TED Community » Koen Wesselman

Comments

• TEDCred score: +2.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there anything such as waste or unfortunate

  Jan 30 2012: Dat weet ik, ik ben ook Nederlands. :)
  --------------------------------------------
  I know, I'm Dutch too. :)

• A reply on Conversation: what is the basis of our existence? Is the word "Existence" only a kind of our subjective sense? How do we judge existence?

  Jan 28 2012: Assuming other's exist they would have the same doubt about whether I exist, yes. You are right, it is paradoxical I guess, but I take it for a fact that you can't PROVE whether anything else exists. That doesn't mean I don't believe anything else exists. To me it's (more than) reasonable to believe this is not all an illusion.
  I think you would find the book "The problems of philosophy" by Bertrand Russell interesting.(You can get it here if it's not available in your local bookstore and you want to read it, worldwide free shipping: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Problems-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/9781604500851)

• A reply on Conversation: what is the basis of our existence? Is the word "Existence" only a kind of our subjective sense? How do we judge existence?

  Jan 28 2012: Ah I see what you mean now, you are right about that, yes. It doesn't conclude anything about the existence of other objects than me, just that you can't really know.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Construction Manual for a Life-sustaining House & Financing Plan

  Jan 27 2012: If you're planning to make this keep in mind that people want to create a home, not a product. That means you should give them the opportunity to customize things like colour, size and rooms. It might not sound like a priority but if you want it to be implemented broadly you need to keep in mind want the public wants and not just the group that is willing to have an unpersonalised house because they see "the greater good".
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: We should create adaptive systems to support humanity in it's goals.

  Jan 27 2012: But realise that your always changing variable that you want to try each possibility for and record it is not simply a number, but an attribute of a situation. Let me draw a situation for you:
  We program a system that calculates whether firefighters are allowed to enter a building. We give the system as input possibilities:
  - The number of firefighters / victims
  - The size of the fire
  - The complexity of the building
  Then, after implementing the system, a fire occurs:
  - There's 3 firefighters and 2 people inside, unconscious
  - It's a small fire
  - The room with the people is easily accessible
  But there is also a gas leak about to happen, as the pipe is of bad quality and likely to burst. (Theoretically, probably not likely in real life, but I dont know anything about gas pipe's..)
  The system wouldn't be able to make a right decision because we can't give it all the information we need to. An expert would have to make a quick decision due to the time limit of this situation and the system needs updated.
  
  Of course this is not very likely a thing to forget to build into the system but it's an example: We can never predict every possible attribute of a situation. Hence we will always need experts for when the system doesnt suffice and the system will never be self-sufficient. The risk of assuming creating a self-sufficient system is possible is that we will end up having no experts when the system can't calculate the right answer. That's why we should always remember we need to be able to replace systems like these with humans may the need occur.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: When do we discard explanations that are intuitively appealing?

  Jan 27 2012: I'm not sure if this is personal or not, but usually you can convince me of changing what I think with logic that proofs my wrong. The problem I think is that a lot of people, including me sometimes, don't accept that their intuition could be wrong and sit down to think about other people's arguments.

• A reply on Conversation: what is the basis of our existence? Is the word "Existence" only a kind of our subjective sense? How do we judge existence?

  Jan 27 2012: Apart from your personal doubt though, can you actually proof to me that anything but I exist? Of course it's reasonable to assume things do exist but, like I said, there's no way to proof it.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: How can smartphones enhance a presentation?

  Jan 27 2012: I think a possibility is to create beamers that you can connect to through bluetooth and hence allow people to show their slides or documents with it. Another possibility I think sounds good is to create an app for mobile devices that would allow them to show the presentation on all of these devices simultaneously. Of course it's still a question whether this would be more of a distraction than something useful, but it would increase the mobility of presentations as you would need no non-mobile devices. In addition to this you could give this app the functionality of an anonymous voting/suggesting system so people would not be peer-pressured into decisions. This already exists on non-mobile devices.

• A comment on Conversation: Is there anything such as waste or unfortunate

  Jan 27 2012: For me exclusively it would be unfortunate to break my glass or to get sick. For the person I pay because of it it wouldn't be. This is why they say "One man's meat is another man's poison."
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: We should create adaptive systems to support humanity in it's goals.

  Jan 27 2012: You could write a variable that's random with one simple function, but I assume you want the solution to be the best one and not a random one? This would have to be done with a mathematical function by calculating the chance of success per option. The problem is that the system has to give a certain value to certain "features" of a situation which have to be predetermined or learned based on history.
  See a system like this as an automation of the human mind when it makes a choice: Before we can write a system that can make decisions like humans do we have to know precisely how a human brain calculates the best option and implement this in a mathematical way. If we can accomplish this the next step would be to give it more experience than a human brain by feeding it as much input, based on historic facts, as we can.