TED Community » Robbie O'Brien

More About Me

I'm passionate about

The reunification of humanity's search for meaning where art, science and spirituality cease being mutually exclusive and begin to support it other and humanity.

An idea worth spreading

Being nice to people. The simplest and most underrated idea ever conceived.

Talk to me about

Anything.

People don't know that I'm good at

Listening.

My TED Story

When I found this site I was in awe. It is surely one of the most amazing resources humanity has ever had. It is a dream to attend a conference.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +0.70 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +3

  A comment on Talk: Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun

  Feb 1 2012: The big problem is that the guy on the other side of the battle field is saying something very similar. All wars are fought in the name of all sorts of nice words like freedom and democracy and justice. The invading nation always creates a pretext to try and make themselves look like the good guys.
  
  Of course if all armies and governments were run by principled and peaceful men like Peter van Uhm then I would agree with war being a tool of peace. But if that were the case we would have no 'need' for the armies anyway. In reality positions of power are generally filled by those with a thirst for it and a thirst for power is hard to quench. The more that an army becomes loyal to it's democratically elected government the more those who want power leave guns behind and move to control the government.
  
  Sadly the executives of Halliburton would disagree with the idea that peace is more profitable than war. And with no separation of powers between corporations that profit by stealing the resources of other nations and our government the whole idea of a military that only responds to the citizens desire for peace becomes impossible.

• A comment on Conversation: jails should be more widely known as schools

  Oct 13 2011: I think this is a great idea but the fundamental problem with the prison system (and really the justice system in general) is that we actually have a very confused idea about what we want out of it. We want to punish as a disincentive but prisons are not frightening enough to really do that... in fact the threat of having your hand cut of or being hung wasn't enough to stop crime. We want revenge, though we don't like to admit it we want people to 'pay for what they've done.' And prisons are not close enough to 'an eye for an eye' to satisfy our need for a symbolic balancing of the scales. Plus a key part of 'paying a price' is that once it's done it's done. You steal something, you get a spear in the leg, then it's forgotten about. Our most modern idea is that of rehabilitation. Clearly that's the best way to stop people re-offending and improve the character of society and just as clearly our prisons do not do that... in fact they generally make people 'more criminal'. We can never really do that though because our nature will not allow us to see people get counselling and a good education in return for committing a crime. Until we can love and feel compassion for those who wrong us we cannot rehabilitate them.

• A comment on Conversation: What do you think is the main reason why contemporary kids do not like / understand opera?

  Oct 13 2011: For the same reason that kids don't like 19th century Melodrama, Morris Dancing or Greek sacrificial rituals. It is the nature of culture to evolve and change. Texts, movements, rhythms or symbols may survive but they are transformed and recombined into new cultural expressions. The real question is why does opera still exist. As far as I can tell it's primarily because somewhere along the line people decided it was 'important' and should be saved and kept pure which, for me, is a little like saying that white skin is important and should be kept pure. I have no problem if people want to spend their whole lives making opera but I think it's sad that it soaks up so many resources. In Australia, Opera Australia receives more than the Australia Council's entire competitive funds for literature, music, theatre, dance, visual arts and inter-arts or cross-artform projects combined. I don't want to disregard the contribution that Opera has made to our culture but nor do I think that any cultural product needs to be preserved. On the contrary culture needs to evolve.

• A comment on Talk: Maya Beiser(s) and her cello(s)

  Jun 23 2011: For me the thing that is missing from the idea of simply multi-tracking yourself is the connection between musicians or between musician and the audience. She mentions the goal of an orchestra uniting with one purpose and for me that uniting is glorious and perhaps even sacred. However, the beauty of it comes from the extreme difficulty of the task and the level of understanding that the group must attain in order to play together. One person working to sound like one person seems a bit redundant and recording yourself in a studio and then playing that back live seems a bit of a waste of time. I'd rather buy the CD.
  Zoe Keating and others who use loop pedals to multi-track live bridge this gap for me because each layer can be rebuilt in dynamic relationship to the audience and because every layer is live the musician must have the same intensity of listening as a ensemble member because she hasn't heard the parts replayed exactly the same way while practicing and has to be ready to adjust to the subtle changes that will inevitably arise.
  However, conceptual concerns aside, the compositions and her playing are stunning :)

• A reply on Talk: Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

  Apr 25 2011: I don't think it is the case that people do something they believe to be wrong. I agree whole heartedly with Schulz's assessment that worrying about being wrong is incredibly debilitating but there's no way to function in the state of being wrong. If I ask you to do something you think is the wrong thing to do then you might do something socially unacceptable but that would be what you consider the right demonstration of wrongness. Or you might try to do something unexpected to find the right way to out manoeuvre my logic problem.
  When someone thinks the gain outweighs the guilt then they are doing what they think is right. They acknowledge the social problems of what they are doing or their own guilt but they'd rather be rich and guilty than poor and noble.
  To use a less extreme example than Chai's (though I think that's actually a daily question for many people in the world) I know that eating too much chocolate at Easter might make me feel ill but I still do it because I want the taste. This is the real problem with our decision making - continuously over estimating the worth of short term gain and underestimating the pain of long term problems.
• +4

  A reply on Talk: Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

  Apr 25 2011: I don't think she's really being superior, I think she's just nervous. She does sound like she just finished reading a guidebook on how to sound inspiring.

• A reply on Talk: Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

  Jul 16 2010: She is talking about balance, about being able to choose. We just don't acknowledge how stuck we are in the far left of our brains. Of course if we abandoned our left brain we'd all starve to death while we wondered around in a blissful fog. But I think most of us, me included, have never even tasted full right brain processing. We are willing to fight terrible wars in order to maintain our separateness and are terrified of the idea that we may not, atomically speaking, have any defined edge.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Christopher "moot" Poole: The case for anonymity online

  Jun 4 2010: I think the real issue here is not so much anonymity but diversity and personal responsibility. There's good and bad with any kind of structure or space but it's important that we have options to choose from. If you don't like the 4chan content don't go there. It's importance lies in offering an alternate mode of communication (anonymous, unarchived, uncommercialised) which suits some people and some forms of content. If we insist on making every space 'safe' and 'nice' we only achieve homogenisation. I don't need people to protect me from offensive content by getting rid of it; I need a culture that supports my ability to make critical decisions about what memes I want floating around in my head.