Open Left - TED

Time-Lapse Footage of Melting Ice

Michael Kwiatkowski — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:39:19 GMT

Thanks to Edger at Docudharma for posting about this. James Balog discusses TED, the Extreme Ice Survey, and why perception is the enemy in the fight to survive global warming. The following embedded video was "[r]ecorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England."

Seeing is believing. This is why it was so important to pass meaningful climate legislation instead of the cap-and-trade scam, which appears to be stalled anyway. If we as a nation - indeed, if we as a species - are going to survive the coming catastrophes, we MUST do something NOW. Baby steps and fake reforms will kill us all, guaranteed.

The Psychological Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives

Daniel De Groot — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:31:51 GMT

(Direct link) Psychology professor Jonathan Haidt discusses his research into the moral and psychological foundations of liberalism and conservativism. See and take the tests he describes at yourmorals.org.

The main thing I'd ask you to take from this is that conservativism and liberalism exist at a fundamental level of human brain function. They are facets of ingrained human psychology and not pure constructs of thought and rationality. You cannot discuss the roots of these two ideologies (separate from others IMO) without looking at human evolutionary psychology.
In criticism of what he's discussing, I had a couple thoughts:

1) Adding additional priorities is not such a trivial moral difference as Haidt seems to think. If I value both preventing harm and ingroup loyalty, the conflict between the two means one will win and the other lose.

2) Having additional priorities to your moral calculus doesn't preclude your decisions from actually being immoral. Just because it made moral sense to your value system doesn't mean we should all just agree to disagree. Conservatives, according to Haidt's test results place a higher value on authority than fairness or avoiding harm. So they'd rather not weaken a strong President who engages in torture. Perhaps that result is internally consistent with their values, but it is still immoral, if the word is to have any meaning at all.

3) If conservatives value all 5 moral concepts Haidt identifies almost equally, that conversely means they value nothing. If everything is priority one, then nothing is.

I will accept Haidt's admonishment to foster greater understanding of and with conservatives. However I don't accept his conclusion that they're just as moral when their policies lead to such abhorrent results and they as a group are so reluctant to adjust their thinking. It's all well and good to say "I value authority more than fairness", but you have to be able to empirically defend the results of those moral calculations. I contend conservatives cannot successfully do this, at which point failing to adjust your moral formula becomes itself immoral.

Mapping the MSM Suckage

Daniel De Groot — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:47:59 GMT

Cartogram of the world based on news coverage for Feb 2007. It's from a TED talk by Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International.

Or here if the embed doesn't work for you. More money for Publicly owned outlets, please.

TED

Daniel De Groot — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:15:04 GMT

Have you heard about TED? The Technology Entertainment Design conference has been held annually since 1990. It's a kind of Bildeberg group for smart people. It was pretty secretive until 2006 when they began posting selected talks from their invitation-only no media intimate conferences on their web site (I certainly hadn't heard of it!).

They're up to over 200 talks posted online and the subject matter varies greatly but there it is a goldmine of new thinking and leading edge innovation in a variety of fields. There's no overt ideology to the place, but the defacto alliance of science, empiricism and rationality with liberalism makes it pretty friendly for the most part from a progressive perspective. I think part of building a governing progressive majority in America involves linking up with progressives worldwide. I may write about this in future, but conservatives got a leg up on us through globalizing commerce and goods and leaving out civil rights and labour mobility. The answer is not to go protectionist and put the shields back up, it's to globalize our issues too. I think we were beating them domestically so they took the fight globally. I think if we do the same, we'll beat them globally too.

Below, a few talks I've seen and would recommend.
Alex Steffen sees a sustainable future - Just fantastic on some of the hopeful signs that humanity can adapt so that everyone gets to live a prosperous life without needing several additional planets worth of resources. You'll love the device for detecting land mines.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen - I can't recommend this one highly enough. He makes a compelling visual and statistical case that the term "developing world" is outdated. After viewing this talk you will want to go here to play with his visual graphing tool. He has another TED talk too.

Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe - He needs no intro from the likes of me.

Jane Goodall on what separates us from the apes - She's always worth watching.

Arthur Benjamin does "Mathemagic" - Watch this guy multiply 4 and 5 digit numbers in his head. Entertaining in a nerdy kind of way.

David Gallo shows underwater astonishments - Amazing marine life tricks. You won't believe it when you see the octopus appear. Astonishing.

Larry Brilliant makes the case for optimism - I always like seeing people make the case for hope. Cynicism and Panglossianism only lead to zero-sum me-first thinking. You can't be a progressive and a pessimist with much consistency.

Patrick Awuah on educating leaders - He founded an educational institution for leadership in Africa (I feel bad that I can't remember where, I watched this in December). He talks about the linkage between the endemic government corruption in Africa and the simple fact that many of their middle and upper management simply have no idea how else to function.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page on Google - They do a cool 3D holograph of the world showing real time Google searches.

Bill Clinton on rebuilding Rwanda - I confess I haven't watched this yet. I do know a bit about Rwanda's genocide and I have to believe Clinton feels some personal guilt over not doing more so I suspect he's done some genuine good here.

Al Gore on averting climate crisis - Should be old hat to most readers here, but I linked the Big Dog, his rightful successor in office deserves a nod too.

Carolyn Porco flies us to Saturn - For the space geeks (like me).

Discuss them, or recommend other TED talks I missed in the comments.