How to let go of being a good person and become a better person-Ted talk review
You can view the Original presentation by the Presenter at the link mentioned herein-Click here
Prelude
The most alarming thing to start off would be that of the Speaker’s credentials, which says that the Speaker is a social scientists who studies the psychology of Good people.
The question that we wish to ask here would be, on what basis was the classification done, specially when it comes to the Speaker’s choice of selecting the “Good People”
It would be have been much better to our readers if the Sample data set for the Speaker’s research were mentioned in the Ted, talk. Since we would now know who the Good people are.
The Talk gives us more Laughter than being Critical of it
The Speaker central point is this, “let go the good in you, to become a better person”
From a critique point of view, the Speaker has no understanding as to what constitutes “Good”. If you were to ask us in brevity as to what the Speaker is aiming to say, then we would sum it up as follows, ” you don’t need to be Positive, but be Positiv-ish”
The Real Core of the Talk
This talk is a real joke and more so runs merely on the Speaker’s ability to draw inferences that has no Scientific standing. The title of the talk in itself, How to let go of being a “good” person — and become a better person, raises questions as to what the speaker is trying to convey?
The Speaker, starts off saying, “I’m a social scientist. I study the psychology of good people”. The question here would be, what is the base on which you classify a person to be “Good”? If a person is fleeing from battle grounds of Poverty, Hardship, Bonded labor, Racial discrimination, Color discrimination, tribal justice, Civil war, etcetera, in to a land of plenty, what would you call him/her, Good or Bad?
You may call him/her, “good”, since you are not the one who would be supporting the person, where as the locals might call him/her to be bad, or even use words which are more intense, for now, their burden through taxes has increased.
The underlying point that we wish to mention herein is that, the term, “Good” or “Bad”, is more a relative term, and context ought to be considered first, which the Speaker has totally ignored.
Second Example for “Good” or “Evil”
You standing in line to collect your boarding pass, and the line is exhaustive, you are hungry and more so you have this hay way drop in your Blood sugar.
Suddenly, the man behind you, offers you a cookie. You thank him in amazement for his benevolent gesture and more so for his timely help, and then snack on it.
But you didn’t notice that the cookie is glazed with peanut cream and your skin has a particular way of reacting to peanut products, by producing bumps and sporadic rashes all accompanied by uncontrolled itching.
It never occurred to you to check on the cookie’s contents, neither did the person was aware of your medical condition. You burst forth with pain, discomfort, itching, redness, shame, and tears. Now your condition has gone from bad to worse.
You cuss, scream and make a scene. The good compliments that you once bestowed has perished, replacing all of your words which were “Good” in the first place to “Evil”
The question here is, was the man, Good or Evil? And how would you define your reaction? Good or Evil.
How the definition of being Good, changes with Time
The point here is, all human reactive sentiments are relative in nature. When as a child is growing up in a conservative family set up, you have a set of dos and do not’s.
The dos, will keep the Child in the good books of its parents and relatives and will in turn earn a reward, which might be a chocolate.
Now, most times, at least for a child, these restrictions will often seem and appear as a form of torment to self and to the freedom it wants to enjoy.
Thus, inwardly, the child, defines his or her parents to be someone who imposes draconian restrictions on personal freedom and liberty. In short, the teacher, the parents, and their conservative society in which the child, thrives are considered, “Bad”, or “evil” from the perspective of the child.
Change in Behavior
But this behavior and tendency changes later on in the life of the child. Specially when the child has grown up to be a young man or a young lady and has now clear set focus on self and the future. With the realization as to how life would have been, had he or she, not listened and obeyed to the imposed instructions of his/her parents.
The point we are trying to here is, what appears to be bad tentatively may Not be classified bad in the long run, and vice versa.
Now for the erroneous assumptions on the part of the Speaker
Speaker states that Bounded Rationality works on the idea, that the “Human mind has limited storage resources”, which is totally incorrect.
Let us give you the principle on which Bounded Rationality works. Bounded Rationality, functions on the idea that in decision making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.
That means, Bounded Rationality is individual specific and thus cannot be generalized to include all of the Human mind- an Error on part of the Speaker.
Just because Einstein slept with a Metal spoon, does not mean you too can do that
Let us explain, Einstein’s ability to sleep with a metal spoon for increased creativity may not even have the same impact on someone who is trying to ape his behavior.
In other words, your decision making on a particular scenario is largely dependent on your acquired expertise. Going a bit further, the ability to push 200 pounds on the bench press is dependent on the muscle power of the individual.
To make generalized prepositions that all who workout will have this ability is classified a joke. Which is what the Speaker is attempting here.
The Speaker has no idea as to how the Human mind works
Next, the Speaker makes sweeping statements with regard to the processing powers of the human mind. Just for facts, scientifically, there is no concrete definition to define the human mind.
From the field of Neural sciences, an average human mind can process up to 400 billion bits of information, out of which, 2000 of them are done consciously.
So, coming back to the Speaker’s claim that a mere 11 million bits of information is coming in to the mind and that a mere 40 are handled consciously, is a biggest joke and mockery to proven Brain sciences.
Irrelevant Examples
Next, the Speaker connects information which are not relevant to drive home the argument. What has an individual not locating a butter in the fridge has to do with becoming a good or a better person?
If you can’t find butter, then you should look up to the way the Brain is wired. In this case, it is totally wired differently for a Man and a Woman. Going further, women can’t read maps. This is also a proven neural scientific fact.
Conclusion: The Speaker seemed to be totally unaware of Neural sciences and yet seems to make passing statements under the claim of being scientific.
Bounded Ethicality and Red zone defensiveness
Coming to the Speaker’s line of work on bounded Ethicality and the red-zone defensiveness, where the Speaker narrates an experience as to receiving an email from her student, accusing the Speaker of being a sexist because of the reading assigned, which of course has been the reading that was being assigned for years by the Speaker.
We observer here that the Speaker just to maintain the flow of the talk goes on a defensive note, as to calling the assigned reading passage, to be a mistake on her part, which in fact is not.
For the simple reason, just because some student shoots an email, accusing the Speaker to be a sexist, all because of an assigned reading paragraph, shouldn’t be the cause to alarm.
For if everybody were to place their foot in their mouth and start this band wagon, then no one should be studying any branch of social sciences.
For all of the established contributions in this branch has only been from Male professors.
Just to keep everyone happy, the Speaker accepts that it is indeed her mistake
This also raises another alarm bell, as to why so easily the Speaker accepts this to be her flaw and then mentions the following sentences, “they leave us fighting for the good person identity”
Again, the Speaker commits the error of generalization, for she should have said, “the accusation from the student had left her fighting for the good person identity”
For, if someone out of sheer laziness and lackadaisically behavior were to shoot a foolish email claiming the lecturer to be sexist, then it is imperative for the lecturer to stand ground and not simply sway with the student.
For this day and age, 98% of them come to classes merely to warm the benches up.
We are working hard to protect the good person-No we don’t
The Speaker then goes on to make this statement that,” we don’t realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior, that in fact, we’re working so hard to protect that good person identity, to keep out of that red zone”
Again, this is a generalization on the part of the Speaker. It would be better to say that it is the Speaker who is particularly bothered about staying clean and far from the red-zone, not us.
For according to us, no one who claims to be good is good and that being good is an everyday challenge, you can only try your best.
Concluding Remarks
We cannot take this anymore, for now the Speaker is introducing a new term called as goodish, and then goes on to define that a good-ish person is someone who is better at noticing his/her own mistakes and doesn’t have to wait for people to point them out.
Oh yeah! so you can see the blog in your own eye? That is nice but the irony is when we cannot see our own face and would require a mirror to tell us and more so even then we would still need an acclamation of our fellowmen to say the things, the good, the bad and the ugly, on our looks, here we have a Speaker who talks about being goodish, and that the goodish person has the ability to note all of his/her flaws.
If that be the contention of the speaker, then when the student accused the speaker of being a sexist, was she a goodish then or not?
Our final points: clearly this shows the standard of our higher education and the Research that is done in these universities.
When we clearly know deep within ourselves, that we are not “Good”, here we have a Speaker, talking about fairy tales and Paddington journeys.
The irony is, there are people who are all smiles.
