Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Amaranta Heredia Jaén
Those who received this paper will be the referees of the game.
And the idea is that players can't see it,
so if anyone caught it, stole it, or saw it,
then do not play;
if you want, be a referee, but if not, don't play.
Especially if you saw
what is in here,
--this I show you without you seeing it--
if you saw this, then, you should not play.
I'll give you quickly the instructions,
and after that we execute them.
The first task of the referee is to look for players.
Don't do it yet.
Players are going to be the person in front of you and behind you.
You want to play with your brother, cousin, friend,
but you will play with the one in front and at your back.
That's the first thing you will do.
Each group of three people, also has to have a pen
because the referee have to write.
Give the pen to the referee, who is the writer, the referee always writes.
If none of the three has a pen,
there are many volunteers around here giving pens.
In a while, when I tell you, you will look for the two players,
and then what the players will do is
--if Max is with me--
a thumb war.
For those who don't know what it is
or have forgotten your childhood,
I'll show it to you with Max,
which is the great thumb war champion.
Thumb war is played as follows:
You shake hands, look at each other,
and greet with the thumb war courtesy.
The thumb war greeting is doing:
one, two, three;
and each one tries to put their thumb on the other's thumb
and there the referee counts: one, two, three,
and when this happens, the one who won scores a point.
And you go on. We keep playing, Max!
One, two, three, and we go on...
Thanks, we're done!
We keep playing like this for a minute.
The goal of each player,
is to score, in that minute, as many points as possible.
We believe everything,
but the role of the referee is precisely to testify
that things are well recorded,
referees will have something like this,
where they must keep the score of the game.
Each column is the first point.
For example, Max is the first player,
then you score one point to Max,
imagine that then I score a point,
you put a point to me, and so on.
If you run out of space,
no problem, write it manually
--this is my handwriting--
the number of points each player scored.
So, the referee looks for their players,
players shake hands, play a thumb war.
Let's start now.
The last ingredient --in TEDx we never do things normally--
is that the thumb war is played blindly,
with eyes closed.
And you will see that it is lovely,
trying to guess the position of your own thumb and the other's,
without seeing it.
This is an experiment, we won't do things easy.
Now, I ask you to be focused and effective,
the referees, turn around, take your two players,
--we will make some noise now--
greet, introduce yourselves, grab the pens, shake hands.
We have 20 seconds to organize 10,000 people.
Go!
We will start when I tell you, not yet.
Do not start!
Shake hands, we'll give you 20 seconds and we start all together.
If someone doesn't make a group, don't worry.
Some will not be able to play, without someone in front or behind you,
but it's not a problem.
Get ready, make groups,
referees with pens, we start in 10 seconds!
Those who didn't make a group don't worry,
let's start.
To the count of three;
when I count three the minute starts, OK?
One,
two
we start!
Time's up! Stop! You can open your eyes, stop!
Now I need everyone to stop and be quiet.
We will disarrange and arrange back.
The referees, complete the score and remain standing up,
but in silence; or I'll lose my voice.
Referees finish to score and I ask the players.
Hands up those who scored at least two points.
Raise your hand.
OK, there are some champions...
Raise your hand those who scored at least four points.
Very few, very few reached the highest level.
Very few within 10,000.
We finished. We will go for another round.
But before that,
--remain as you are, you will play again--
I remind you again
of the exact instructions I gave you of the game:
each player has to try to score
as many points as possible.
I remind you that this doesn't mean
having to score more points than the other player.
It doesn't mean that if you lose
you have to feel bad or that you lose points,
or that you have to make more points than the others.
Each person has to think how
--and maybe it is not about killing the other--
you have to think together,
how to achieve the goal you have.
You may need to collaborate, cooperate, you guess.
Let's play again with the goal each one has
of trying to score as many points as possible:
no matter if everyone scores a lot as well,
what you want is to do as many points as possible.
Let's start, rearrange yourselves back on this premise,
and we will play again.
One, two,
go! One minute!
Time's up! Stop there!
Stop!
Stop! Now we stop the game.
I ask the referees...
Let's lower the volume; now we go back to order.
The game's finished, you can all sit down again.
If you want, if not, stay up, do what you want.
We will go back so that we can continue.
Hands up those who scored at least two points.
Virtually everyone.
This is a nice world, in which nobody loses, really.
How many scored at least six points?
A lot! So, notice that something good and something obvious happened:
you all discovered...
there was a hidden joke you all discovered immediately,
that we will discuss now.
First, I think it's appropriate that we make a celebration
because with this TEDx we just entered the Guinness World Records
as the largest number of thumb wars ever played!
(Applause) (Ovation)
Look at this! Look at this!
Not even in China
they play this amount of thumb wars!
(Laughter)
And beating the Chinese in their game and in crowds is something!
It is one of the many achievements of today!
We didn't do the experiment for this... or did we?
But now we have to put together all the excuses for why we did
what we just did.
With Nicolás Stier, my friend and colleague who studies traffic:
how to optimize traffic, how make it work well,
and, in general, how to make work well
human networking situations,
situations where there are people interacting, like today.
We thought this game was very nice
as it illustrated two fundamental principles:
the first is that cooperation pays.
It not only pays from a romantic and altruistic worldview,
but it pays, as you realized,
in that it helps each person to get closer to their goal.
Precisely, that was something obvious for everyone in this game,
the strategy you all discovered of: "I go, you go, I go, you go."
You all discovered it even when you were told,
that you could not even speak.
The referee must have told you that you couldn't see or talk,
anyway you discovered this trick,
that was the most effective in the game and is also the most effective in traffic.
In a bottleneck,
instead of fighting to go slow on one lane,
it's better to go and let go, go and let go.
This is not only better,
but more effective for each driver.
So, this is a simple point, it isn't a great discovery,
but the most interesting part is this:
if in retrospect this was obvious for all of you, as it happened:
why most of us didn't realize from the start
that if the goal we had was to score as many points possible,
the best solution was to cooperate?
This is the big problem.
Why didn't we understand from the start that cooperation was the best solution
for the problem we faced?
And this is called generically, zero-sum game fallacy.
Zero-sum games are those like sports:
there is no choice but to compete.
What you win, I lose.
There is a fixed amount; 100 points.
If you win 80, I'm left with only 20 points.
Then, the strategy is to compete, inevitably,
because for me to win, you have to lose.
The fallacy we have discovered in this game,
is to assume that many life situations
are zero-sum games, when actually they are not.
In other words,
it is not being able to shut down the competition chip,
even when being competitive
is detrimental to what we do.
And there are many situations and illustrations of this in life.
One, I chose to tell you,
is about a ubiquitous and ancestral resistance
to immigration, to new people,
a group that arrives to a society, a country.
And a great motivation, a great source of this resistance,
is to think that we have a finite number of resources,
such as jobs.
That if more people come, they will compete for the same jobs,
they will earn more, therefore, I lose.
This fallacy is the same fallacy
which made us, in the first game,
go and compete against the other,
because it is not true, in any way,
that the amount of jobs in an economy is constant.
The economy and the amount of jobs fluctuate;
it is not a zero-sum game.
Therefore, competing is not the best strategy.
And in the game we played,
we didn't fight for jobs, nor for the money,
the limited resource was time.
We had one minute, and what all we learned
almost immediately, magically,
is learning to socialize time.
And what I want to tell you today,
is that the reason why people don't cooperate,
is not because they don't have the predisposition,
but because language is opaque.
Even when the instruction is clear:
"You have to score as many points as possible"
the message is not clear.
We don't hear all the time what we are told.
Then, the experiment was about language and time.
And here in this space which is TEDxperiment,
we always play two games:
this one we just played, and the other in the previous days.
We played it with 2,000 or 3,000 of the people here
and we will now bring it to light.
In which we also wondered about language and time,
the common theme of the two TEDxperiments.
And what we wanted to answer is clear in a sentence,
which also is a phrase that comes effortlessly, and it is:
"Christmas is coming."
You heard this phrase, it's simple, with no great belonging,
and it evidently means we are at the end of the year.
And besides, you get a feeling:
"Christmas is coming and I had to do a lot of stuff..."
If you think of it through the magnifying glass of language,
this phrase is strange: "Christmas is coming."
From where?
From Chile? From San Francisco? From Luján? From California?
Where is Christmas?
The strange thing is that Christmas is not in space, is in time.
And what you unfailingly can't do, and that's where language appears,
is to think that time, besides being in time,
is in space.
And not only that, but almost all of us have a stereotype,
a way of thinking, in which we assume that the future is ahead,
because one moves into the future,
and Christmas is coming like a wind blowing in your face.
"Fast, because Christmas comes! I'm already there!"
As if you are going through the wall of a deadline,
you have to solve something and you're on the verge of crossing it.
It's almost obvious, that's why language is so,
that the future lies ahead and the past behind.
Well, that is not so.
Not for everyone.
For example, the Aymara, a native people from South America,
they are here in Argentina, Chile, in Bolivia, Peru,
they are 3 million people,
and they have a language that exquisitely and beautifully
associates time and space in another way.
For the Aymara, the word "naira" means "past",
but it also means "ahead."
And the word "kipa" means "future," but also "behind."
So, when they speak,
they speak opposite to how we speak Spanish,
putting naturally the future behind, and the past ahead.
This seems strange to us
because we all have a chip, a way of thinking,
but when they explain it, it is extremely natural.
The Aymaras say the following.
Look what a lovely way to think time.
The only thing we know, and therefore, the only thing we see,
all that the eyes see, is the past.
The past is what I know, what my eyes see.
Far, very far away,
lies the most distant past; I see it blurry, dimly.
Much closer, here, close to my eyes, lies the recent past,
and behind lies the uncertain future, what my eyes can't see.
In fact, the Aymara go through time walking backwards.
And when they walk backwards, that which is the uncertain future,
becomes seen, becomes the past.
The Aymara think time the opposite to us
and we did an experiment to understand how each of us,
those of us here in this space, represent time.
And for that, we made a simple game,
in which we asked you to draw three circles:
One is the past --which I placed over left--,
another circle is the present and another circle is the future.
Everyone drew it as they wanted,
the size they wanted, the radius they wanted,
and with that simple and geometric language they were expressing
how they think time.
And the result of that,
with my friend Mariano Sardon we turned it into some visuals,
is this the skeleton of time.
What you see is something that to me looks like a kind of butterfly,
in which naturally emerges the past to the left,
the present at the center,
and to the right of the butterfly is the future.
Past, present and future is the skeleton
through which we represent time.
It's simple,
it has to do with writing and moving forward in time
from left to right, which forces one representation of time.
Over this skeleton,
there are very colorful and interesting ways to think time
and I want to talk about three kinds.
Three ways that those of us here, have to think time.
The first kind is what I call the cosmocentric.
The ones for me who think time
--I only put three, but they are many, tens and hundreds of these--
they think time from a universal, physical perspective,
where the present is ephemeral, there's essentially no present,
there is an enormous, infinite future,
and there is a future of past to the other side.
And in fact, the present is at the center of time.
There are also cosmocentrics who are more optimistic,
for them the present is ephemeral,
but they understand that there's much more future than past,
and there are also pessimists who, in universal time,
understand the present as ephemeral, but that we are much more closer
to the end than the beginning of time.
These are the cosmocentrics, one kind,
some of us who think time like this.
And there are the opposites,
who I call, quite simply, the nowcentrics.
The nowcentrics are those who think time
from the subjective narrative, actually.
"Look, the present is fleeting, but all I know is the present.
All the time I dwell in the present."
From this perspective of subjective space, the present is everything,
the future and the past are small satellites,
decorating and feeding the present.
In fact, the maximum nowcentric is this one for whom
the present and the future live literally within the present.
All that exists is the present.
And the third and final group I want to show are these,
see some examples, but they are many,
we are many, too, who are like these,
representing time, each one, differently:
some more stretched, others more elongated,
others more concentric, others upwards, downwards,
but they all agree that the future is larger than the past.
And following the notation that I chose, I thought of calling them futurecentrics.
It seemed a very appropriate term,
but besides pretentious, the name is weird,
because it is much simpler:
these people are "young".
(Laughter)
People who make these circles
are young people, and naturally, from their life perspective,
--no longer that of universal time,
but the concept of time in our own lives--
they understand they have a broad future, much broader than the past,
because they are just beginning the adventure of life.
Thank you very much!
(Applause)