TED Community » scott lee

More About Me

I'm passionate about

I am passionate about environmentalism and especially green trades.

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• TEDCred score: +7.70 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +2

  A comment on Conversation: What is your definition of 'freedom'?

  Apr 27 2013: Freedom is a complex idea which can be broken down into two general camps (sometimes they are called positive and negative freedom, but I dislike those terms because of the connotations they bring).
  
  For example, in many countries people are forced to pay taxes which funds a public education system. One camp would say that by compelling people to pay taxes for this purpose they are denying citizens the choice of where their money goes which limits their freedom. On the other hand, giving everybody access to education gives them more opportunity in a greater variety of career paths and the knowledge with which to participate in civil society, which therefore increases their freedom.
  
  I am in the latter camp. I don't believe freedom is about lack of restrictions. I believe freedom is about empowerment. People are free when they have the resources, knowledge and skills to pursue and generate opportunities for themselves and others. An empowered citizen in a lawful society is freer than an uneducated, destitute person who lives in a place free of the restrictions of government.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: If communism was working the way its progenitors wanted it to, would it be better than capitalism?

  Apr 21 2013: No system ever works the way its progenitors want it to.
  
  That said, the fundamental problem with communism is the centralization of authority over the economy. In Luis von Ahn's talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html, its about recaptcha and duolingo, great talk) he makes an interesting point about organizing people. Building the pyramids, the Panama canal and going to the moon all took about 100 000 people. That's about the most people you can effectively organize to a single task effectively. Beyond that, its just too hard. It's not realistic to pool the resources of a large country and organize millions of people to work efficiently.
  
  Think of the job where you work. How organized is it really? Its hard to organize 30 people, try 30 million!
  
  Capitalism works because it lets people self organize. Economies are emergent, not constructed. The challenge is regulating it enough so it's just and without excessive exploitation, isn't prone to extreme volatility and collapse, and doesn't destroy the ecology on which we depend. Those needs have to be balanced with allowing enough freedom for businesses to actually function. So far that balance has not be achieved, but I like to hope it's possible.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Do enough people, espescially children, know that we are living in an extinction event caused mostly by us?

  Apr 6 2013: The question of whether we are in a mass extinction event is contentious, but mostly for political reasons. It is not a question of whether its happening, or whether we cause it, it is a question of how much extinction qualifies a time period as being an "extinction event".
  
  When considering this we have to remember that industrialization is still only a blink of an eye in geological time frames and we can only truly understand how much extinction we have caused after we have reached some sort of equilibrium with the ecosystem and the extinctions return to a normal level.

• A comment on Conversation: Mental Health : Still in the dark ages?

  Mar 24 2013: We live in a culture where we can plead insanity as a defence in a court of law, and be declared not responsible for our actions. However, we can't plead determinism for the same purpose. It's as if we have presupposed that mental illness robs us of our free will, which is a dangerous and terrifying idea.
  
  Who would want to seek help from a system that apparently doubts ones autonomy as a human being? Furthermore, people fear a loss of personal freedom. Popular culture portrays psych wards as worse than prisons. People can lose power of attorney. Also, when people start to see you as "crazy" they start to see your actions differently. What used to be justified frustration is now "agitation". Do you question authority or have unusual beliefs? Those might now be symptoms.
  
  Admitting to having mental illness can be a scary thing.
  
  Intervention can be difficult too. People who need help may not want it. At what point do you deny them their freedom? Most mental illness exists on a spectrum, with many people that have similar symptoms, but they can cope just fine. We don't want a system that scoops up people that have done nothing wrong and tries to "cure" them. Its hard to know when to draw the line and intervene. Often they have estranged relationships with their family, who are the people most needed to help them access the help they need.
  
  Some people who seek help are actually just trying to get access to drugs to use recreationally. There is a large black market for prescription drugs. How do you filter them out? Remember, often mentally ill people have drug addiction problems (many would argue that addiction is a mental illness). Sometimes people self medicate with the drugs they had access to, which may have been illicit stimulants or opiates, to help them cope with the symptoms of their mental illness. At that point, how do you make them see the prescribed drugs as a treatment, and not just another drug, to be bought, sold or shared?
• +6

  A comment on Conversation: The debate about Graham Hancock's talk

  Mar 21 2013: This talk is not scientific, but it is important because it points to a divide in our paradigm that many people choose to ignore. The divide between objectivity and subjective experience. In the tradition of empiricism, science has always striven toward objectivity. This has lead to a pursuit of the laws of nature which has broken through dogmas of the past. Part of this process is the purging of subjectively held belief. A scientist must overcome their own bias, see past cultural presumptions and focus on the empirical data and experimentation. This is how scientific progress is made.
  
  However, human experience is innately subjective. All of the most important aspects of our life, the joys and pains of childhood, pride in our accomplishments, love of our family, fears and anxieties, grief over our losses, our passions and our vices, are all subjective.
  
  Consciousness is at the crux of this divide and is still mysterious in many ways. Though neuroscience is getting very advanced in its ability to correlate brain activity with subjective experience, it is still mysterious what subjective experience actually is and why we have it at all. Increasingly our personal struggles are being medicalized into mental illness. Is social anxiety or drug addiction a mental illness or a subjective struggle in the narrative of our lives?
  
  While many will argue that pharmacology is the only objective cure to mental illness, others believe that subjective journeys such as meditation and self realization give us the means to cope inner struggles. Both paradigms have their place in the diversity of human consciousness, but only one is scientific.
  
  Graham points to profound subjective experiences that people are having which are empowering them to overcome their problems. They are subjective solutions to subjective problems. Not all truths are scientific truths. Not everything can be understood through objectivity and science.

• A reply on Conversation: Fertilizer not CO2 is responsible for coral bleaching and ocean acidification, from all I see. Intelligent rebuttal wanted. Thanks

  Mar 20 2013: " if co2 were the cause, all coral beds would be affected equally. They aren't. "
  
  Not necessarily. Why do you believe that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are uniform? Might there not be is more CO2 in a city than in a forest? Predicting CO2 concentrations requires a strong understanding of weather patterns, CO2 producers and CO2 sinks that I honestly don't have. Similarly, the ability of water to dissolve CO2 is not uniform either.
  
  There are people who devote their lives to studying these very topics. Why accuse them of lying?

• A comment on Conversation: Fertilizer not CO2 is responsible for coral bleaching and ocean acidification, from all I see. Intelligent rebuttal wanted. Thanks

  Mar 20 2013: It is true that fertilizers run off causes serious ecological problems resulting in dead zones, but that is not because it causes the ocean to acidify. When there is too much nitrates and phosphates in the ocean it fertilizes the algae and causes a large algae bloom. Eventually this clouds the water and prevents sunlight from reaching deep into the water, which prevents photosynthesis. The algae beneath the surface begins to consume its stored energy, or decays and is eaten by the local microbes. This process uses the oxygen faster than it can be replenished and the oxygen gets depleted. This prevents all oxygen dependent life from living in the water resulting in a dead zone. Fertilizer does not cause acidification, it causes hypoxia.
  
  CO2, when dissolved in water does make it slightly acidic. If you don't believe me you can do a simple chemistry experiment at home. Take two bottles of water and dissolve equal amounts of baking soda in them. Tightly put a lid on one and leave the other to the open air. Then let them sit for a week. Measure their PH. The one open to the air will slowly get lower in PH as because of exposure to CO2. I admit that is a clumsy experiment, since it does not isolate the CO2. If you could find a source of pure CO2 such as dry ice then you could perform a better experiment.
  
  It is true that fertilizer run off is a huge problem that devastates ecologies and causes dead zones, but scientists are not lying when they say that CO2 is causing ocean acidification. They are separate pressures we put on the ocean from separate causes.
  
  TL;DR Fertilizer run off causes aquatic hypoxia. CO2 causes ocean acidification.

• A comment on Conversation: Solar energy after the sun sets

  Mar 19 2013: I don't think a sterling engine will be powerful enough but compressed air has been used as a mass storage of energy before. Typically they use a large geological formation as a tank to store the air. I believe the example I read was a coal powered electrical plant that wanted to run at peak efficiency. Instead of lowering its power during low load time it would compress the air the old unused underground coal mine and then use that air to drive generators at peak load. Other examples use salt domes as a storage tank.
  
  The loss of power comes from the fact that compressing gases causes them to heat up which can dissipate as an energy loss. Also, when gases decompress they get cold and this can cause mechanical problems with the turbines that drive the generators. To deal with this systems have been designed to use heat exchangers to capture and store some of the heat to reintroduce into the compressed air when it is released. Of course, there is always energy loss. As I understand, these systems are less efficient, but cheaper than batteries.
  
  If you want to do some research into what has been done in this area, Wikipedia is a good place to start.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Science is developing the tools towards de-extinction of species on the planet that have become extinct. The question becomes; Should we?

  Mar 18 2013: I think Allen Macdougall hit the nail on the head. The vast majority of extinction is due to habitat loss. Without dealing with with the loss of habitat and damage to ecosystems there is no point in cloning extinct animals. All of pressures that brought it too extinction still exist. Unless we can fix the causes of extinction in the first place, we shouldn't devote the resources to a doomed project.
  
  We need to focus one helping preserve ecosystems as a whole, not individual species.
• +4

  A comment on Conversation: Is capitalism sustainable?

  Mar 18 2013: It depends on what we mean by sustainable. Capitalism itself just refers to people being free to trade amongst themselves. Even in the worst market failures those transactions can still go on. Peoples lives are worse, but capitalism doesn't end when it fails to deliver prosperity. Will the divide between rich and poor bring an end to capitalism? I doubt it. The poor can still trade what little they have and the rich do like to spend money (after all, why be rich and live in a tent?). Bankers can cheat, markets can collapse, giant corporations can go bankrupt, but capitalism lives on.
  
  The only thing that can end capitalism is a totalitarian regime that prevents people from trading amongst themselves. Can that happen? Well its possible, and perhaps more likely when the masses feel exploited by big business. Discontent gives the would be tyrants fuel for their propaganda. If that outcome is inevitable, then capitalism is unsustainable.
  
  What's unsustainable is what we have been getting from capitalism. Our economy is unsustainable, even if capitalism is not. In a pure free market society free of all regulation, business would catch every last fish in the sea, cut down every tree in the forest, pollute every river, and burn every last drop of oil.