May 8 2013: So this is the viewpoint known as "Social Darwinism". The idea is that the reason poor people aren't successful is because they are genetically inferior and not because we, as a society, don't bother investing in them. This idea has kind of faded from public discourse, but I believe it is coming back as an underlying thread in the movement to increase the wealth gap in our country. The basic idea is that you have a genetically and morally superior group of people (call them Aryans, Job Creators, the 1%, or whatever). Then you have the inferior people who you decide are genetically and morally inferior and doing anything for them is a waste.
BTW, your medical doctor has probably received the most education of any person you have met. You should explain that you do not want the services of the dumbest person you have met.
May 8 2013: You comments about Head Start are misinformation. Here is a link to an article with more depth http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/05/does-head-start-work-for-kids-the-bottom-line/. If you are talking about global comparisons those fall flat because typically other countries have even educational spending where the U.S. funds education for the rich and poor at very different levels.
Apr 18 2013: Sorry, typo. My assumptions were based on #5 where you basically imply that you feel billionaires should receive massive tax breaks. I think prebates is an awesome idea. It is similar to the notion of a basic guaranteed income and does make the tax structure more progressive and shifts that "Fairtax" from burdening the poor to burdening the middle class, but still represents a massive tax cut for the 1%.
1. Yes, "us vs. them" is generally harmful. Strangely, I have heard this talking point before. You may have heard my talking point. Massive wealth gaps are an indication of an unjust society and are bad for society. You can't convince people struggling to pay for food and heat that they are in the same boat as the guy putting in a car elevator in his house who earns what they do in a year in a day. Especially when they are working 40 hours a week and the car elevator guy is not working at all. Closing your eyes and pretending there are no income differences seems insane. Economics impacts every aspect of your life from your education to whether you marriage will last.
2. I think your point is that taking taxing takes money out of the economy and could be harmful to the economy. But then the government spends that money stimulating the economy. The question is where you take money from. Like I said above, you should take money out with a few general goals in mind. Like how to cause the least suffering and how to discourage or encourage certain things (i.e. smoking, marriage).
Look, you made it clear you don't believe that we should not tax rich people or corporations and I would agree that the Fairtax is a good way to do that. I assume since you didn't answer my questions about wealth distribution that you do feel that this is a good way to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and that that is your goal. I also assume the goal is to not tax stock purchases to further enrich those who can afford to purchase ownership.
Apr 18 2013: So flat taxes and sales taxes are basically ways to increase taxes on the poor and decrease taxes on the rich. So I ask this question. What impact do you think this would have on the wealth distribution of the United States? I assume from your point #4 that you think the rich pay too much taxes and should be taxed less. So I guess I would also ask if you feel the tax code should be structured to make the poor pay more and the rich less and if the problem with our country is that the poor have too much and the rich too little?
You may believe in a tax system that maximizes pain. So you may believe that you should tax a family deciding between heat and food for their children $200 instead of taxing a "frugal billionaire" $200 that will not impact his life. Or perhaps you work for a credit card company because this would be a windfall for credit card companies and would in effect raise the rate of taxation for the poor.
Apr 18 2013: What about when you have a remote control where you can control your own thoughts? Will human civilization end when we all have dials where we can just turn on "happy and contented"? What about when the powers that be decide to make your brain more obedient? The military tries to desensitivize people to killing. What if they could deactivate a soldiers empathy in order to make him kill more effectively. What if you could develop a bio-weapon that increased human empathy? Instead of incinerating our enemies with explosions and fire we could just make them sympathetic in order to stop any attack on people. We have the notion of chemically castrating sex offenders. What if we could change the emotions so they would no longer commit crimes? How would society progress if every child could push a button to make themselves incredibly focused and intelligent unlocking the promise of every child?
Unlocking the mysteries of human thought leads to a lot of questions and possibilities. You can easily conjure both nightmares and dreams. You should watch the TV show Dollhouse. It explores the idea of uploading and downloading personalities. You should also watch the movie Serenity since it involves the idea of widespread through manipulation.
Apr 18 2013: This is also a great example of bias. You get a call, make a prediction, if you are correct you will remember your correct guess and and if you are wrong you will forget it. Therefore you will naturally think you have psychic powers. Humans tend to believe they are magical, their consciousness is essentially perfect., and that their behaviors are rational. The human brain will occasionally misfire and label a current experience as a memory leading a deja vu. Because we believe in our magically superior consciousness we instead decide that we can predict the future!
Apr 16 2013: When you observe a complex object or phenomenon you ask, "where did it come from"? There are essentially two answers. One is that a more complex object or phenomenon created it. That works really well for objects you create. I made a pot, but I am more complex than the pot. So the idea the complexity derives from greater complexity leads you to a belief in the ultimate source of complexity, an omniscient and omnipotent deity. Descartes uses this assumption in his "proof" of a god. The second answer is that complexity emerges from numerous simple interactions. You are composed of cells. Both you and the pot you made are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of subatomic particles. The Ted website is composed of ones and zeros. Planets and solar systems are created by fundamental forces. Evolution creates complex lifeforms from simpler one. Science tends to show us that complex things are created by interaction of simpler things. Physicists strive to reduce existence to fewer and fewer equations.
So you take one of two paths. You say science can't answer the real questions, or that science is a sham, or that science is wrong. (I have seen all these statements in these Ted conversations) You then happily believe in a magical, unseen world beyond the bounds of observation (the root of science). You get to feel confident of your importance in the universe as it is most likely made for you and you can be sure of a grand plan.
You could also take the other path and believe that there is no grand plan or intergalactic super-being to whom you are special. Life and thought and just self sustaining complex chemical reactions. It seems like a more depressing path and forces you to embrace humility and struggle with the meaning of a life that has no real special meaning. I can understand people not choosing this path.
Apr 16 2013: We aren't using the potential of the human brain? I think you may be just spreading an urban myth, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth. I would agree that many people do not fully use their brains, but I think the sci-fi mythology that we are going to unlock psychic powers and ascend to godhood to be, well, mythology. Stargate Sg-1 (Ascension) and Babylon 5 (psi-corps, Ironheart story) are great examples of this, but you should note that they aren't real.
Apr 1 2013: Okay, let's hypothesize you are investing effort X into an activity with a positive outcome Y. Expending effort X will produce a probability of Y. Let's assume that X and Y can be measured in the same unit (call it personal value). So if X = 1 and Y = 100 the tipping point for P is 1%. Let's use a real world example. You are applying CPR. The effort of spending time pumping on someones chest we will call 1 and the value of saving a life we will call 1,000,000. This means you should continue to apply CPR until there is only a 0.00001% that your efforts will revitalize the person. The calculation is simple so the trick is in analyzing the values of X, Y, and P. Since the notion of personal integrity and never giving up can be added to Y you can have people who don't believe in quitting, but I reckon none of those people would be applying CPR to a rotting body so they are really just loading in extra value to Y.
Apr 1 2013: Systems have been built to harness unused CPU cycles. SETI@home is a classic example where your computer can do valuable computation when it would otherwise be doing nothing. The examples you mention are essentially the same thing except that instead of CPU cycles it is using human mental processing. Gaming is just a way of framing the usage of these resources. So some problems that require applying human sensory processing to huge data sets can be tackled, but not all of science boils down to this. So as a technique it opens up ways to solve problems that we wouldn't otherwise be able to solve just like high speed computing does, but I don't think it will "transform science".
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A reply on Talk: Geoffrey Canada: Our failing schools. Enough is enough!
BTW, your medical doctor has probably received the most education of any person you have met. You should explain that you do not want the services of the dumbest person you have met.
A reply on Talk: Geoffrey Canada: Our failing schools. Enough is enough!
A comment on Conversation: Would you prefer sales tax to income tax?
1. Yes, "us vs. them" is generally harmful. Strangely, I have heard this talking point before. You may have heard my talking point. Massive wealth gaps are an indication of an unjust society and are bad for society. You can't convince people struggling to pay for food and heat that they are in the same boat as the guy putting in a car elevator in his house who earns what they do in a year in a day. Especially when they are working 40 hours a week and the car elevator guy is not working at all. Closing your eyes and pretending there are no income differences seems insane. Economics impacts every aspect of your life from your education to whether you marriage will last.
2. I think your point is that taking taxing takes money out of the economy and could be harmful to the economy. But then the government spends that money stimulating the economy. The question is where you take money from. Like I said above, you should take money out with a few general goals in mind. Like how to cause the least suffering and how to discourage or encourage certain things (i.e. smoking, marriage).
Look, you made it clear you don't believe that we should not tax rich people or corporations and I would agree that the Fairtax is a good way to do that. I assume since you didn't answer my questions about wealth distribution that you do feel that this is a good way to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and that that is your goal. I also assume the goal is to not tax stock purchases to further enrich those who can afford to purchase ownership.
A comment on Conversation: Would you prefer sales tax to income tax?
You may believe in a tax system that maximizes pain. So you may believe that you should tax a family deciding between heat and food for their children $200 instead of taxing a "frugal billionaire" $200 that will not impact his life. Or perhaps you work for a credit card company because this would be a windfall for credit card companies and would in effect raise the rate of taxation for the poor.
A comment on Conversation: Will mind-reading eventually become a reality and what are the implications for humanity?
Unlocking the mysteries of human thought leads to a lot of questions and possibilities. You can easily conjure both nightmares and dreams. You should watch the TV show Dollhouse. It explores the idea of uploading and downloading personalities. You should also watch the movie Serenity since it involves the idea of widespread through manipulation.
A reply on Conversation: Will mind-reading eventually become a reality and what are the implications for humanity?
A comment on Conversation: Can we ever design an experiment which can determine whether God exists?
So you take one of two paths. You say science can't answer the real questions, or that science is a sham, or that science is wrong. (I have seen all these statements in these Ted conversations) You then happily believe in a magical, unseen world beyond the bounds of observation (the root of science). You get to feel confident of your importance in the universe as it is most likely made for you and you can be sure of a grand plan.
You could also take the other path and believe that there is no grand plan or intergalactic super-being to whom you are special. Life and thought and just self sustaining complex chemical reactions. It seems like a more depressing path and forces you to embrace humility and struggle with the meaning of a life that has no real special meaning. I can understand people not choosing this path.
A reply on Conversation: Can we ever design an experiment which can determine whether God exists?
A comment on Conversation: When is it time to quit? And how does one know?
A comment on Conversation: How might gaming and crowd-sourcing change the future of science?