TED Community » Jared Kirschner

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• A comment on Conversation: â��That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.â�� â�� Christopher Hitchens. Do you agree?

  Dec 25 2012: I'm not sure that it is a useful question to ask whether the quote applies generally. Hitchens likely used this quote in the context of discussing religious faith. If this quote is not meant to apply generally, the linguistic debates are inconsequential.
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  A reply on Conversation: Is the Firestorm Against Chik-Fil-A Justified?

  Aug 1 2012: I certainly agree that one side (being against "gay marriage") is wrong. However, someone from the other perspective may believe that we are inviting G-d's judgment / condoning a grave sin if "gay marriage" is allowed. I highly doubt that anyone spreads an idea that they don't believe just because they want to drum up anger and hatred. That may be the outcome of their behavior, but I disagree with what you charge as the motivation. If that is an expression of frustration on your part with what you perceive as obstinacy from those against "gay marriage", I can sympathize. However, I don't think such misplacement of motivations is productive, they just stoke further "anger and hatred" from those that disagree with you.

• A reply on Talk: Paul Root Wolpe: It's time to question bio-engineering

  Jul 31 2012: Alex, if you believe "quite oppositely" what Ken believes, can you explain your perspective on why animals then are ours to manipulate for industrial or amusement purposes? Would the situation be different if another species was capable of doing similar modification on us? Regardless of whether or not these modifications cause pain, should we be making them when we have not considered the consequences? Under what conditions are such modifications okay?
  
  I think the negative reactions people have to the topics discussed in the presentation are because it seems like we are essentially enslaving all of the life that we modify for our own purposes. It's not like, as a species, we've never enslaved our fellow humans for our own purposes. I'm sure that the people who benefited from the slaves had their own justifications for this enslavement activity being perfectly consistent with morality.
  
  And, sure, evolution had a few hiccups on the way. That's kind of how evolution works. However, I am unaware of any cases where evolution gives 100% of the benefit of a modification to a species other than the one which was modified. Something about this just feels incredibly wrong. It appears that you and others don't have the same gut reaction, however. I'd like to understand your perspective so that we may each potentially learn something.

• A reply on Conversation: What will be the best renewable source of energy in 2050?

  Jul 30 2012: I don't think this qualifies as renewable energy. One might argue that this is simply decreasing wasted energy. Also, from what I understand, the technologies that are currently used to harvest energy from walking perform terribly in a life-cycle analysis. (They also don't harvest much energy unless there is very heavy foot traffic.)
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  A reply on Talk: Michael Hansmeyer: Building unimaginable shapes

  Jul 30 2012: I think you should refrain from assuming that someone doesn't understand something. What position are you in to judge his mathematical ability? What is your evidence? How do you know he isn't aware of the Mandelbrot set?
  
  Also, you can definitely design something without being able to envision the end result. He clearly explained this himself in the talk: he can be an orchestrator of an evolutionary process that creates many variations of columns. The role of the designer is to control this process. If I generate 1000 random columns and then look at them and pick the ones I like most, I have just designed something without being able to envision the end result of any particular column generated from a set of rules.
  
  Why is he clueless? Do these claims have any base?

• A reply on Talk: Michael Hansmeyer: Building unimaginable shapes

  Jul 30 2012: As a fellow engineering student, I suggest that you should care about aesthetic concepts. People don't just want practicality. They want experience. If you only care about practicality as an engineer, very few people (besides other engineers) will adopt your solutions.

• A reply on Conversation: What will be the best renewable source of energy in 2050?

  Jul 30 2012: I'm posing this question to both Andrew and Lindsay: justification? If your intent is to persuade, inform, discuss, or debate, you shouldn't just state your answer.

• A reply on Conversation: What will be the best renewable source of energy in 2050?

  Jul 30 2012: Could you elaborate on this? I am not familiar with any way of using positrons and anti-matter to generate useful energy. The positrons and anti-matter would have to be "harvested" so to speak, not generated by humans, in order to be useful for energy production. What are your sources on this matter?

• A reply on Conversation: Laws are just sad attempts to stop regularly occurring problems in society but they don't fix the problems.

  Jul 29 2012: Sure. But I would like to invoke one of my favorite ideas here: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." I would argue that it's better to have laws than to not have laws, as you seem to agree with as well. See my response below to Rhona, where I claim that an explicit set of laws is necessary in a city-state. If you agree with that (which you should, as I believe laws in the Bible are explicit), now we are just arguing about the number of laws. Certainly the legal code could be improved. It could be simplified (which would also probably remove a lot of loopholes). New rules could be made. Others could be changed. We may not need more rules, but we also might. Who knows what the simplest set of functional rules is. At some point, there probably are diminishing returns between improving the legal code and decreasing behavior which we as a social deem unacceptable.
  
  On an unrelated note, this thread becomes a lot funnier when I substitute the word "law" for your surname, "Law". Such a fitting surname for this thread!

• A reply on Conversation: Laws are just sad attempts to stop regularly occurring problems in society but they don't fix the problems.

  Jul 29 2012: Yes, I'm glad that one of the rules we agree to is that it is okay for us to have differences in opinion. Though, I'm not sure where the difference lies. I think as we are both unaware of all instances of law and religion, it is hard to make a broad characterization of the true nature of all of them. It wouldn't surprise me if certain religious rules like "Thou shalt not consume ____" had practical reasons underlying them, for example. How does the rule-maker benefit from someone not eating shellfish or pork?
  
  I never claimed to know the motivations of people who authored religious and secular laws. I only claimed that not all of these people were attempting to maliciously control others; I did not exclude the possibility that some did. Yes, there are hypocrites in the world. We're all hypocrites on some level. It's always easier to point out in other people. And, yes, there is certainly a range of how hypocritical people can be. However, for a city-state to exist, I think that a codified set of explicit laws is necessary, even if it has some down sides. I wouldn't trust my fellow citizens to judge my behavior against "being honest with ourselves and honest with others". They don't know me or my context well enough. I am arguing that this type of agreement only works within a small community.