Jonathan Haidt's Bad Idea 1 - What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Weaker

so bad idea number one is that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker now I wrote a book my first book is called the happiness hypothesis I gathered I read the wisdom literature of east and west and everywhere I could find I pulled out the psychological claims and then I analyzed them are they true and so every society that leaves us a wisdom literature has some insights about adversity and it is often stated like this what doesn't kill me makes me stronger so that's the wisdom principle it's the opposite of the great untruth uh and here's why it's true the most important word I can give you tonight is anti fragile if you understand this word you'll understand everything else about the talk and you'll understand that why the common things we do on campus in the last few years are mostly backfiring why they're often very badly considered so the word comes from Nasim TB he's the guy who wrote The Black Swan um and he observed that there are certain systems that need to be tested and challenged so he he he's one of the few people who correctly predicted the financial collapse in 2008 because he could see that the financialist system was fragile it had never been properly tested and so if anything goes wrong it's all going down and he was right so afterwards he's thinking about this property of systems that gets stronger when you test them and challenge them and he says there's no word in English for this he says we have the word fragile so if something is fragile then you have to protect it so if you have a wine glass and you drop it it will break and nothing good happens from that so we give our kids plastic cups like sippy cups because if they throw them on the ground they don't break plastic is resilient but does the sippy cup get better from being thrown on the ground does it age well no it doesn't do anything it just doesn't deform and so TB says we need more than that it's not just resilience we need a word for things that get better when you throw them on the floor and so he coins this term antifragile and here are the great examples our bones are anti- fragile if you take it easy on them if you lie in bed for months they will get thinner and weaker if you bang them around they get stronger because that's the way bones are they get stronger in proportion to the need um uh and the immune system is the best example so let me go into that peanut allergies have tripled they tripled between the ' 90s in about 2010 why they only went up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid peanuts so some immunologists got together to do a study in which they tested the hypothesis um that if you expose infants to peanuts it allows the immune system to actually develop you have to shock it expose it challenge it and then it gets stronger so they recruited uh they recruited um they so there's an Israeli snack food called Umba which is a corn it's a puffed corn with peanut dust on it and kids love it so they recruited 640 women who had recently given birth and whose infants were at high risk of peanut allergy because there was some other immune issue and here's what they did they said okay half of you standard advice avoid mom don't have any peanut products while you're lactating you don't want to pass the peanut proteins into your child standard advice keep your kid free of peanuts and and uh then at the age of five they tested everybody with a full immunological assay to see did their does their immune system respond to peanut proteins to peanuts and 177% of these kids had a peanut allergy following the standard advice they'll have to carry an EpiPen with them for life and they have to always worry about food because it could kill them the other half were given bomba and told here give your kid this this snack food and I mean I should read the article carefully I'm sure they monitor him they didn't just say go home and tell us if he survives but you know so I mean they you know they they watched for signs and uh uh but what happened when they tested at age five here's what they found 3% only 3% so we could essentially eliminate peanut allergy in this country if we gave kids peanuts rather than running away from peanuts so as this as the authors say our findings suggest that the standard advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in peanut allergies uh this is an example of our subtitle how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure okay let's run the experiment again only this time we'll use the whole kid all right kids are fragile protect your children you don't want them getting hurt nothing good can happen if your kid gets hurt right so you got to be there for them you've always got to be there for them because you don't want to let them go what if they get hit by a car you can't let the kid out you have to be there for the kid and if you do that you have to always be there for the kid I work in a business school and only recently are we hearing from business people who say I didn't hire this person and his mother called me so it never stops it never stops when you get on the helicopter parent whatever escalator whatever it is um it never stops uh and so um here's the way to see how quickly this changed I have a question for all of you in the audience at what age were you let out at what age could you walk out the front door no adult with you bye mom I'm going to Billy's house you walk six blocks you and Billy go down to the store buy some candy or whatever maybe maybe you don't want to that's too dangerous um you know but the point is at what age could you go out without any adult supervision and so if it was first grade you should say six if it wasn't until 11th grade you should should say 16 so please everybody think to yourself what's your number when were you L out without adult supervision not just walking to school more than walking to school okay now what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to call out your answer but first I only want people born before 1982 raise your hand if you were born before 1982 okay so you're all Gen X and Baby Boomers and a couple of greatest Generation so okay so um uh so just you what only if you just raised your hand I'm going to sweep my finger around the room and when I point to your section just yell it out loud okay what's your [Applause] number okay so that's what I always find it's six is always the mode this is what we always did always did kindergarteners are a little young but first grade that's when kids go out you go out and play come back at dinner there's other kids out there that's what we always did first grade okay some kids said some of many of you said eight so between first to third grade by third grade everyone's out okay now I'm going to skip the Millennials I'm sorry but you're not interesting because you're just transitional okay um now just gen Z that is and that's most of you students here so only so um yeah so right so this is what I always find is that for the older people that's what it is now only if you were born in 199 or later raise your hand High okay only you people as I oh oh wait and only if you were raised in the United States other countries aren't as crazy as us so only if you were born in 1995 or later and raised in the United States should you answer okay what's your [Music] number okay where's is your where's your mom is she okay so this is what I always find all right so the norm changed in the 90s beginning of the late ' 80s the norm changed in the '90s just as the crime rate was ending we had a huge crime wave from the 1960s to the 1990s just as crime was plummeting and it became safe to let kids out again we changed our minds and said oh if I ever take my eyes off you you will be abducted therefore you cannot go out you can go to practice because I will drop you off and then another adult's responsible for you until I pick you up but we will not let you out of adult sight until you are 12 that's the norm that we developed in this country in the 1990s so many of us have idilic memories of childhood or at least we see stories about it and in the '90s we said no more of this no more of this and what's the result so Peter gray is an amazing psychologist at Boston College who has done research on the effects of play we learned so much in play all mammals play there is a biological imperative for mammals to play in play we learn how to coordinate how to be empathetic how to make up rules how to enforce rules how to be flexible with rules what do you do when you don't get your way we learn almost all of our social skills in Play It's the richest source of learning for children we learn how to climb trees by climbing trees not by taking a class on tree climbing where they show you power points and so what's the effect if we suddenly take play away from children and we say no more unsupervised play everything is done by adults what's the effect the effect is a big rise in Psychopathology one of the main things we learn in play is how to handle risk for ourselves if you've noticed what kids do is when they play with something like if they get a skateboard or anything they play with it once they Master it they ramp it up they make it harder once you can skateboard you then skateboard down staircases right they kids are seeking out the level of risk that their brain needs to unfold we have to learn to face risk in order to become self-governing adults and in the '90s we said no more no more of that you just sit there on your well not on your device in the 90s but you just sit there and don't go out where I can't see you and so um as Alison gnik a developmental psychologist put it um trying to eliminate all such risks from children's lives might be dangerous there may be a psychological analog to the hygiene hypothesis which is like what I was telling you about with peanut allergies in the same way by by shielding children from every possible risk we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren't risky at all such as a speaker coming to campus who's saying things that you hate um and we may isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master in other words there is good reason to think that by protecting our children we damaged them we harmed them we we we interfered with their development so I'm not saying we need to go back to this okay this is too too much because kids could actually die and and there's research on this death does not make you stronger so that's too much but this is just right because on this playground you can get hurt and that's very important because if you let kids face situations where they can get hurt that's the only way they can learn how to not get hurt conversely if you said no let's give kids playgrounds like this this is what my kids were raised on this is what most of you right raise your hand if this is you recognize this from your childhood right this is boring you it's very hard to get hurt here and therefore there's not much you can learn it's fine for three-year-olds but not for eight-year-olds the basic dictum the basic Insight that every culture knows and it's common sense once you see it is prepare the child for the road not the road for the child because you can't fix every road that they will ever be on they have to learn how to go off-road or to on rough roads in Britain they're ahead of us on this they have all the same problems not quite as severely but their their heads of schools are beginning to understand the psychology here kids need risk and so they're beginning to put construction materials out on a playground and you know physics professors here look what this kid is going to learn he's created a lever right he's going to basically discover Archimedes for himself and if the bricks go up like that it's a lesson he will never forget unless he has Amnesia okay what do we do in America the opposite in America we say if anyone gets hurt we will ban it for everyone everywhere for all time and before we know it everything is banned um I just found this meme floating around we are all balloons filled with feelings in a world full of pins okay this would be a terrible thing to teach teenagers or children of any sort uh this I think is the one of the reasons we end up with this um so um taleb has this wonderful uh wonderful Insight in his book he says he he notes that a candle flame a candle is easily blown out a candle flame is fragile if you have a candle flame you have to protect it with a glass sleeve because any puff of wind will extinguish it but once it reaches the stage of a roaring fire the more wind the better the more wind the stronger it gets and so what TB says is you want to be the fire and wish for the wind if you get that you understand antifragility [Music]

Channel: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy

Views: 5,398

Keywords: education, universities, higher education

Id: nMQqL0zwYJo

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024