TED Community » austin kubiniec

Comments

• TEDCred score: +0.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Conversation: What kind of education reform do we need?

  Mar 5 2012: Will do, thank you for the suggestion!

• A comment on Conversation: What kind of education reform do we need?

  Mar 4 2012: It depends on the goal of the educators:
  
  1. Money
  Objective: give people a reason to pay extra for your education above others
  Reform: Invest in staff, technology resources, and business connections to foster the school and gain reputation. Convince people that paying for the education will be profitable to them in the long run.
  Subjects taught in school: anything you want
  End result: A Profitable and politically correct business
  
  2. Educating the leaders of tomorrow
  Objective: provide a place where people can learn of the ways of the world and prepare them to change the world without charging a penny over the overhead costs.
  Reform: Spread awareness of the school, acquire employees with the same life goal of making a better future through education. Convince others to give you money to do so.
  Subjects Taught: Business, Politics, History, Math, Sciences, Languages, etc.
  End Result: An educated society with the necessary authorities put in place to continue future education.
  
  3. Evolving a society that believes what you believe in
  Objective: Creating a world where everyone believes in the same things, a world without debate, without war, all under the creed you assign them (scary, right?)
  Reform: I am not the evil supervillain I like to think I am. I have no idea how you would pull this off.
  Subjects taught: Ideology 101 - 451
  Result: A world where you are the bridge between the masses and happiness. A blind civilization available to do your bidding.
  
  You will find that modern schools feature an eclectic mix of these three goals. They reform based on which goal they wish to foster growth in: Profit, Worldly Improvement, or Allegiance.
  
  I would like to think that we need Worldly Improvement. Isn't that why we're all here at this website?
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: "":: A great idea is one that Spread ::""

  Mar 4 2012: I love this quote, but I read it backwards from the way you read it. An idea becomes "great" when it is spread. If an idea isn't spread, than it did a bad job as an idea! there are two genotypes of ideas:
  
  How good an idea it is (how beneficial it is to the parties involved)
  
  How much it is spread (how many people hear it and are influenced by it)
  
  they do not correlate with eachother much; much of it is based on how well marketed the idea is

• A comment on Conversation: Should teachers be aware of their students’ religious beliefs, or should that be kept private and out of classroom discussions?

  Mar 4 2012: It is not the job of the teacher to tell the student who to pray to. It is the job of the teacher to foster the intellectual development of his pupils. No teacher should be saying what is right and what is wrong, he or she should be encouraging their students to live their lives the way they want them to be lived!

• A comment on Conversation: Our beliefs are based upon our experiences vs Our experiences are created by our beliefs

  Mar 4 2012: They definitely build off of eachother. It's like breathing; the only reason I exhale is because I have recently inhaled and wish to do so again in the future. When I experience something, I take the facts from the experience and shape my expectations of nature (aka beliefs) to fit the evidence. Because I am human, I like knowing that I am right, so when evidence comes along that doesn't quite fit the model, I will try to disfigure the evidence or the model so that they fit together. It's different from person to person; some people write new models, and some people fake the evidence.

• A comment on Conversation: So many conversations, so few comments

  Mar 4 2012: We're social beings with a desire for attention. It's only natural that in a society that expects you to care about things that have nothing to do with you that intellectual intercourse runs into a few speed bumps.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Self-motivation, a myth or reality?

  Mar 4 2012: We are genetic mules, meaning that our purpose in life is to carry our genes and pass them on to future generations. This is because the only genes that survived the billions of years of evolution on Earth were the ones that encouraged this objective. Every thought that we have, everything we ever do is controlled by an organ that is influenced by mental algorithms written by our genetic code, and is influenced memetically by things like advice from people you trust, coke commercials telling you what you should buy, and politicians wearing red ties to symbolize power and intelligence. Self-motivation is the only motivation in the world, when you think about it. If someone tells you to do something, you only do it because your brain told your body to act on it after calculating that the opportunity's benefits exceeded its cost. In this way, you could argue that there is no such thing as free will, independent thought, opinion, or anything. It's all very nihilistic, which is why I tell myself that it is all okay, and go on about my daily life.

• A comment on Conversation: WHAT RISKS WOULD YOU ACCEPT TO COLONIZE THE MOON OR MARS?

  Mar 4 2012: No. Earth isn't intolerable enough yet for me to accept those odds.

• A comment on Conversation: Why do we have to pay to gain knowledge?

  Mar 4 2012: Well, as time has gone by, we have seen the availability of knowledge increase exponentially along with developments in encyclopedic technologies such as the internet. Free education is in impossibility in a world that demands concrete, cash reward for its efforts. Sleep well at night knowing that there are public volunteers who break this mold. "WE as a people should all want to learn and further the human mind set pass the horizon pass the stars." Unfortunately, all of us do not share this goal. Many of us are content to live our lives with what is available to us, and it's our right as a American citizens to do so. What we need is a philanthropic explosion of knowledge, akin to Wikileaks. For the pay-to-learn system to collapse, we need to bridge the gap between the knowledge and the person pursuing it, just as wikileaks bridged the gap between confidential agencies around the world eager to gain an advantage on the other. An ironically contrasting example to the pursuit of knowledge, yes, but I think the analogy holds. The closest thing we have today is the public library and programs like PBS.

• A comment on Conversation: What is happiness?

  Mar 4 2012: For me, happiness is knowing that you are enough, that what you have is enough, and that the world provides enough for you.