TED演讲 | 去怀疑的勇气

| 简介

大多数人自然而然地回避矛盾，但是Margaret Heffernan为我们展示的，好的怀疑精神对于进步是很关键的。她为我们证明了(有时候通过反直觉的方式)为什么最好的伙伴不是志趣相投的人，以及好的研究，团队，人际关系，以及商业如何允许人们去怀疑和争执的。

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| 中英对照演讲稿

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In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart.

在20世纪50年代的牛津，有一位相当优秀而又极不寻常的医生，她叫Alice Stewart Alice。

And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s.

她很不寻常，因为她是个女医生，这在20世纪50年代很罕见。

And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians.

她非常厉害，是当时“皇家医师学院”最年轻的学员之一。

She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids,

她很不寻常还因为在她结婚生子后，还继续工作，

and even after she got divorced and was a single rent, she continued her medical work.

甚至在她离婚成为单亲妈妈之后，她仍在继续着她的医学工作。

And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science,

她很不寻常还因为她对一门新的科学感兴趣，

the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease.

当时新出现的流行病学，对于疾病规律的研究。

But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark,

但跟每个科学家一样，她知道为了出众，

what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it.

她需要寻找到难题，然后解决它。

The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers.

Alice当时选择的难题是童年期癌症发生率的上升。

Most disease is correlated with poverty,

大多数疾病都跟贫穷有关，

but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families.

不过在童年期癌症的问题上，这些垂死的孩子似乎大多数都来自富裕家庭。

So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?

于是她想知道，怎样才能解释这样一种特殊的现象呢?

Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research.

当时，Alice很难为她的研究筹备到资金。

In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize.

最后,她只得到了1000英镑，从Lady Tata纪念奖得来的。

And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data.

这意味着她知道她对于收集数据，只有一次机会。

Now, she had no idea what to look for.

她完全不知道应当寻找什么。

This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of.

这对于需要大量数据的研究来说是一个沉重打击，因此她问了所有她能想到的东西。

Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks?

这些孩子有没有吃煮沸的甜食? 他们有没有喝花里胡哨的饮料?

Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing?

他们是不是吃油炸鱼和薯片了? 他们是不是使用过户内或者户外的铅制品?

What time of life had they started school?

他们什么时候开始上学的?

And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of.

而当她的调查问卷回来时，只有一个明显的数据显示了出来，这是大多数科学家都无法想象的。

By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant.

三分之二的这些由于癌症而死的孩子，他们的母亲在怀孕的时候都做过X光检查。

Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

这个发现对于传统观念是一大冲击。

Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold.

传统观念认为，任何事情在一种程度上都是安全的，像一个门槛。

It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine.

这对于这一观念是很大的冲击，尤其是对于当时的新科技X光机器的巨大热情。

And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.

而且对于医生对自己的看法也是巨大的冲击，因为他们都是想帮助病人的，而不是想害他们。

Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956.

不过，Alice Stewart还是很快将她最初的发现在1956年的The Lancet杂志中发表了。

People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize,

人们都很兴奋，有人还提到诺贝尔奖的可能，

and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared.

Alice也很着急，她想去研究她能找到所有的儿童癌症的资料，在他们消失之前。

In fact, she need not have hurried.

事实上，她并不需要那么急。

It was fully 25 years before the British and medical -- British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women.

过了整整25年之后，英国和美国医学界才禁止了给孕妇做X光检查。

The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know.

数据都是开放的，很容易获得，但是没人想知道这一点。

A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change.

每周都有一个小孩在垂死挣扎，但就跟啥都没发生一样，开放性无法带来改变。

So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands.

25年来Alice Stewart做了很大的斗争。

So, how did she know that she was right?

那么，她怎么知道她当时是对的?

Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking.

她有一个极佳的思考模型。

She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't.

她当时与一位名叫George Kneale的统计学家合作，而George刚好与Alice互补。

So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse.

Alice非常外向和社交化，而George是个隐居者。

Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients.

Alice很热情，与她的病人有很多互动。

George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship.

而George相比之下更喜欢数字，而不是与人打交道。不过他提到，这对他们的工作关系而言非常有好处。

He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong." He actively sought disconfirmation.

他说：“我的工作就是证明Stewart博士是错的。” 他积极地寻找证明错误的证据。

Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her.

以不同方式研究她的模型，她的数据，以及不同方式，去利用数据来证明她是错的。

He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories.

他把他自己的工作当作为Alice的理论创造矛盾。

Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.

因为只有他无法证明Alice是错的时候，George就可以带来Alice所需要的自信，让她相信她是正确的。

It's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.

这是完美的合作模式，伙伴之间形成互补。

I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators.

我想知道有多少人有过，或者敢有过这样的合作伙伴。

Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.

Alice和George对于处理矛盾相当擅长。他们认为这就是在思考。

So what does that kind of constructive conflict require?

那么这种建设性的矛盾要求什么呢？

Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves.

首先呢，它需要我们去找到十分不同的人们。

That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves,

这意味着我们必须抗拒精神上的推动，那就是我们更喜欢像我们的人们，

and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.

这意味着我们必须寻找用不同背景，不同训练，不同方法去思考以及具有不同经验的人们，而且还要去想办法与他们交流。

That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.

这需要很多热情和能量。

And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love.

我想这一点想的越多，真的，我觉得这是一种爱。

Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care.

因为如果你不在乎的话，你不可能付出那么多能量的。

And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds.

这还意味着我们必须准备好去改变我们的想法

Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again.

Alice的女儿告诉我每次Alice去和一个同事科学家会面，她都会一遍一遍地思考。

"My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them."

“我的母亲”，她说，“我的母亲不喜欢争吵，但是她却很擅长。”

So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship.

因此这在一对一的关系中是一个方面。

But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals,

但这使我想到那些我们面对过的最大难题，经历过的最严重灾难，大多都不是由个人引起的，

they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives.

而是由组织引起的，有些比国家还大，大多数都有影响上百人的能力，甚至上千人，上百万人。

So how do organizations think? Well, for the most part, they don't.

那么这些组织是怎么想的呢？其实大多数情况下，他们是不思考的。

And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't.

这不是因为他们不想，而是因为他们无法思考。

And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.

因为在组织里面的人，对于矛盾有一种恐惧心理。

In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise.

在对欧洲和美国行政人员的调查中，有85%都承认，他们有一些他们自己不敢说出的话题和意见。

Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose.

对可能产生的矛盾有恐惧心理，不想被缠绕在他们不知道怎么处理的争论中，而且感到他们肯定会输。

Eighty-five percent is a really big number.

85%可是很大的数字。

It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did.

这意味着大多数组织没法做George和Alice成功做到的事情。

They can't think together.

他们不能心往一处想。

And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations,

而这意味着跟我们一样的许多带领组织的人，

and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.

都在尽可能找到他们能找到的最好的人，不过大多数都失败了。

So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too.

那么我们怎样培养我们需要的技巧呢? 因为这的确需要一些技巧和练习。

If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it.

如果我们不惧怕矛盾的话，我们必须把它当作思考，然后我们必须变得很擅长。

So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company.

因此，最近，我在和一个叫Joe的行政人员工作，Joe为一家医疗设备公司工作。

And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on.

他很担心他正在工作的这台医疗设备。

He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people.

实在太复杂了，以至于这台机器可能会产生一些错误去伤害人们。

He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help.

他很害怕去伤害那些他想帮助的人们。

But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried.

不过他看了看周围的人，没人似乎有这种担心。

So, he didn't really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn't.

因此，他不想把自己的想法说出来，毕竟，其他人可能知道他有不知道的东西。

Maybe he'd look stupid. But he kept worrying about it,

这样他会看起来很愚蠢。但是他始终非常担心,

and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.

以至于他到达一种程度，他觉得唯一可以做的事情，就是辞掉他热爱的工作。

In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns.

最后，Joe和我找到一个提升他担心关注度的方法。

And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation.

结果呢，总是发生的事情果然再一次发生了。

It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts.

所有人其实都有着同样的问题和怀疑。

So now Joe had allies. They could think together.

所以现在Joe和他的伙伴。他们可以往一处去思考。

And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument,

当然，这其中有很多的矛盾和辩论，

but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.

不过这使得所有人都变得有创造力，都能去解决问题，去改变这台设备。

Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers,

Joe有点像是大多数人认为的揭发者那样，只不过像所有揭发者一样，

he wasn't a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served.

他不是在异想天开，他有激情地为组织付出，以及为组织的目标而努力。

But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence.

不过他对于矛盾太过于惧怕，直到最后沉默对他来说更为可怕。

And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined.

而当他敢于说出口的时候，他发现了更多的自己，以及他从未想象过的对于系统的贡献。

And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader.

而且他的同事没觉得他的想法是天方夜谭，他们认为他是个领导者。

So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often?

所以说,我们怎么样才能更简单，更经常地来发起这些对话呢?

Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend.

嗯，Delft大学要求，它所有的博士学生必须提交他们已经准备好可以进行辩护的5个陈述。

It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority.

这些陈述是什么都无所谓，重要的是这些选手们愿意而且有能力对权威提出挑战。

I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life.

我认为这是一个极棒的系统，不过我觉得毕竟博士生还是少数，而且太晚了。

I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development,

我认为我们应该向所有小孩和大人都教授这些技巧，

if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.

如果我们想要能够思考的组织和社会。

The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden.

事实上，那些我们曾经见证过的最大的灾难，很少是由于一些隐藏的或者秘密的信息而产生。

It comes from information that is freely available and out there,

这都是由那些公开的信息而造成的，

but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes.

不过我们只不是完全忽略了而已，因为我们不想去处理引起的各种麻烦和矛盾。

But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict,

但是当我们愿意去打破这种沉默或者我们敢于看到并且制造矛盾，

we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.

我们就能使我们以及周围的人进行最有效的思考。

Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential.

公开信息是很棒的，公开的网络很关键。

But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

但是事实不会让我们自由，除非我们拥有技能、习惯、天赋、以及道德上的勇气去利用它。

Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.

公开并不是一个结束。它只是一个开始。

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