Translator: Panagiota Prokopi Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi
Hello.
My subject is Mediocracy vs Meritocracy
and I have to start by saying that, personally,
I understand that I have to be ashamed for my profession.
What I am doing has absolutely no respect in Greece.
I am neither a drug dealer,
nor a human trafficker,
not even a politician.
I am doing something way worse. I am a scientist-researcher.
To prove to you how disrespected this is in Greece,
this is the GDP portion for research and technology.
Countries that wish to produce wealth, that want to be wealthy,
they invest in research and technology.
Israel for example.
We have so much wealth that we don't need it,
so we are nothing like the ex-soviet satellites that give 2%,
we are not like the lost countries
where just 1% will led them to bankruptcy sooner or later,
we are at 0,6%, in the bottom along with Uganda.
Still, there is a huge difference between Uganda and Greece.
In Uganda 0,6% goes to research and technology.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Just to let you know how disreputable I am,
I spent half my career as a professor in the University Ioannina.
For twelve years I received hundreds, thousands invitations
to give talks, interviews abroad.
In Ioannina and in Epirus there are, maybe,
dozens of TV stations, radio stations,
news stations, on-line, for news and what's happening.
No one ever asked me to tell: "What are you doing, in a nutshell?"
My name appeared once in a local newspaper,
I think it was on page 27,
underneath an advertisement about toilet and kitchen supplies.
The Panhellenic Championship of Fencing wrote one line about me,
"An athlete of the Modern Sports Association of Epirus competed,
John Ioannidis, visibly exhausted,
poorly prepared and mostly lost."
So, I have a second capacity and the moment you will hear about it
you will be very angry and mad, it is even more disreputable.
I am a doctor.
When I had just came back with my family to Greece from America,
we found ourselves a lovely romantic night somewhere on a beach in the Ionian Sea,
but it was late and we had to find a place to spend the night, to sleep.
We managed to find a small hotel.
''Any vacancies?" "Yes, sure"
"May I see?" "Sure"
"Very nice. What is the price?"
The hotel manager looks me in the eyes, "What do you do for a living?"
I replied, "I am a doctor".
"A doctor? Thieves, crooks, all you think of is money under the table.
If you are a doctor, double price, triple price".
He was about to kick me out.
Since then, I decided not to say I am a doctor.
I could not say that I am a researcher,
how can someone understand what is the meaning of a researcher.
So I was saying, "I work in a lab".
And some other romantic time, again on a lovely beach in the Ionian Sea,
some other very nice lady
who rented us beauftiful rooms by the sea, asked me,
"Mr John, you work in a lab, right?
In Ioannina, in a jewelry lab?"
(Laughter)
I have a third capacity
and since you already think the worst of me and what I do,
but since we are at this point now, let's give it away, even if it just 4%.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
This is the worst of all.
I am making an effort to place myself in the intellectual world.
I write literature, I write poetry.
Now, when you hear "I write poetry"
you think of some ministers who write poetry,
some politicians using poetry
in speeches that fascinate the masses.
I realize that the use of poetry in Modern Greece is a bit like this.
What does a politician mean by the following in his speech?
"Freedom requires virtue and boldness",
"I have not enjoyed enough Frappé coffees, I need more".
"Small people that fight without swords and bullets"
"When I am not lying, I am bored to death".
"Die hard"
--I am not sure if this one is from Pindar or Stesichorus,
or maybe another poet, Mimnermus, perhaps another post modern American --
"Thank you for re-electing me triumphantly,
while I completely destroyed the country."
(Applause)
So, mediocracy, meritocracy.
You lost my train of thought; now I will take a poll as well.
I am not a surveyor, but let's do one, everybody is doing one.
So, raise your hands, who knows, who has heard him speak,
or has read a text written by Paul Alivisatos at Berkeley.
Huh, no...
Nick Peppas in Texas?
I don't see anyone, my glasses are dirty.
Tom Maniatis in Columbia?
I don't see anyone. Sorry, am I boring you?
Who knows Lakis Lazopoulos?
(Laughter)
Not too many hands raised, but I heard answers, so...
So, all these are top Greek scientists.
They are scientists that are the top of the top.
There are some, a random sample, of the 100 best Greek scientists.
Most top Greek scientists
are abroad.
Almost 3% of the top scientists in the world,
based on objective facts,
based on the impact they have on the international bibliography
--you may go to the Google Scholar base
and see how many times each one is mentioned
by other scientists for his work --
3% are Greeks.
As a population we are 0,2%, but 3% of the top scientists are Greeks.
Population 15 times fuelled by science.
Almost 90% of them are not in Greece at this moment.
10% insists on staying here, to struggle and be rolled over,
be crushed on a daily basis.
Some of them were not born in Greece,
because their parents had emigrated as economical emigrants,
as scientific emigrants,
as emigrants because they were sick of it all, or whatever.
Most of them grew up in Greece, but they had to leave.
Many tried to come back, most of them had no luck.
Some of them they made it and most of them offered a lot to this country.
Most could not make it. Why?
The answer is that competition is very hard.
This is what goes on in Stanford, my university.
If we open a position, the average number of people that apply for it is 300.
This is nothing.
In Greece, if there is an open position there is one candidate.
(Laughter)
At least that was before the crisis of 2010.
The rest, if they wanted to show interest, they were thrown out the window,
several ways, cut their heads off, throw them in the sewer, I don't know what.
There are no positions at the universities after the beginning of the crisis,
because the budget for the universities,
but also the hiring of new professors and staff are practically almost zero.
You can't get a position even if you are the prime minister's wife!
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So what's going on.
The Greek universities' budget,
to explain to you what's on, how much the country is investing to meritocracy,
I found this image on some sport news:
''Olympiakos paid 17,4
--millions euros even during the crisis--
to transfer players, Atletico gave 112...Spanish...presentation...''
The Greek universities, the entire university of Crete
plus the one in Patras, in Ioannina, if I put them all together,
the annual budget is way cheaper
than the Olympiakos annual budget for transfers.
So, what is going on?
We don't have new professors.
We only have the old professors, eternal professors.
At the same time, we also have eternal students involved in politics.
The combination of the eternal students and the eternal professors
leads us to perfection.
(Laughter)
So, where do we stand?
(Applause)
Where do we stand.
I told you there are many top Greek scientists
who know their fields very well
and they can help society, if they are given the chance to say
what they know or not know, what we can do or we can't do.
There are plenty of professors.
The voice of the specialists and the scientists has to be heard.
That's what I am saying, that's what I want to say.
''How dare you, Mr Ioannidi, listen to the specialists and the scientists,
meaning that we should bring even more academics to upset us?
How many academics can poor Greek society handle?''
You need to advertise a jacket with a stripe?
An academic.
You need to fill the air time in a morning TV show?
An academic.
You need someone to ambiguously absorb the few remaining funds?
An academic.
You need someone to destroy the university,
to violently throw out the few excellent specialists left,
to eliminate the flaw of the excellence?
An academic.
(Applause)
Not exactly.
I told you that there are a lot of other scientists
and there is no need to look in politicians or party leaders
or anything else, but just to show you what is going on,
this is data by Google Scholar
about the nine professors ministers of Education, Economy and Health
during the years 2004 till 2014, when Greece bloomed.
I had to set a benchmark at the side of the slide,
I picked Mr Nanopoulos who has 60.000 citations,
he is a giant in science.
He doesn't have the most citations, he is within the first 50, 50 to 100.
There are others with six times more,
but I had to find someone really excellent, as a comparison.
The median of all those professors is about 250 citations.
Change in January of 2015, 13 professors are ministers by one government.
The have the very same median, you can't even plan this.
23 professors were candidates on the statewide ballot on September 2015.
We are going towards the wrong direction.
The median is 95 citations.
Fourteen professors were ministers in September 2015.
We reach 65 citations.
We haven't reached zero yet, there is still space, we' re almost there.
Shouldn't we take all those top scientists...
And I used Mr Nanopoulos, not for any other reason,
but because the rest 99 as you saw, you had never heard about them,
while why do you know Mr Nanopoulos?
Probably because he was the face on the Lexus advertisement.
So we must take the 100 or the 1000 best
and make them ministers, party leaders, fashion designers, pop-stars?
What should we do with them?
No, no way.
We simply must gave them the opportunity to share what they know.
To inform the society, to educate the society.
Make the ghosts of the unreachable illusions,
that we all may have, disappear.
This is not the return of the legendary "Marble Emperor", right?
These are simple people, they just do their work,
they know a couple of things, we have to give them a place, a chance in society
to be heard as well.
If we allow the specialists to talk, will all of our problems be solved immediately?
We will pass from Hieronymus Bosch's "Hell" to ''The School of Athens''
where of the great philosophers and specialists are included
and Heaven will exist in sky and earth?
I can promise you that this is not going to happen.
Miracles do not happen overnight.
They happen much faster than this actually.
When a student at my university decided that
''Lessons are fine, but I want to start a company'',
and two years later he built Google,
the miracle had happened.
Another guy in the same neighbourhood that I live, built Facebook.
Another one in the same neighbourhood built Yahoo.
A third one built Hewlett Packard, Apple.
We need to give the chance to brilliant people,
to innovative people, to people with ideas,
in the mood to experiment and to offer, to change our light bulbs
literally.
Will everything be perfect? No, it will not be perfect.
Scientists, even the most excellent ones, make mistakes, a lot of mistakes.
They simply know how to admit they might be mistaken
and they know how to warn others for the chance of the mistake.
They don't have a big mouth.
They say, "That is what I know, this I do not know, this may change soon".
So someone may move with a strategy
that most things and new ideas that are going to be heard,
might eventually not move forward.
But if we could bring even one Google to Greece, would it be bad?
Or one Facebook?
Of all the ideas you will hear today in this TEDxAcademy,
starting from microRNA to robotics,
to experience from systems from NASA's scientists,
from social scientists, from the 30, 50, 100 ideas
maybe one of them can work out.
Give a chance to those 50 ideas, let them be heard,
so that one of them will finally work out.
The opposite solution?
The opposite solution, the alternative, might be it:
maybe we should listen to drug dealers,
or maybe we should listen to the illegal immigrant traders,
maybe we should listen to the politicians.
Good luck!
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
(Applause)