Translator: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I recently visited Paris,
and on that trip this last March, I made a discovery.
It was a fascinating thing that I noticed.
I discovered the loneliest place at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
I can tell you where it is.
It's on the first floor, south wing, room number seven.
North side, not the south side.
It is an amazing place, and I'll explain why.
But first, I'm just struck by a thought, actually,
looking at the timer that is in my face,
if I were to end right now, this would be the shortest TED Talk in human history.
So, on that note, in under a minute, do you guys want to make history?
Shall we?
(Audience) Yeah!
Finish it here?
Thank you, thank you, you've been amazing.
(Laughter)
In an earlier talk this morning, you heard about the Louvre Museum.
(Laughter)
No, but why is this room the loneliest place at the Louvre Museum?
Room number seven.
There are two sides to it, north entrance and south entrance.
I entered though the north entrance,
and there is a wall in the middle of the room
that divides the room into two parts.
So as I entered, this big wall is in front of me,
and there are five paintings mounted on the wall.
And I am just super excited because there is nobody around.
I have these five beautiful paintings all to myself.
So I stand there and I take it all in.
But soon I realised something very strange:
that I was the only one looking at the wall.
Nobody was coming towards the wall.
People were walking away from the wall or around it.
Why? Why wasn't anybody paying attention to these five paintings?
So I beg the question, What is on the other side of the wall?
I had a look.
More than 300 people were on the other side.
And they were all trying to catch a glimpse of Da Vinci's masterpiece,
the Mona Lisa.
The wall epitomizes a core vulnerability for all of us.
A fear that we share.
Which side of the wall are you going to end up on?
Is what you're working on today going to stand the test of time?
Will you matter?
And it is not all about, not at all about fame or fortune;
it is about values, about beauty.
It's about creating something that has impact.
So let me share with you my personal beacon of guidance
for how to choose projects that have the best chance at having impact.
I call the process "lygometry."
"Lygo," L-Y-G-O, is Latin for shadow or darkness.
"Metry" is measurement, quantification.
Lygometry means quantifying things you know you do not know.
The open questions.
Picture a circle.
Inside the circle is everything you know. Outside is everything you don't know.
Lygometry is the edge of the circle.
The segue to creativity.
Things you know you do not know. Quantifying lack of knowledge.
This is quite powerful
but is not as prevalent as you would expect it to be,
given that it is the segue to creativity.
I have a degree in artificial intelligence,
I studied economic policy at Harvard, I got an MBA from Stanford,
and I am quite grateful for the education that I got.
But in 10,000 hours of lectures that I have sat through,
never did I see a professor walk into the room and say,
"Here's everything we know about this topic,
and here's everything we don't."
Why?
Why not?
Why is that our educators feel compelled to project perfect knowledge
when there isn't any.
Our education system is predicated on the needs of the Industrial Revolution.
They needed to dump a lot of information on a lot of people.
But guess what?
Information has become abundant and cheap.
Imagine what we could do
if instead of asking our students to regurgitate established knowledge,
we expose them to the open problems.
Imagine the type of creativity we could tap into,
the type of passion we could fuel.
Lygometry is a bit counterintuitive.
We all seek certainty in an uncertain world,
so it creates cognitive dissonance to talk about open problems -
problems that might not be resolvable.
Our brains love solving problems that are solved.
I believe we're going to look back at this period in human history
and recognise a big flaw in how we're doing this.
We are mistaking abundance of information for sufficiency of knowledge.
Mistaking abundance for sufficiency.
I have a picture of Isaac Newton's house
on top of my desk.
It is a reminder to me about lygometry.
In the picture, you can see the tree.
Yes, the tree from which the apple fell on his head,
he discovered gravity,
and as a result, we all had to take physics.
(Laughter)
And we did.
In those physics courses, we learnt about gravity, all the formulas,
how to do calculations.
But did any of your teachers ever say
that gravity as a whole is a big open question in physics?
We don't understand it, can't explain it, don't know where it comes from.
The best theory we have about gravity is from Einstein.
And even that theory has not been reconciled with quantum mechanics.
Big open question.
But why is it
that today is probably the first day that a lot of you hear about it?
Why don't we talk about these open questions?
I decided to do something about this.
I have started a project called "Reversopedia."
It is a reverse encyclopedia of things we know we don't know.
And it is online.
It's an open-source project, and I encourage you to check it out,
especially if you're an educator -
go there and incorporate some of the open questions in your lesson flows.
But the challenge is absence of lygometry does not affect education only;
it affects how we run our organisations.
The modern workplace suffers
from an epidemic of knowledge inflation and knowledge pretension.
Folks believing and claiming to know more than they do.
Collectively we have failed to create a safe environment for people to say,
"This is what I know I do not know."
So we compound our assumptions and pretensions and lack of knowledge.
I coach executives on this,
and it is amazing the type of discoveries they make
about new opportunities and about how to handle threats.
I personally believe we could have avoided the financial crisis
through a lygometric process.
It is important to recognise that the most important type of knowledge
is lack of knowledge.
But we have stigmatised it in the workplace.
I'm positive we will get over this
as our language around knowledge becomes better,
as we increase the calibre of that dialogue,
as we become more sophisticated and more secure in what we know,
we'll be better prepared to talk about what we don't know.
But let me switch to a positive note.
Who does lygometry well?
Two groups:
children and artificial intelligence.
Children are born with an innate ability to do lygometry.
They're very good at keeping track of things that don't make sense to them.
And they're not shy about asking, are they?
They ask those questions; their egos don't get in the way, yet.
We're all born with an ability to do lygometry,
but we are educated out of it.
We're educated out of it.
Surprisingly, machines do this extremely well too.
Our best methodologies in artificial intelligence
keep track of things about their hypothesis
that don't map the data they're given,
the difference between what they know and what they don't.
So effectively, they are following a very methodical lygometric process.
They're honing in on the open questions,
and as a result, they're adapting in real time.
This is my hope for humanity's future.
I started with a conversation about vulnerability.
Lygometry,
acknowledging the open questions,
acknowledging things you know you don't know
is a very vulnerable process.
But if you endure the pressure, if you can get through it,
on the other side there is creativity, there is innovation, there is liberation.
No pressure, no diamond.
I want to share with you a personal story.
If you google the phrase "the world's best guitar player,"
I'm it.
(Laughter)
You can try it.
You google that - "world's best guitar player" -
search for it, I'm the first result.
There's a video of me somebody posted, I don't know who; it went viral.
It has 32 million views.
By the way, 32 million views -
I want to share a secret with you guys,
privileged information, please don't share outside this room.
(Laughter)
Of the 32 million views,
31 million is my mother.
(Laughter)
Big fan. That's how you become the world's best guitar player.
I'm definitely not the world's best guitar player.
The reason I share this story with you
is the fact that I've only had seven hours of lessons in my life.
I'm grateful for those seven hours.
But I've benefited from the absence of my instructors in a strange way.
I could see what other guitar players could do,
the types of sounds they could create.
And I knew I couldn't.
Lygometry.
But that led to a creative process.
I tried to create my own sounds.
The easiest way to think outside the box is to not know where the box is.
I have big belief in lygometry.
And I think, over time, a paradigm shift is in order
to upgrade our conversation about knowledge,
about how we think about humanity's big problems.
Because if we do, and we should,
because children are doing it, machines are doing it,
there's no reason why we can't.
If we do, our biggest problems will become our biggest solutions.
I would like to end by playing you a little song.
It is a song that I wrote called "Gratitude."
I call it "Gratitude,"
and the title perfectly captures
how I felt for the opportunity to be here with you this morning.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music)
(Music continues)
(Music ends)
(Cheers) (Applause)