TED Community » Chris Ke-Sihai
About Me
I'm older than James Bond, but nobody seems to believe it until they get to know me and hear all my stories. I "wasted" a great many years wandering the Earth accumulating experiences instead of money, so I'm largely unaffected by the recent loss of "wealth" that is worrying everyone else. My wealth is in my head, so I'm OK until I succumb to Alzheimer's or fall off my motorbike and land on my head.
I have spent the last seven years 'by the board" in Taiwan, starting as a high-school EFL teacher and progressing to freelance silver bullet. I tend to get hired these days as the solution, not to provide a solution, and interviews are along the lines as "we have these students who ....," or "we need ........," followed by "so can you take care of it?"
Most of my work revolves around attitude adjustment, ie leadership. Most of my students are adults, many are mid/high-level professionals and they are seeking ways to develop their careers. Aside from the mundane stuff like presentation and report-writing skills, I spend most of my time coaching people on team-building, process, developing marketing strategies, process, advising on cross-cultural issues, process, long-term career planning, process and process!
There are huge fundamental differences in the basic assumptions on which western and Asian people build their strategies. Very often, western-style university education tries to overlay alien practises on people who don't really understand the spirit of what is being taught, resulting in compliance without commitment. My job is to obtain commitment, which starts with me developing a deeper understanding of my customers' world picture.
In my spare time I sail, cook, and am making a really poor job of learning Taiji. My poor co-ordination is adding weight to the theory that I may have Asperger's, but at least Sun Tzu is starting to sound like he might be understandable one day. Another 20 years, maybe.
- Location:
- Taiwan, Taipei
- Current organization:
- TEDxMonga
- Past organizations:
- Enspyre
- Current role:
- Speculative Thinker
- Gender:
- Male
- Areas of expertise:
- Telling stories, EFL ESL Design, Development and Teaching, Sales & Sales Training, Sailing, Joomla
- I am:
- Blogger, Brainstormer, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Social entrepreneur, Startup, World traveler, Writer/Editor
- Associations:
- Garden of Hope, European Chamber of Commerce Taipei
- Languages:
- English, French, German, Chinese
- My website links:
- TaiwanChallenges, Ingeniousity, TEDxMonga
- Universities:
- National Taiwan Normal University, National Taipei University, Private Chinese Culture University
More About Me
I'm passionate about
Better ways of doing things. Everything. I want to live in a clean, low-threat environment, which means changing the way the world does just about everything. Start with language, our primary tool.
An idea worth spreading
the idea you don't have to wait for someone else to solve your problems
Talk to me about
1. The relationship between The Art of War, Leonardo daVinci, and improvised comedy.
2. Fixing Taiwan
3. EFL
4. Pretty much anything else, especially sailing.
People don't know that I'm good at
thinking of answers to strange questions.
My TED Story
TEDSOL - TED for speakers of other languages
I teach English to people who have studied, but failed to internalise, all the rules of grammar and more vocabulary than they will ever need. They need interesting, stimulating material to read, listen to and build activities around.
I would love to share TED with them, but conversations between native-speakers are too difficult to follow. Aside from language, there are too many cultural references that they just won't get.
I'm currently contemplating making some short videos with associated written material, based on selected TED speeches. These would present the information using language that makes the ideas accessible to students of English, particularly Asian students.
Step one: join TED. Done.
Step two: find time........
Comments
Load 10 more Comments (Showing 1 - 10 of 295)Favorite talksSee all »
-
Play
Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs
20:02 Posted: Mar 2009
Views: 642,280 | Comments: 136
TEDCred score: +209 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A comment on Talk: Daniel Goldstein: The battle between your present and future self
He is talking about ways to convince people to "save," by which he means to put money into the investments offered by the sponsor, on the assumption that those investments will pay off. This is a marketing tool, designed to influence behaviour for the benefit of people selling investment opportunities.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
Will the rest of the world tolerate me doing this? Is there space for me to pursue an alternative lifestyle? It sounds like we need everyone to sign up before it could work.
So, how do you/we sell this idea to the 7 billion people who are busy taking what they can?
A comment on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
However, I define economics as the study of incentives. People are not always rational about the incentives they choose, but they still respond to incentives.
Diagnostincs and prediction are tricky, as even a basic understanding of chaos theory shows us that all complex systems are inherently unpredictable. That's why we don't know what the weather will be next weeek, or what the stock market is going to do.
However, by recognising the limits of our knowlegde, we can make better decisions. A lot of modern economics is based on the assumption that we know enough already. We don't worry about the long-term global impacts of our actions, nor do we worry about our own exposure to harm from the wider system. Our economics is not adequate for the task of building a better world. Pavan is arguing that we need to be more aware.
If you think of economics in narrow terms, money and exploitation, you ignore the other possibilities. Economics can treat time as a currency, happiness, stress, CO2, diversity, anything that can be measured can be managed in the same way as the economy - and at the moment, we're doing it all very badly because the incentives systems are too restricted in their thinking. They don't recognise the bigger picture.
Pavan is saying that we should improve the system. I don't know what you're proposing instead. What do you want the world to do? I live in a city of ten million people, all of them are polluting like crazy. Pavan is offering a road map to solve that problem. If you have a better idea, I would love to hear it. What change are you proposing that can be implemented tomorrow? You appear to be suggesting that we should just abandon civilisation. OK, how do we do it, and where do we go? I'm not very impressed with the state of the world. Give me an alternative. What's the plan?
A comment on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
(This site doesn't make it easy to reply directly, but this is a follow-on to enlightened self-interest and ethics.)
You're right that economic rationalism might dictate that we don't play with our kids. I teach in Taiwan, and parents work long hours to earn money to send their kids to classes, so that the kids can take care of them when they are old. Kids are an investment, and there is little love or even emotional awareness.
From an evolutionary perspective, this does not matter. Having kids, and enabling them to survive until they can raise the next generation, is the only thing that matters. Nature doesn't care if the old people die in poverty, or whether the kids are happy.
On the other hand, if you can demonstrate that playing with your kids in the park gives them some benefit that increases their chances of reproducing successfully, enlightened self-interest dictates that parents should find the time. Over many generations, the population that does this will be more successful, but this is not ethics.
Can you think of any other reason to play with kids that is consistent with a purely evolutionary perspective? What is the 'cost' of not doing so? How is it measured? If you can't measure it, how can I understand what it is or why it's important?
It is apparently your opinion that people should play baseball with their kids, but how are you going to persuade millions of parents that you're right and they are wrong? It's just your opinion vs theirs. This is ethics. For the record, I agree with you. But we can't impose our view on others just because they disagree with us about what is important.
As a counter-example, I believe that religion is a human construct with no basis in fact. However, I have to concede (unwillingly) that the existence of religion appears to have played a beneficial role in our development. Why no great atheist empires? Religion seems to confer an evolutionary advantage, much as it annoys me to admit it.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
Modern corporatism is broken. The profit motive, in companies which are run by people who don't own them, leads to all sorts of crimes. I think this is what you're referring to. But this is not economics, and it's not even capitalism.
Adam Smith lived in a pre-industrial economy. His capitalism was founded in the idea of the common good, and he saw powerful corporations as the biggest danger to that common good. He was an economist, developing tools to help us understand why things happen. His conclusions was that together we can work it all out as long as nobody becomes too powerful.
Marx, another economist, also hated big corporations. He lived in the industrial era when individuals were crushed by big business. His attempts to understand and reform the system led to new ideas about economics, but not the end of economics.
Economics is the study of why things happen, to say that it doesn't work is like saying that biology doesn't work because it creates syphillis and politicians.
Ethics is about value judgements. We need them in our economics. And in our capitalism. But it's important to understand the difference between economics, capitalism, and the modern corporate state that uses flawed economics to suppress real capitalism.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
Fortunately, we live in a world where we don't have to make that choice. Our survival depends on recognising that we are just a small part of the system and need to work with it rather than against it. For me, that means recognising the real costs of our actions. Nothing is free, there is a price to pay to Planet Eart plc, the company from which we steal our raw materials and dumping ground for our waste.
Our modern economics doesn't do that. But the point of the speech is that we can choose to, if we're smart enough. Money is a very clumsy tool, and there is room for a lot of improvement, but the central argument that we need to account for what we consume still stands.
CO2, for instance, is a measurable commodity. So is temperature. The relationship between them has been understood for nearly 200 years, but these factors were not included in the accounting systems that developed with the industrial era. I don't think anyone is saying this is OK.
If they are measured, they can be managed, because companies (should be the end consumers) will have to bear the full costs of their economic activity. It would become cheaper NOT to pollute.
Compare with the first settlers in Australia, who burnt down the forests and hunted many of the native animals to extinction, and then invented mythologies to explain the state of the world. This fashionable "blame the colonists" talk hides the fact that most of the human race has always taken what it wanted and dumped its garbage without thought for the consequences. It's only when scientists and accountants start measuring things that we know what is going on.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
You don't see any need to bring systems thinking into an ethical problem. I think the speech was about systems thinking, simply don't believe there is any reason to bring 'ethics' into a discussion about complex systems.
You and I have different world pictures. I made the mistake of trying to impose my world picture, without acknowledging yours. That's not going to work, just as arguing with me about ethics is not going to achieve anything. We simply have no common ground for discussion.
Where do we go from here? A wise person (probably a woman) once said "seek to understand before you seek to be understood." So how do we create a situation where dialogue can take place?
How do you achieve understanding of the core belief system behind Pavan's speech, if you're adamant that we should be talking about ethics? How can I understand your ethical argument if I don't see the relevance of right/wrong to a discussion about systems?
Being angry, or trying to 'prove' one of us is 'wrong' isn't going to achieve anything. We both need to understand the other's point of view if we're going to make any progress.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
I am not religious. There are no ethics. There is only nature. A lump of rock is no more or less priceless than a wetland or a human being or a river or a deposit of uranium. They simply exist, without value.
Things eat other things, they consume and excrete, they reproduce and when they reproduce they sometimes make mistakes. This creates diversity, leading to new ways to consume, excrete and reproduce. With enough complexity, everything is useful, and you can achieve a kind of balance.
In fact, the balance is illusory. This planet's average temperature varies over the centuries and millenia. The composition of the atmosphere, even the length of the day, they all change with time. Nothing is forever. It's not clockwork, it's chaos with uncertainty bulit into the heart of it. That's the world we live in, and there are no gods or absolute values. There is only "that which works."
You are the product of evolution, which is a nice way of saying that survivors survive and everything else perishes. Insoffar as you have any duty, your duty is to survive. In fact, it is to ensure that you reproduce, then you can die and nature won't care. That's all there is. Your ethics are merely self-justification. We're not stewards of the Earth, we are no better or worse than any other species and we have as much "right" to consume as every other - from the bacteria to the whales.
Personally, I believe that the best survival strategy is to try and understand the system and work with it. Instead of believing we can take whatever we want, we need to recognise the impacts and limits, and take steps to bring our own behavious into line with the requirements for our own survival - that is to see ourselves as part of a diverse ecosystem that needs to be respected.
If any given resource is taken without regard for the real cost, we all lose. You can quantify it, objectively, or you can rely on vague subjective 'ethics'.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!
Trouble is, it would need to be a global scheme. Like every other attempt to solve global problems, it won't work because national governments will seek special benefits, in order to attract or keep investment. Companies will play at "regulatory arbitrage" to find the cheapest place to build their projects.
A reply on Talk: Pavan Sukhdev: Put a value on nature!