so right now how many of you can say in
your life you have done something that
has changed the world literally change
the world how many can I see a show of
hands is my hand the only hand up well
it shouldn’t be it should be dr. Mario
Molina one of our speakers tonight who
has literally changed the world but if
you could not raise your hand
don’t despair our other guest dr. Ian
cousin is doing research that could help
inform us how we might influence the
decisions of enough people to impact the
world in a positive way I suppose
getting sounds a bit like a self-help
seminar but it is actually locust swarms
and ozone holes poles to better explain
how these issues can have such
far-reaching impact we are going to hear
from both professor Mario Molina and Ian
cousin part of what we like to see in
this in these evenings of conversations
with Nobel laureates and actually I did
not mention but in 1995 professor Molina
was shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry
for work on CFCs chlorofluorocarbons and
their impact on the ozone level so if
we’re looking for a shared area it would
seem like it’s biblically epic plagues
locusts and disappearing environment
brought on oftentimes by only human
mistakes but I’m sure when you started
your work you didn’t look at it and
saying here’s a problem I’ve got to
solve it there must have been a science
that brought you for instance in
studying chlorofluorocarbons they
weren’t particularly there wasn’t a harm
it wasn’t like cigarette smoking we were
saying this is causing cancer that they
were sprayed out of an aerosol can they
were in refrigerants rise in every car
air conditioner every refrigerator in
the home and people were breathing it no
harmful effects so why did you think
there must be some chemical reaction
happening somewhere and we don’t know
what it is well what we set out to do
together with my colleague sherry
Rowland is to find out
what happens to these components after
they are released because they were
created as miracle chemical so that they
could replace dangerous refrigerants so
these compounds were miraculous they
were fantastic they were extremely
stable but measurement showed they were
beginning to pile up in the atmosphere
so essentially we decided to find out
whether something would happen or not
because of they are so stable that’s why
they go all the way up to the
stratosphere and when they decompose
they can destroy part of the
stratosphere okay so this was just a
logical finding of what are the
consequences of human activities and so
you have to look at all the
possibilities we made the discovery
we’ll get to what happened when you told
the world about your discovery in a
moment but in did were you attracted to
the the problem of locusts is that what
drew you to this to look at group
behavior were you just interested in
group behavior and you decide well
locust azar about the biggest group we
can find well I was interested in in
generally in group behavior and looking
for for systems that we didn’t
understand how and why they grouped and
locust was very appealing because of
this huge impact that they have on the
livelihood of so many people on the
planet and in science magazine in 2004
what really triggered us was a review
that said even after 50 years of
experience fighting looks as more of an
art than a science and that’s very
embarrassing as scientists because the
individual locust is one of the best
studied organisms in neurobiology and
behavior but the last time someone put
them together to see how they swarmed
was a woman called Peggy Ellis in 1954
he published it in an obscure journal
called the locust bulletin and I think
and that’s a big seller right I’ll order
another subscription there was there was
there was really no research going on
trying to understand how they swarm and
if we don’t understand how they swarm
then there’s no hope for us to develop
control methods or more effective
control methods now when you think
you’ve made a discovery of what the
dynamic that surprises everyone because
when you say the reason locust
because their cannibal its sucking each
other it certainly surprised us it was
it was completely fortuitous are you
hesitant to release that information you
double and triple-check it because you
say this is so different well I mean
initially I I thought I was going insane
because I was putting low Christy and
I’d have to put say a hundred locust in
and then my postdoc who would take them
out eight hours later at the end of a
locust day would say you you said you
were gonna put in a hundred but they
were only 98 this happened again and
again he was a sort of
passive-aggressive frenchman and i
became quite scared and i thought you
know how are they how are they escaping
they don’t have wings and we’ve coated
the the edges with a chemical such they
can’t climb and then it was going back
to the videos we realized they were
eating each other which was completely
unexpected so this is you are what you
eat if you’re absolutely yeah one it’s a
perfectly packaged source of nutrients
it’s exactly the right composition of
fats and proteins and salts in the blood
the percentage of salt of a locust is
the exact percentage that they most
desire we have done experiments with
moment crickets in Utah and Idaho where
we put down different salt
concentrations and they will scramble
and fight over 0.25 molar salt
concentration they taste it with their
feet and they fight vigorously and
that’s exactly the concentration of salt
in their blood so they’re finely tuned
to a cannibalistic lifestyle this may be
a new vampire series I can see it coming
now to the National Geographic Channel
all right when you made your discovery
was there any hesitancy to release what
you were finding because people thought
we’ve got the miracle as you described
it the miracle chemicals that have made
our lives so much more convenient and
easy and by the way at the time you made
this discovery of what
chlorofluorocarbons were doing people
had an average of how many aerosol cans
in their home this is how ubiquitous
they were at the time about 40 the
average American had 40 aerosol cans in
their home at the time we were dependent
upon it so were you hesitant to release
this there was some hesitancy as a
scientist to go and communicate with the
media because it was not very well
perceived um you had to publish in
scientific journals but quit with my
colleague I remembers and if not us who
and even if not
now when so we made a decision we had to
go out and talk to the not just to the
media but to decision-makers and it was
not very well seen by the entire
community but I’m glad we did because we
were convinced that the threat was real
and eventually of course it that that’s
came to me at the time you said it
really was the chlorine in this
combination it wasn’t the carbon that’s
released the chlorine destroying the
ozone layer right and then immediately
I’m sure industry ran up and said thank
you for stopping us before we destroyed
the plan well it’s interesting that’s
one of the main differences with climate
change because these compounds were
manufactured essentially by a small
number of large chemical companies which
initially were of course very reluctant
to do anything about it and they said we
won’t stop unless this makes sense and
it doesn’t make sense to us but they
made a statements if the science proves
to be correct we will stop doing that
and and they that’s what they did
and of course it was coupled to this
international agreements but industry at
the end of course came along and they
were able to make replacement compounds
so that we can still use brake and air
conditioning and so on and so forth but
with compounds that do not affect the
ozone layer in a minute we’ll talk about
in the short period of time what the
change has been in reaction to
scientific information now a part of
your study you didn’t just stop with
locusts because we always like to know
how it affects us personally and since
we’re not living in areas susceptible to
locust plagues I’m sure not all group
behavior not all decisions are made by
I’m worried about the guy maybe on Wall
Street it’s eating those around you
right
that’s not our normal behavior in a
group dining right well one of one of
the the really exciting areas of science
at the moment is is really understanding
better the scientific principles of
social communication and how decisions
are made and how opinions form in
populations and how we can because we of
course are up
unfortunately we are selfish you know we
think about our own you know benefits
and we don’t necessarily care as much
about others as we as we should and so
this leads to some problems such as in
climate change how do you manage to sway
the opinion of a population such that
they can understand the scientific
material and that they will forego you
know something relatively small but
forego something on their personal
regarding their personal life for the
for the global good for the common good
and so this is a really fundamental
issue is to try to understand how and
why the opinions form in populations
individuals that actually will not be
biased will not have a pre bias in their
opinions can have a very strong
influence on the outcome they they they
encourage consensus to happen because if
you have two vying groups with no
intermediaries it’s hard for a consensus
to be achieved then let me speculate or
I find your data fascinating because
there are indeed things that can be
explained that way because there are
surveys okay so it turns out when you’re
talking about minorities the survey show
that it’s only about 10 to 12 percent of
the population at least a couple of
years ago that were really thinking this
is the climate change issues just all
the folks that it’s it’s the scientists
are crazy and so it’s clearly minority
but they were very powerful so they were
able to influence at least half the
population of course through the media
because it was there was a very well
organized and pain and so on the ozone
issue it would not have worked if it had
been up to individual initiative to stop
using CFCs yeah that’s right government
involvement and I assume the same all I
know the same will have to be with
climate change the problem is too big
you can’t just depend on everybody
changing their lightbulbs or driving a
hybrid that’s right so voluntary action
is important it won’t solve the problem
but it’s very important to show people
in decision-making positions that they
care and so politicians correspond to
what people think and so that’s why it’s
very important to have these movements
because they do affect politics
so what I’m getting at is in what do you
see today we see in there’s kind of this
general sort of ambivalent attitude
toward science what do you see in in
Princeton and what do you see it will be
San Diego III personally I think the I
think with the advent of things like
social media like I love Twitter and I
follow so many scientists and
importantly scientific journalists there
are so many good journalists out there
who are promoting science and helping
the public understanding of science and
they’re doing it you know through blogs
through Twitter and so on I think
there’s a huge community of there’s a
huge interest in science and so with
these types of media I’m very hopeful
that we can reach people who perhaps you
know that their parents or their
families inhibit them from learning
about scientific methods and the
scientific method is critical it’s
thinking in a in a critical way about
the world not just believing stuff
because you’re told that’s how it is are
you seeing the same yeah yes but I let
me put it this way when we have a
cocktail social meetings a common
opinion is chemistry in high school Wow
did I hate that it was horrible and I
had to memorize things I really hated it
see that’s a reflection of how badly
it’s a reflection of how poor we are
with education but there’s something
going on a revolution in education new
pedagogy so if the starting with k-12
science is becoming much more
interesting for kids because you have
now new techniques where they do the
experiments they work with each other in
teams and so on of course not everybody
is doing that but this is something that
the National Academies put together and
it’s having an enormous success all the
way to college in college instead of
you’re sitting and listening to a
professor but you get that you can just
do on your own reading a text but you do
active learning you’re gained working
groups and you do experiment yourself so
that’s a revolution in teaching and I
think science is it’s already happening
you can measure that with the kids
it’s
much more attractive that way than just
memorizing or having to pass tests so
there is hope that people will start
accepting sure what the scientists are
saying is happening on the planet or in
any other part of our lives it’s the
kind of looking facts then we will
analyze them say yeah that yeah it’s
it’s good that people would believe that
I don’t know how they actually climb
both airplanes it’s all based on science
otherwise why don’t they crash we want
to let you join the conversation if you
have some questions we can doctor cousin
um I’m curious if you’ve been approached
to or thinking along the lines of how to
use your work to say draw bigger crowds
in a shopping mall to a particular store
or kind of commercial applications like
that well it turns out I would have no
interest whatsoever in pursuing that
that sort of that sort of work but it
turns out that you know people used to
believe you know Stanley Milgram a
famous psychologist sort of had a study
that you know suggested that this sort
of crystallization of behavior in crowds
there’s this strong nonlinearities and
tipping points within crowd behaviors
such as you know looking looking at you
know in shops and so forth we’ve we’ve
replicated those studies and tracked
over 11,000 pedestrians and manipulated
pedestrian behavior and fortunately for
us our work is also consistent with his
but he’s a single data point whereas we
collected much more data to look at
error distributions and what we find is
that people are sufficiently sensitive
to others to gain information from them
but not so sensitive that they’ll
blindly sort of copy and and and and so
I’m thankful about that because
otherwise I think it would be a bit
scary how much we could manipulate
people’s gaze distributions I’m getting
the sense that it’s easier to make an
analogy
between human behavior and other kinds
of life if the humans have good
information about the decision of what
to do but in political life where you
were talking about the media tends to
distort that decision in a way that I
don’t see happening anywhere else in
nature so is is there really that kind
of factor going on somewhere that you
can begin to get some sense of how those
political decisions will be made based
on something that happens like that in
nature in studies by my colleague Matt’s
organic at Princeton actually he did
them when he was at Columbia University
prior to that they allowed people to log
into a website where you have songs and
this is unsigned bands and Ahn’s had
these songs before and unbeknown to you
when you log in you’re placed in one of
eight different worlds with you know
thousands of other people and in some of
these worlds you don’t get any social
information about what others thought of
the songs you just have your own view
and you rate the songs and in those
worlds there was strong correlation
between the songs that were considered
good the coastlands were considered
average and those that were bad however
in worlds where you do have social
information where you see how many times
the song had been downloaded and let’s
get a sense of how popular it is you get
massive cumulative advantage sometimes
called the Justin Timberlake effect one
very average can really reach the top or
the bottom of the chart due to the
scheme of advantage and so one way that
I like to think about this is we’ve
evolved to have a relatively slow rate
of communication verbal song and so
forth
and when you have social media or
technology this produces a very high
rate of information flow and what we
know from studies of animals and humans
is that when you have fast positive
feedback this type of cumulative
advantage then decisions become less
accurate and so you get these sort of
heard type dynamics where you know you
get this cascades of failure for example
and so it’s not necessarily
or true that more information or faster
information is necessarily a good thing
in relation to the media perhaps you’d
have the comment about media it’s
certainly has played a crucial role in
in these issues that we’re discussing
but in contrast we in the scientific
community we haven’t done very well we
scientists normally are not trained in
terms of how to communicate so normally
we just talk science and people normally
get bored so we have done a very poor
job in explaining in simple terms the
essential features of the problem that
we have so in part it’s our fault if you
want but the media I think should help
because they could get informed
better informed and that’s happening
already but rather slowly just we have
time for one more question down here
where she’s been in the various animal
experiments there’s always a leader or
leaders of the pack is there any
characteristic that determines the
physical or whatever characteristics
that’s going to make the leader and if I
take the leader and I take them out from
the head of the pack what happens to the
pack so it’s a really good question I
mean not in all groups if you think of
the locusts
there’s no leaders in those locust
swamps within fish schools or bird
flocks or ungulate herds there may or
may not be leaders but we have good
reason to think that because individuals
you know because the world is changing
and the world is dynamic because
individuals age and gain experience that
they can often be leaders so for example
in caribou migrations there’s actually a
policy to let the leaders pass for half
a day before you hunt and this actually
comes from the elders this is cultural
knowledge there hasn’t been a scientific
study but it’s highly consistent with
our simulations where we evolved
migrations and we find that in our
evolved populations we expect to have a
small proportion of leaders and a larger
proportion of followers and this means
migrations can be very susceptible to
damage and again unfortunately the
scientific evidence is not yet
accumulated but there is anecdotal
evidence that for example in herring
fishing one year they disproportionately
took large individuals not deliberately
but just by chance disproportionate at
large individuals and that completely
stopped the migration the migration
didn’t happen that year and then when it
started happening again it went to a
different location and so there is this
evidence that there is this transmission
of information and so in certain groups
this can be like a matriarch see an
elephant groups or in other groups it
may be dominant individuals that play a
role and in many of the groups we look
at its informational status leadership
is transferable dynamically depending on
who is information about what and we can
do experiments where no individual knows
the solution to a problem but by
grouping together they can solve that
problem and so they can sort of
effectively combine information if I can
make a comment that leaders in human
society they’re of course extremely
important and you can see that
historically but how do they function in
a democracy you would say okay they do
what the majority wants no I think
leaders go beyond that they convinced
population that there’s a better way to
do things and so on but it’s absolutely
crucial to elect leaders and not just to
elect people that will do what the
majority thinks anyhow that’s perhaps
pure politics and you go back on a
positive note the change that Professor
Molina made with this CFC studies and
getting the ban on coral or carbons the
ozone layer which had a hole in it is
healing itself in a relatively short
period of time on the other hand you’ve
done study of migration patterns when
migrations get interrupted
they don’t resume quickly yeah you can
actually lose them there can be a strong
historical dependence whereby if you
lose that information in the population
even if you recover the
habitats you will not recover the
migration so if any very careful and on
the global scale with climate change if
indeed these projections prove true it
will not turn around that fast
yes leo so it won’t turn around as fast
as the O’s no if temperature goes up
four degrees Celsius then sea levels
rise we won’t be able to correct our
mistake within 10 years right well first
of all then you clarified with the with
the stratospheric problem it says the
promise essentially solved what the
compounds remain for many decades there
so that’s why the ozone layer is hasn’t
healed yet but it’s it’s improving so we
will take another couple of decades but
we knew that long time ago but we
climate change it’s even worse because
we know carbon dioxide about half is
removed very fast but the remaining some
of that remains in the atmosphere for
more than a thousand meters so that’s a
big problem that we have that that’s why
we want to stop it because we’re
committing the humanity for many many
years unless of course we can extract it
out of the atmosphere eventually but
that’s a big word it’s a it takes a long
time in the bottom line Ian you better
hurry up and find out how to motivate
people Oh what cut on that yeah and
hopefully it’s not by devouring each
other locusts now thank you for joining
us it’s a most interesting evening
whenever we get National Geographic
explorers and Nobel laureates together
and I think tonight was that and we all
learned something and we learned we’d
better get our act together thank you
you
your life you have done something that
has changed the world literally change
the world how many can I see a show of
hands is my hand the only hand up well
it shouldn’t be it should be dr. Mario
Molina one of our speakers tonight who
has literally changed the world but if
you could not raise your hand
don’t despair our other guest dr. Ian
cousin is doing research that could help
inform us how we might influence the
decisions of enough people to impact the
world in a positive way I suppose
getting sounds a bit like a self-help
seminar but it is actually locust swarms
and ozone holes poles to better explain
how these issues can have such
far-reaching impact we are going to hear
from both professor Mario Molina and Ian
cousin part of what we like to see in
this in these evenings of conversations
with Nobel laureates and actually I did
not mention but in 1995 professor Molina
was shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry
for work on CFCs chlorofluorocarbons and
their impact on the ozone level so if
we’re looking for a shared area it would
seem like it’s biblically epic plagues
locusts and disappearing environment
brought on oftentimes by only human
mistakes but I’m sure when you started
your work you didn’t look at it and
saying here’s a problem I’ve got to
solve it there must have been a science
that brought you for instance in
studying chlorofluorocarbons they
weren’t particularly there wasn’t a harm
it wasn’t like cigarette smoking we were
saying this is causing cancer that they
were sprayed out of an aerosol can they
were in refrigerants rise in every car
air conditioner every refrigerator in
the home and people were breathing it no
harmful effects so why did you think
there must be some chemical reaction
happening somewhere and we don’t know
what it is well what we set out to do
together with my colleague sherry
Rowland is to find out
what happens to these components after
they are released because they were
created as miracle chemical so that they
could replace dangerous refrigerants so
these compounds were miraculous they
were fantastic they were extremely
stable but measurement showed they were
beginning to pile up in the atmosphere
so essentially we decided to find out
whether something would happen or not
because of they are so stable that’s why
they go all the way up to the
stratosphere and when they decompose
they can destroy part of the
stratosphere okay so this was just a
logical finding of what are the
consequences of human activities and so
you have to look at all the
possibilities we made the discovery
we’ll get to what happened when you told
the world about your discovery in a
moment but in did were you attracted to
the the problem of locusts is that what
drew you to this to look at group
behavior were you just interested in
group behavior and you decide well
locust azar about the biggest group we
can find well I was interested in in
generally in group behavior and looking
for for systems that we didn’t
understand how and why they grouped and
locust was very appealing because of
this huge impact that they have on the
livelihood of so many people on the
planet and in science magazine in 2004
what really triggered us was a review
that said even after 50 years of
experience fighting looks as more of an
art than a science and that’s very
embarrassing as scientists because the
individual locust is one of the best
studied organisms in neurobiology and
behavior but the last time someone put
them together to see how they swarmed
was a woman called Peggy Ellis in 1954
he published it in an obscure journal
called the locust bulletin and I think
and that’s a big seller right I’ll order
another subscription there was there was
there was really no research going on
trying to understand how they swarm and
if we don’t understand how they swarm
then there’s no hope for us to develop
control methods or more effective
control methods now when you think
you’ve made a discovery of what the
dynamic that surprises everyone because
when you say the reason locust
because their cannibal its sucking each
other it certainly surprised us it was
it was completely fortuitous are you
hesitant to release that information you
double and triple-check it because you
say this is so different well I mean
initially I I thought I was going insane
because I was putting low Christy and
I’d have to put say a hundred locust in
and then my postdoc who would take them
out eight hours later at the end of a
locust day would say you you said you
were gonna put in a hundred but they
were only 98 this happened again and
again he was a sort of
passive-aggressive frenchman and i
became quite scared and i thought you
know how are they how are they escaping
they don’t have wings and we’ve coated
the the edges with a chemical such they
can’t climb and then it was going back
to the videos we realized they were
eating each other which was completely
unexpected so this is you are what you
eat if you’re absolutely yeah one it’s a
perfectly packaged source of nutrients
it’s exactly the right composition of
fats and proteins and salts in the blood
the percentage of salt of a locust is
the exact percentage that they most
desire we have done experiments with
moment crickets in Utah and Idaho where
we put down different salt
concentrations and they will scramble
and fight over 0.25 molar salt
concentration they taste it with their
feet and they fight vigorously and
that’s exactly the concentration of salt
in their blood so they’re finely tuned
to a cannibalistic lifestyle this may be
a new vampire series I can see it coming
now to the National Geographic Channel
all right when you made your discovery
was there any hesitancy to release what
you were finding because people thought
we’ve got the miracle as you described
it the miracle chemicals that have made
our lives so much more convenient and
easy and by the way at the time you made
this discovery of what
chlorofluorocarbons were doing people
had an average of how many aerosol cans
in their home this is how ubiquitous
they were at the time about 40 the
average American had 40 aerosol cans in
their home at the time we were dependent
upon it so were you hesitant to release
this there was some hesitancy as a
scientist to go and communicate with the
media because it was not very well
perceived um you had to publish in
scientific journals but quit with my
colleague I remembers and if not us who
and even if not
now when so we made a decision we had to
go out and talk to the not just to the
media but to decision-makers and it was
not very well seen by the entire
community but I’m glad we did because we
were convinced that the threat was real
and eventually of course it that that’s
came to me at the time you said it
really was the chlorine in this
combination it wasn’t the carbon that’s
released the chlorine destroying the
ozone layer right and then immediately
I’m sure industry ran up and said thank
you for stopping us before we destroyed
the plan well it’s interesting that’s
one of the main differences with climate
change because these compounds were
manufactured essentially by a small
number of large chemical companies which
initially were of course very reluctant
to do anything about it and they said we
won’t stop unless this makes sense and
it doesn’t make sense to us but they
made a statements if the science proves
to be correct we will stop doing that
and and they that’s what they did
and of course it was coupled to this
international agreements but industry at
the end of course came along and they
were able to make replacement compounds
so that we can still use brake and air
conditioning and so on and so forth but
with compounds that do not affect the
ozone layer in a minute we’ll talk about
in the short period of time what the
change has been in reaction to
scientific information now a part of
your study you didn’t just stop with
locusts because we always like to know
how it affects us personally and since
we’re not living in areas susceptible to
locust plagues I’m sure not all group
behavior not all decisions are made by
I’m worried about the guy maybe on Wall
Street it’s eating those around you
right
that’s not our normal behavior in a
group dining right well one of one of
the the really exciting areas of science
at the moment is is really understanding
better the scientific principles of
social communication and how decisions
are made and how opinions form in
populations and how we can because we of
course are up
unfortunately we are selfish you know we
think about our own you know benefits
and we don’t necessarily care as much
about others as we as we should and so
this leads to some problems such as in
climate change how do you manage to sway
the opinion of a population such that
they can understand the scientific
material and that they will forego you
know something relatively small but
forego something on their personal
regarding their personal life for the
for the global good for the common good
and so this is a really fundamental
issue is to try to understand how and
why the opinions form in populations
individuals that actually will not be
biased will not have a pre bias in their
opinions can have a very strong
influence on the outcome they they they
encourage consensus to happen because if
you have two vying groups with no
intermediaries it’s hard for a consensus
to be achieved then let me speculate or
I find your data fascinating because
there are indeed things that can be
explained that way because there are
surveys okay so it turns out when you’re
talking about minorities the survey show
that it’s only about 10 to 12 percent of
the population at least a couple of
years ago that were really thinking this
is the climate change issues just all
the folks that it’s it’s the scientists
are crazy and so it’s clearly minority
but they were very powerful so they were
able to influence at least half the
population of course through the media
because it was there was a very well
organized and pain and so on the ozone
issue it would not have worked if it had
been up to individual initiative to stop
using CFCs yeah that’s right government
involvement and I assume the same all I
know the same will have to be with
climate change the problem is too big
you can’t just depend on everybody
changing their lightbulbs or driving a
hybrid that’s right so voluntary action
is important it won’t solve the problem
but it’s very important to show people
in decision-making positions that they
care and so politicians correspond to
what people think and so that’s why it’s
very important to have these movements
because they do affect politics
so what I’m getting at is in what do you
see today we see in there’s kind of this
general sort of ambivalent attitude
toward science what do you see in in
Princeton and what do you see it will be
San Diego III personally I think the I
think with the advent of things like
social media like I love Twitter and I
follow so many scientists and
importantly scientific journalists there
are so many good journalists out there
who are promoting science and helping
the public understanding of science and
they’re doing it you know through blogs
through Twitter and so on I think
there’s a huge community of there’s a
huge interest in science and so with
these types of media I’m very hopeful
that we can reach people who perhaps you
know that their parents or their
families inhibit them from learning
about scientific methods and the
scientific method is critical it’s
thinking in a in a critical way about
the world not just believing stuff
because you’re told that’s how it is are
you seeing the same yeah yes but I let
me put it this way when we have a
cocktail social meetings a common
opinion is chemistry in high school Wow
did I hate that it was horrible and I
had to memorize things I really hated it
see that’s a reflection of how badly
it’s a reflection of how poor we are
with education but there’s something
going on a revolution in education new
pedagogy so if the starting with k-12
science is becoming much more
interesting for kids because you have
now new techniques where they do the
experiments they work with each other in
teams and so on of course not everybody
is doing that but this is something that
the National Academies put together and
it’s having an enormous success all the
way to college in college instead of
you’re sitting and listening to a
professor but you get that you can just
do on your own reading a text but you do
active learning you’re gained working
groups and you do experiment yourself so
that’s a revolution in teaching and I
think science is it’s already happening
you can measure that with the kids
it’s
much more attractive that way than just
memorizing or having to pass tests so
there is hope that people will start
accepting sure what the scientists are
saying is happening on the planet or in
any other part of our lives it’s the
kind of looking facts then we will
analyze them say yeah that yeah it’s
it’s good that people would believe that
I don’t know how they actually climb
both airplanes it’s all based on science
otherwise why don’t they crash we want
to let you join the conversation if you
have some questions we can doctor cousin
um I’m curious if you’ve been approached
to or thinking along the lines of how to
use your work to say draw bigger crowds
in a shopping mall to a particular store
or kind of commercial applications like
that well it turns out I would have no
interest whatsoever in pursuing that
that sort of that sort of work but it
turns out that you know people used to
believe you know Stanley Milgram a
famous psychologist sort of had a study
that you know suggested that this sort
of crystallization of behavior in crowds
there’s this strong nonlinearities and
tipping points within crowd behaviors
such as you know looking looking at you
know in shops and so forth we’ve we’ve
replicated those studies and tracked
over 11,000 pedestrians and manipulated
pedestrian behavior and fortunately for
us our work is also consistent with his
but he’s a single data point whereas we
collected much more data to look at
error distributions and what we find is
that people are sufficiently sensitive
to others to gain information from them
but not so sensitive that they’ll
blindly sort of copy and and and and so
I’m thankful about that because
otherwise I think it would be a bit
scary how much we could manipulate
people’s gaze distributions I’m getting
the sense that it’s easier to make an
analogy
between human behavior and other kinds
of life if the humans have good
information about the decision of what
to do but in political life where you
were talking about the media tends to
distort that decision in a way that I
don’t see happening anywhere else in
nature so is is there really that kind
of factor going on somewhere that you
can begin to get some sense of how those
political decisions will be made based
on something that happens like that in
nature in studies by my colleague Matt’s
organic at Princeton actually he did
them when he was at Columbia University
prior to that they allowed people to log
into a website where you have songs and
this is unsigned bands and Ahn’s had
these songs before and unbeknown to you
when you log in you’re placed in one of
eight different worlds with you know
thousands of other people and in some of
these worlds you don’t get any social
information about what others thought of
the songs you just have your own view
and you rate the songs and in those
worlds there was strong correlation
between the songs that were considered
good the coastlands were considered
average and those that were bad however
in worlds where you do have social
information where you see how many times
the song had been downloaded and let’s
get a sense of how popular it is you get
massive cumulative advantage sometimes
called the Justin Timberlake effect one
very average can really reach the top or
the bottom of the chart due to the
scheme of advantage and so one way that
I like to think about this is we’ve
evolved to have a relatively slow rate
of communication verbal song and so
forth
and when you have social media or
technology this produces a very high
rate of information flow and what we
know from studies of animals and humans
is that when you have fast positive
feedback this type of cumulative
advantage then decisions become less
accurate and so you get these sort of
heard type dynamics where you know you
get this cascades of failure for example
and so it’s not necessarily
or true that more information or faster
information is necessarily a good thing
in relation to the media perhaps you’d
have the comment about media it’s
certainly has played a crucial role in
in these issues that we’re discussing
but in contrast we in the scientific
community we haven’t done very well we
scientists normally are not trained in
terms of how to communicate so normally
we just talk science and people normally
get bored so we have done a very poor
job in explaining in simple terms the
essential features of the problem that
we have so in part it’s our fault if you
want but the media I think should help
because they could get informed
better informed and that’s happening
already but rather slowly just we have
time for one more question down here
where she’s been in the various animal
experiments there’s always a leader or
leaders of the pack is there any
characteristic that determines the
physical or whatever characteristics
that’s going to make the leader and if I
take the leader and I take them out from
the head of the pack what happens to the
pack so it’s a really good question I
mean not in all groups if you think of
the locusts
there’s no leaders in those locust
swamps within fish schools or bird
flocks or ungulate herds there may or
may not be leaders but we have good
reason to think that because individuals
you know because the world is changing
and the world is dynamic because
individuals age and gain experience that
they can often be leaders so for example
in caribou migrations there’s actually a
policy to let the leaders pass for half
a day before you hunt and this actually
comes from the elders this is cultural
knowledge there hasn’t been a scientific
study but it’s highly consistent with
our simulations where we evolved
migrations and we find that in our
evolved populations we expect to have a
small proportion of leaders and a larger
proportion of followers and this means
migrations can be very susceptible to
damage and again unfortunately the
scientific evidence is not yet
accumulated but there is anecdotal
evidence that for example in herring
fishing one year they disproportionately
took large individuals not deliberately
but just by chance disproportionate at
large individuals and that completely
stopped the migration the migration
didn’t happen that year and then when it
started happening again it went to a
different location and so there is this
evidence that there is this transmission
of information and so in certain groups
this can be like a matriarch see an
elephant groups or in other groups it
may be dominant individuals that play a
role and in many of the groups we look
at its informational status leadership
is transferable dynamically depending on
who is information about what and we can
do experiments where no individual knows
the solution to a problem but by
grouping together they can solve that
problem and so they can sort of
effectively combine information if I can
make a comment that leaders in human
society they’re of course extremely
important and you can see that
historically but how do they function in
a democracy you would say okay they do
what the majority wants no I think
leaders go beyond that they convinced
population that there’s a better way to
do things and so on but it’s absolutely
crucial to elect leaders and not just to
elect people that will do what the
majority thinks anyhow that’s perhaps
pure politics and you go back on a
positive note the change that Professor
Molina made with this CFC studies and
getting the ban on coral or carbons the
ozone layer which had a hole in it is
healing itself in a relatively short
period of time on the other hand you’ve
done study of migration patterns when
migrations get interrupted
they don’t resume quickly yeah you can
actually lose them there can be a strong
historical dependence whereby if you
lose that information in the population
even if you recover the
habitats you will not recover the
migration so if any very careful and on
the global scale with climate change if
indeed these projections prove true it
will not turn around that fast
yes leo so it won’t turn around as fast
as the O’s no if temperature goes up
four degrees Celsius then sea levels
rise we won’t be able to correct our
mistake within 10 years right well first
of all then you clarified with the with
the stratospheric problem it says the
promise essentially solved what the
compounds remain for many decades there
so that’s why the ozone layer is hasn’t
healed yet but it’s it’s improving so we
will take another couple of decades but
we knew that long time ago but we
climate change it’s even worse because
we know carbon dioxide about half is
removed very fast but the remaining some
of that remains in the atmosphere for
more than a thousand meters so that’s a
big problem that we have that that’s why
we want to stop it because we’re
committing the humanity for many many
years unless of course we can extract it
out of the atmosphere eventually but
that’s a big word it’s a it takes a long
time in the bottom line Ian you better
hurry up and find out how to motivate
people Oh what cut on that yeah and
hopefully it’s not by devouring each
other locusts now thank you for joining
us it’s a most interesting evening
whenever we get National Geographic
explorers and Nobel laureates together
and I think tonight was that and we all
learned something and we learned we’d
better get our act together thank you
you
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