About this talk Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.
About Jared Diamond Jared Diamond is an award-winning scholar of ecology, biology and history, and best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
ABOUT THE LECTURE: Neither philosophers nor economists can satisfactorily explain some quirky aspects of decision-making, such as why most people elect to receive a 30-minute massage in the next two weeks, as opposed to a 45-minute massage a few months down the road. Shane Frederick teases apart preferences like these, coming at them from different perspectives, and raises questions about the degree to which rational thinking drives human choices. Frederick’s talk looks at how people weigh the future when making choices. Some studies have shown that “people give less weight to the future – they discount future utility the way bankers discount future streams of income,” says Frederick. But other research Frederick cites demonstrates that people like to save the best for last. In ordering a sequence, study participants chose to eat strawberries, then liquorice, and then jelly beans -- holding out for “the better thing later,” in this case, the sweetest treat. In another example of people preferring “improving sequences,” subjects chose to dine at a quotidian Greek grill first, followed by a fancy French restaurant. But in a “weird preference reversal,” people chose to pay more for a “declining sequence,” where they would eat first at the expensive French restaurant, and then at the Greek grill. There is incoherence in people’s preferences, which has long puzzled thinkers from different disciplines. According to Frederick, economists say there’s no arguing with tastes, while philosophers prefer to think that rationality requires some concern for the future. We all have a stake in such debates, points out Frederick. In the real world, individuals make decisions about current behaviors that have future impacts, such as drinking, exercising, and tanning. Societies make decisions about vaccinations and tapping energy resources that impact the climate. Do humans value or discount future life? Frederick notes a study that asked people to choose between Program A, which saves 300 lives in your generation, but no lives in your children’s and grandchildren’s time; or Program B, which saves 100 lives in your generation, and in each of the succeeding generations. 80% of participants preferred Program B, because it seemed fairer. But Frederick cautioned that whether people clearly place a value on their future selves, or the future of others remains a continuing controversy, with much depending on how researchers frame their studies and questions. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Shane Frederick's primary research interests are judgment and choice heuristics, intertemporal choice, preference elicitation procedures, the relation between IQ and decision making strategies, consumer regret, and biases in predicting the preferences of others. He has been at Sloan since 2001. Prior to that, he was a research associate and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. He received a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999, an M.S. in Resource Management from Simon Fraser University in 1993 and a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin in 1990.
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index): Video length is 0:44:31.
Author Robert Frank discusses his book "The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas" as a part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place on July 23, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
"James Randi is an internationally known magician (as The Amazing Randi), psychic debunker, and winner of a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant.' He was a founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). He is perhaps best known for offering $1,000,000 (via the James Randi Educational Foundation) to anyone who can successfully demonstrate psychic powers under conditions mutually agreed on by the challenger and himself. Starting with a $10,000 prize over 25 years ago, no claimant to psychic powers has ever won the money.
Randi has pursued 'psychic' spoonbenders, exposed the dirty tricks of faith healers, investigated homeopathic water 'with a memory,' and generally been a thorn in the sides of those who try to pull the wool over the public's eyes in the name of the supernatural.
This event took place August 6, 2007 at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA."
Author Michael Dobbs visits Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA, to discuss his book "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War". This event took place on October 8, 2008, as part of the Authors@google series. In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. In One Minute to Midnight, Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon. Michael Dobbs was born in Belfast, Ireland, and educated at the University of York, with fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. He is a reporter for The Washington Post, where he spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. His Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire was a finalist for a 1997 PEN award. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
World Affairs Council of Northern California San Francisco, CA Jun 11th, 2008 Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush. Engel, who reported as a freelance journalist for ABC News during the initial US invasion of Iraq, was NBC News' lead Iraq correspondent from 2003 until his appointment to Beirut Bureau Chief in May 2006. He joins the Council to discuss his experiences as a reporter in Iraq and his new book War Journal - My Five Years in Iraq - The World Affairs Council of Northern California
