Chris Anderson: So our first speaker gave a TED Talk at TEDGlobal I think seven years ago.
His name is Professor Uri Alon, at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Now, he and his colleagues there have come up with a powerful idea that addresses this key question: How on earth do we get back to work without creating a second surge of the infection?
Uri Alon, welcome to TED.
Uri Alon: Thank you.
Nice to be here again.
CA: It's great to see you again.
So, I guess the key to your idea is this obsession with the reproduction number R, R-naught.
If that number is less than one, then fewer than one person is infected by a typical person, and eventually, the epidemic fades away.
People are worried that as we come back to work, R will shoot up above one again.
You have a suggestion for how we might avoid that.
What is that suggestion?
UA: Exactly.
So, we are suggesting a strategy that's based on a weak spot based on the biology of the virus, which is a cycle of work and lockdown.
It exploits the vulnerability of the virus in that, when a person gets infected, they're not infectious for about three days.
So you don't infect others for the first three days, and after another two days, on average, you get symptoms.
So we're proposing a strategy which is four days of work and then 10 days of lockdown, and the next two weeks, again: four days of work, 10 days of lockdown.
And that way, if a person gets infected at work, they reach their peak infectiousness during lockdown, and that way, they avoid infecting many others.
This restricts the viral transmission.
Also, just working four days out of two weeks restricts the amount of time the virus gets to see many other people, and that's a very powerful effect.
So everybody works on the same four days, kids go to school on the same four days, with all the measures of social distancing and masks, etc, and then there's a lockdown period.
CA: So if you take the worst-case scenario, where you come to work on a Monday morning at the start of your four days, and you're infected on the subway, say, on the way to work, the theory here is that even by the end of that four days, you're not really starting to infect your coworkers?
UA: That's correct.
So you're infected on the subway, and so for the first three days or so, you're in your latent period, you don't infect your coworkers, you reach your peak infectiousness at home, there will be secondary infections at home, and people with symptoms can self-quarantine, and over the long run, you have a reproduction number less than one, so the epidemic, if you continue these cycles, will go away.
CA: I mean, is it frustrating at the thought that people are going to say, "Wait -- I don't want to infect people at home, I'd rather infect people at work shale@example.net."
What's the response to that?
UA: Yes, absolutely.
So we have to consider the alternatives.
If you open up the economy and there's a second wave, you'll get all those infections anyway during the lockdown that happens, along with the devastating effects on the economy, etc.
And so, in the long run, if you do a cyclic strategy like this but with a reproduction number that's less than one, you avoid, at least with these mathematical models and considerations, the much larger number of infections you'd get if there's a second wave.
CA: Right.
You're serving the needs of your family by -- sorry, go on.
UA: Even people who are infected don't infect shale@example.net.
The attack rates are 10 to 30 percent, according to several studies.
CA: Right.
But the hope is that you're serving the needs of your family by engaging in a strategy where very few of your fellow workers are going to be infectious anyway, so that's the plan, but um -- UA: That's right.
CA: Tell me this, though -- because four days out of 14, someone's going to say, "Well, great idea, but that implies, like, a 70 percent loss of productivity in the economy, so that can't possibly work."
I think you think that the productivity loss need not be anything like that much.
UA: That's right, and of course, most people don't work weekends, so it's four days out of the 10 work days in the two weeks, and once you have a predictable schedule of four days at work, you can work longer hours, you can design shifts and get higher productivity by prioritizing in those four days much more than 40 percent of the workdays.
CA: Yes, so talk through how that could work.
I mean, let's imagine, first of all, manufacturing, which is currently shut down.
Is the implication here that a manufacturer could set up two, possibly even three, shifts of four days, maybe 35 hours or something of work over those four days and still get a lot of productivity, basically, having the lines almost running continuously that way?
UA: Exactly.
So this is a staggered version of this idea, where you take the population, divide it into two groups or three groups.
Let's say one group works four days and then 10 days of lockdown.
Then the other group kicks in.
This idea was proposed by colleagues at Bar-Ilan University.
Then you get an added benefit that during workdays there's less density.
If there's two groups, there's half the density and less transmission.
And you can keep production lines working almost continuously like that using this staggered idea.
CA: And applying it to thinking about offices coming back -- I mean, it seems to me that, as we've already seen, there's a lot of productivity that can happen when you're at home, so you could picture on this idea of people doing one set of things during the four days when they're, say, back at the office, doing the exposure to each other, sparking off each other, the discussions, the brainstorming, all that good stuff, while at home, they're then doing all the things that we've been doing the last few weeks, kind of working solo.
How much have you thought about how that, whether it's possible, effectively, to divide work into different types and actually use a strategy like this to maintain almost full or even better productivity?
UA: I agree -- for many sectors, people work at home very effectively, and we've heard from several industries that productivity actually went up during lockdown and people shale@example.net.
So if you have a schedule, a [cyclic exit strategy] you can restrict the amount, or you can plan the work where you need to be together in a very effective way with avoiding a lot of time lost, if the person's work can be more effective at home and more effective at work and get high productivity.
I should say that some sectors really need to adjust, like hotels, tourism, dining.
In several industries, this will require more thought and adjusting.
But other industries are almost built for ideas like this.
Maybe it's even something you can consider after the epidemic, because productivity can be at least as high.
CA: I mean, I read this and I started thinking about our own organization, TED, and how, in many ways, you could argue that could work really well.
I mean, for one thing, there's this question about extroverts and introverts.
Some introverts, if they were honest, might say that this pandemic has been manna from heaven for them.
They've found work less stressful.
They've been able to focus and so forth.
With this sort of four days on, four days off type strategy, perhaps you can imagine a work world that's optimized for both introverts and extroverts?
UA: Absolutely.
I mean, I feel it also.
Me and my partner, with different personalities, we both teach in universities, and teaching through this has [helped me] become productive in certain ways.
So I agree completely, and I think harnessing the creativity of people at workplaces, we're only at the beginning of what these kinds of mixtures can offer.
CA: But for people who are on the front line, again, if you're delivering goods and so forth and you can't do that virtually, is there any thought about how a four days on and then isolation strategy, how that off time could be used to nonetheless contribute to that person's work through some form of training?
Or is it more just that people would work very intensely during four days, and maybe people still aren't quite earning their full pay in this scenario, but it's better than complete lockdown, and it's better than going back to work and seeing another surge?
UA: That's right.
So on a society level, it's better than opening up and seeing another surge, which would require complete lockdown.
For people like hospital shifts, some hospitals adopted this kind of program so we can protect shifts and avoid mixing.
It also creates a lot of simplicity and clarity.
So you understand when you're working, and you have some confidence because this is based on scientific modeling about the effectiveness of this plan.
It's also equitable in the sense that everybody gets to go to work, not only certain sectors, it's transparent, etc.
[Cross talk] CA: And this is something that is best implemented by individual companies?
Or is it actually much better implemented a city at a time or even a nation at a time?
UA: We think it can work [in levels].
So at certain companies, it's very natural to adopt, or at hospitals, schools, etc.
It can also work at the level of a town or a region, and then we would advise trying it out for something like a month, seeing whether cases rise.
In that case, you can dial down the number of workdays.
Or, if cases are declining quickly, you can add workdays and therefore adapt to the climate and the location where a person is.
So it's quite adaptable.
CA: But by aligning work schedules with schools, for example, that suddenly allows parents to go back to work on the days that their kids are at school, and you'd have to try -- UA: Absolutely.
CA: I mean, is the best instantiation of this that countries literally divide households into different A and B categories, or something like that, so that that kind of alignment could happen?
UA: Exactly.
So you can align different households, Group A and Group B, and then the children go to school, the parents go to work in a synchronized way, and the other group, let's say, the alternating weeks.
A certain amount of people need to work all the time.
Maybe teachers are, like, essential workers and need to work throughout.
Just like during lockdown situations, a certain fraction of the population still works throughout.
But a region that does this should be protected, in a sense, because it has a replication number of less than one, so imported infections also can't spread very much.
CA: And here is the aforementioned David Biello.
David.
David Biello: Yes.
Hello, everybody.
Uri, as you can imagine, there are lot of questions from the audience, and we have a first one kind of about those workers who have been marked as essential.
Can you comment on how this would impact the health care professionals and others who may not have time or the flexibility to quarantine in the way you suggest.
UA: That's great.
I want to say that there's essential workers, there's people with low income, that just can't adhere to lockdown because they have to make a living.
And studies show that mobility [among] people in the low-income sectors is larger during lockdown.
And also, in developing countries, people just have to go out of the house.
You can't enforce lockdown.
So this four-10 kind of strategy can actually make lockdown easier to bear for people who can still make a living during those days, or at least make their own choices about what fraction to work and what fraction to stay in lockdown.
Some countries can't get R less than one even with lockdown, because of this adherence problem, because of informal sectors, etc.
We believe that a four-10 cycle might make it easier to do lockdown and maybe get our infection level less than one.
That affects billions of people in the world.
I hope I answered your question.
DB: I think so, and we have another question, I believe, if that can be queued up, which is: Any chance you can do the math and quantify the increased risk of this four-10 cycle?
UA: So the increased risk, we're saying in our scientific paper, we did all the sensitivity analyses, etc, and the question is, it's comparing increased risk comparing to what?
So, to the economy ...
It's possible there will be a second wave.
I mean, I hope there won't be, but it certainly is possible, and in that case, it's clear that a second wave and another lockdown will have worse consequences on health than a cycle of four-10.
And so it's really a question of what you're comparing to.
DB: Sure.
Well, thank you so much for sharing this idea, Uri.
CA: Indeed.
David, stay on.
But just before you go: Have any governments expressed interest in exploring this?
Do you see people considering actually implementing this as national policy?
UA: Yes, we're in touch with several European countries and countries in South America and Israel, of course.
Austria has adopted a similar program for their school system, which is five school days every two weeks.
And several companies and hospitals, etc.
And so we're very interested to see how this will play out.
CA: Well, I love the basic start point of starting by looking at the enemy's weakness.
And you've got this four-day period where it's not necessarily that dangerous after an infection, if you could figure out a way to work then.
I assume that testing would actually enhance this idea as well a lot, right?
To test people before they come back -- UA: It's not predicated on testing.
You don't have to have testing for this idea, so that can apply to regions without a lot of testing.
If you do have testing, it could help you use testing in a more effective way by concentrating testing on people at the end of their 10 lockdown days, just as they're about to go to work; that could make each test more impactful in terms of reducing their reproduction number.
CA: Indeed, instead of having to test the whole population every three or four days, it's just once every two weeks.
That's a much more imaginable goal.
UA: Sure.
CA: Yeah.
Well, Uri Alon, thank you so much for spending this time.
Myths and misconceptions about evolution.
Let's talk about evolution.
You've probably heard that some people consider it controversial, even though most scientists don't.
But even if you aren't one of those people and you think you have a pretty good understanding of evolution, chances are you still believe some things about it that aren't entirely right, things like, "Evolution is organisms adapting to their environment."
This was an earlier, now discredited, theory of evolution.
Almost 60 years before Darwin published his book, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that creatures evolve by developing certain traits over their lifetimes and then passing those on to their offspring.
For example, he thought that because giraffes spent their lives stretching to reach leaves on higher branches, their children would be born with longer necks.
But we know now that's not how genetic inheritance works.
In fact, individual organisms don't shale@example.net.
Instead, random genetic mutations cause some giraffes to be born with longer necks, and that gives them a better chance to survive than the ones who weren't so lucky, which brings us to "survival of the fittest".
This makes it sound like evolution always favors the biggest, strongest, or fastest creatures, which is not really the case.
For one thing, evolutionary fitness is just a matter of how well-suited they are to their current environment.
If all the tall trees suddenly died out and only short grass was left, all those long-necked giraffes would be at a disadvantage.
Secondly, survival is not how evolution occurs, reproduction is.
And the world if full of creatures like the male anglerfish, which is so small and ill-suited for survival at birth that it has to quickly find a mate before it dies.
But at least we can say that if an organism dies without reproducing, it's evolutionarily useless, right?
Wrong!
Remember, natural selection happens not at the organism level, but at the genetic level, and the same gene that exists in one organism will also exist in its relatives.
So, a gene that makes an animal altruistically sacrifice itself to help the survival and future reproduction of its siblings or cousins, can become more widespread than one that is solely concerned with self-preservation.
Anything that lets more copies of the gene pass on to the next generation will serve its purpose, except evolutionary purpose.
One of the most difficult things to keep in mind about evolution is that when we say things like, "Genes want to make more copies of themselves," or even, "natural selection," we're actually using metaphors.
A gene doesn't want anything, and there's no outside mechanism that selects which genes are best to preserve.
All that happens is that random genetic mutations cause the organisms carrying them to behave or develop in different ways.
Some of those ways result in more copies of the mutated gene being passed on, and so forth.
Nor is there any predetermined plan progressing towards an ideal form.
It's not ideal for the human eye to have a blind spot where the optic nerve exits the retina, but that's how it developed, starting from a simple photoreceptor cell.
In retrospect, it would have been much more advantageous for humans to crave nutrients and vitamins rather than just calories.
But over the millenia, during which our ancestors evolved, calories were scarce, and there was nothing to anticipate that this would later change so quickly.
So, evolution proceeds blindly, step by step by step, creating all of the diversity we see in the natural world.
There are still lots of things about space that we may never be able to answer, like is time travel possible?
Or are aliens living somewhere else in the Milky Way?
But there is one thing I believe about space: Space is trying to kill me.
Space isn't out to get me personally.
It's also trying to kill you and everybody else.
Think about it.
Space doesn't naturally have what we need to survive when we travel there: no air, it's too hot or too cold, no ozone to protect us from those nasty UV rays, either.
This all sounds bad, but what can space really do to me if I stay on Earth?
What we need to understand is that objects in space can cause people to think their days are numbered, even when there are events on Earth that can hurt or kill us before something from space does.
So, what are the odds that one of these objects will really affect Earth and you and me in our lifetime?
Well, we can take what we know about the universe to try and figure that out.
You might have heard stories about asteroids hitting the Earth.
That would be pretty bad.
Scientists think asteroids might have killed off most of the dinosaurs.
Sounds like something we should worry about, right?
Well, astronomers can now watch asteroids in space and see them coming using complex computer models to predict the deadly rock's path.
For a while, the reported odds that asteroid Apophis would strike Earth in 2036 were once 1 in 625.
But, after updating their data, astronomers now say the chances are extremely low.
Okay, what about the sun?
Hollywood movies like to pick on our sun by showing Earth destroyed by solar flares or the sun dying out, which would cause Earth to freeze.
Astronomers predict our sun contains enough gas to make energy for another 3 to 5 billion years.
So, in 3 to 5 billion years, if people still exist on Earth, they'll have to deal with that.
But today, well, we're safe.
Sometimes the sun does shoot flares at Earth, but the magnetic fields surrounding our planet blocks most of that radiation.
The radiation that does get through creates things like the Aurora Borealis.
Gigantic solar flares can mess with our satellites and electrical equipment, but the chances of it killing you are pretty slim.
Okay, what about that supermassive black hole in the middle of our galaxy?
What happens to Earth, and us, when it pulls us in?
After all, it is supermassive.
Nope, not going to happen.
That's one big object that can't bother us.
How can we be so sure?
Our solar system is on the edge of the Milky Way while the nearest supermassive black hole is about 26,000 light years from Earth.
That means we aren't on that black hole's menu.
So, you still think space objects are trying to kill you even after what I've told you so far?
I think I've even convinced myself that odds are really good that space and the objects up there won't kill me after all.
But I'll probably keep looking up just to make sure nothing is headed my way.
I bring you greetings from the 52nd-freest nation on earth.
As an American, it irritates me that my nation keeps sinking in the annual rankings published by Freedom House.
I'm the son of immigrants.
My parents were born in China during war and revolution, went to Taiwan and then came to the United States, which means all my life, I've been acutely aware just how fragile an inheritance freedom truly is.
That's why I spend my time teaching, preaching and practicing democracy.
I have no illusions.
All around the world now, people are doubting whether democracy can deliver.
Autocrats and demagogues seem emboldened, even cocky.
The free world feels leaderless.
And yet, I remain hopeful.
I don't mean optimistic.
Optimism is for spectators.
Hope implies agency.
It says I have a hand in the outcome.
Democratic hope requires faith not in a strongman or a charismatic savior but in each other, and it forces us to ask: How can we become worthy of such faith?
I believe we are at a moment of moral awakening, the kind that comes when old certainties collapse.
At the heart of that awakening is what I call "civic religion."
And today, I want to talk about what civic religion is, how we practice it, and why it matters now more than ever.
Let me start with the what.
I define civic religion as a system of shared beliefs and collective practices by which the members of a self-governing community choose to live like citizens.
Now, when I say "citizen" here, I'm not referring to papers or passports.
I'm talking about a deeper, broader, ethical conception of being a contributor to community, a member of the body.
To speak of civic religion as religion is not poetic license.
That's because democracy is one of the most faith-fueled human activities there is.
Democracy works only when enough of us believe democracy works.
It is at once a gamble and a miracle.
Its legitimacy comes not from the outer frame of constitutional rules, but from the inner workings of civic spirit.
Civic religion, like any religion, contains a sacred creed, sacred deeds and sacred rituals.
My creed includes words like "equal protection of the laws" and "we the people."
My roll call of hallowed deeds includes abolition, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the Allied landing at Normandy, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And I have a new civic ritual that I'll tell you about in a moment.
Wherever on earth you're from, you can find or make your own set of creed, deed and ritual.
The practice of civic religion is not about worship of the state or obedience to a ruling party.
It is about commitment to one another and our common ideals.
And the sacredness of civic religion is not about divinity or the supernatural.
It is about a group of unlike people speaking into being our alikeness, our groupness.
Perhaps now you're getting a little worried that I'm trying to sell you on a cult.
Relax, I'm not.
I don't need to sell you.
As a human, you are always in the market for a cult, for some variety of religious experience.
We are wired to seek cosmological explanations, to sacralize beliefs that unite us in transcendent purpose.
Humans make religion because humans make groups.
The only choice we have is whether to activate that groupness for good.
If you are a devout person, you know this.
If you are not, if you no longer go to prayer services or never did, then perhaps you'll say that yoga is your religion, or Premier League football, or knitting, or coding or TED Talks.
But whether you believe in a God or in the absence of gods, civic religion does not require you to renounce your beliefs.
It requires you only to show up as a citizen.
And that brings me to my second topic: how we can practice civic religion productively.
Let me tell you now about that new civic ritual.
It's called "Civic Saturday," and it follows the arc of a faith gathering.
We sing together, we turn to the strangers next to us to discuss a common question, we hear poetry and scripture, there's a sermon that ties those texts to the ethical choices and controversies of our time, but the song and scripture and the sermon are not from church or synagogue or mosque.
They are civic, drawn from our shared civic ideals and a shared history of claiming and contesting those ideals.
Afterwards, we form up in circles to organize rallies, register voters, join new clubs, make new friends.
My colleagues and I started organizing Civic Saturdays in Seattle in 2016.
Since then, they have spread across the continent.
Sometimes hundreds attend, sometimes dozens.
They happen in libraries and community centers and coworking spaces, under festive tents and inside great halls.
There's nothing high-tech about this social technology.
It speaks to a basic human yearning for face-to-face fellowship.
It draws young and old, left and right, poor and rich, churched and unchurched, of all races.
When you come to a Civic Saturday and are invited to discuss a question like "Who are you responsible for?"
or "What are you willing to risk or to give up for your community?"
When that happens, something moves.
You are moved.
You start telling your story.
We start actually seeing one another.
You realize that homelessness, gun violence, gentrification, terrible traffic, mistrust of newcomers, fake news -- these things aren't someone else's problem, they are the aggregation of your own habits and omissions.
Society becomes how you behave.
We are never asked to reflect on the content of our citizenship.
Most of us are never invited to do more or to be more, and most of us have no idea how much we crave that invitation.
We've since created a civic seminary to start training people from all over to lead Civic Saturday gatherings on their own, in their own towns.
In the community of Athens, Tennessee, a feisty leader named Whitney Kimball Coe leads hers in an art and framing shop with a youth choir and lots of little flags.
A young activist named Berto Aguayo led his Civic Saturday on a street corner in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago.
Berto was once involved with gangs.
Now, he's keeping the peace and organizing political campaigns.
In Honolulu, Rafael Bergstrom, a former pro baseball player turned photographer and conservationist, leads his under the banner "Civics IS Sexy."
It is.
(Laughter) Sometimes I'm asked, even by our seminarians: "Isn't it dangerous to use religious language?
Won't that just make our politics even more dogmatic and self-righteous?"
But this view assumes that all religion is fanatical fundamentalism.
It is not.
Religion is also moral discernment, an embrace of doubt, a commitment to detach from self and serve others, a challenge to repair the world.
In this sense, politics could stand to be a little more like religion, not less.
Thus, my final topic today: why civic religion matters now.
I want to offer two reasons.
One is to counter the culture of hyperindividualism.
Every message we get from every screen and surface of the modern marketplace is that each of us is on our own, a free agent, free to manage our own brands, free to live under bridges, free to have side hustles, free to die alone without insurance.
Market liberalism tells us we are masters beholden to none, but then it enslaves us in the awful isolation of consumerism and status anxiety.
(Audience) Yeah!
Millions of us are on to the con now.
We are realizing now that a free-for-all is not the same as freedom for all.
(Applause) What truly makes us free is being bound to others in mutual aid and obligation, having to work things out the best we can in our neighborhoods and towns, as if our fates were entwined -- because they are -- as if we could not secede from one another, because, in the end, we cannot.
Binding ourselves this way actually liberates us.
It reveals that we are equal in dignity.
It reminds us that rights come with responsibilities.
It reminds us, in fact, that rights properly understood are responsibilities.
The second reason why civic religion matters now is that it offers the healthiest possible story of us and them.
We talk about identity politics today as if it were something new, but it's not.
All politics is identity politics, a never-ending struggle to define who truly belongs.
Instead of noxious myths of blood and soil that mark some as forever outsiders, civic religion offers everyone a path to belonging based only a universal creed of contribution, participation, inclusion.
In civic religion, the "us" is those who wish to serve, volunteer, vote, listen, learn, empathize, argue better, circulate power rather than hoard it.
The "them" is those who don't.
It is possible to judge the them harshly, but it isn't necessary, for at any time, one of them can become one of us, simply by choosing to live like a citizen.
So let's welcome them in.
Whitney and Berto and Rafael are gifted welcomers.
Each has a distinctive, locally rooted way to make faith in democracy relatable to others.
Their slang might be Appalachian or South Side or Hawaiian.
Their message is the same: civic love, civic spirit, civic responsibility.
Now you might think that all this civic religion stuff is just for overzealous second-generation Americans like me.
But actually, it is for anyone, anywhere, who wants to kindle the bonds of trust, affection and joint action needed to govern ourselves in freedom.
Now maybe Civic Saturdays aren't for you.
That's OK.
Find your own ways to foster civic habits of the heart.
Many forms of beloved civic community are thriving now, in this age of awakening.
Groups like Community Organizing Japan, which uses creative performative rituals of storytelling to promote equality for women.
In Iceland, civil confirmations, where young people are led by an elder to learn the history and civic traditions of their society, culminating in a rite-of-passage ceremony akin to church confirmation.
Ben Franklin Circles in the United States, where friends meet monthly to discuss and reflect upon the virtues that Franklin codified in his autobiography, like justice and gratitude and forgiveness.
I know civic religion is not enough to remedy the radical inequities of our age.
We need power for that.
But power without character is a cure worse than the disease.
I know civic religion alone can't fix corrupt institutions, but institutional reforms without new norms will not last.
Culture is upstream of law.
Spirit is upstream of policy.
The soul is upstream of the state.
We cannot unpollute our politics if we clean only downstream.
We must get to the source.
The source is our values, and on the topic of values, my advice is simple: have some.
(Laughter) (Applause) Make sure those values are prosocial.
Put them into practice, and do so in the company of others, with a structure of creed, deed and joyful ritual that'll keep all of you coming back.
Those of us who believe in democracy and believe it is still possible, we have the burden of proving it.
But remember, it is no burden at all to be in a community where you are seen as fully human, where you have a say in the things that affect you, where you don't need to be connected to be respected.
That is called a blessing, and it is available to all who believe.
Thank you.
(Applause)