on the moon you see just how incredible it is that we're even here right now and you see how vulnerable and sacred maybe there might be something worth protecting but they had to look back on it and this photo was partially credited with helping to galvanize the environmental movement and the Environmental Protection Agency was started two years later and it helped create a whole new consciousness a whole new way of seeing ourselves now what I kind of would like to argue is what if we had something like that for ourselves and our own humanity what if we'd be willing to look back at our own humanity and the sort of sacredness of our mind maybe there's something to protect like an environmental movement for our mind that we might want to hold sacred and protect and what would that look like you know I don't have all the answers I've been thinking about this for a little while but I think it's one of the most important conversations that we're collectively not talking about by definition because it's in our blind spot but if you think about it we're one of the Ray species who could ever even do this right we don't know of any other animal living that can introspect enough to see the limits of its own thinking and if there are existential threats that we face right now this is a rare opportunity for us to actually meet them I think we can and I hope you'll join me thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 42,594

Rating: 4.8805971 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Behavior, Brain, Change, Cognitive science, Communication, Creativity, Design, Technology, Value

Id: TQPD2Qv4Pls

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016