TED Community » Matthias Daues

More About Me

I'm passionate about

slowing down time.

An idea worth spreading

will be spread.

Talk to me about

collaboration.

People don't know that I'm good at

kindling fires.

My TED Story

I owe TED to a neighbour, a social entrepreneur sailing under the flag of "adding value to communities", who left Cologne in January 2007 to embrace new challenges abroad and who sent me a book by Guy Kawasaki called "Selling the dream". He did so because, for the lack of a proper word to describe how I saw myself in my job, I unwittingly referred to myself as an evangelist. I read the book and learned to my surprise, that there is a whole job-description associated with what I used as an impromptu metaphor for myself after several kölsch (the local draught) on our last evening out.

I then started researching Mr. Kawasaki on the WWW and serendipitically stumbled upon Garr Reynolds' website and blog concerned with matters of speaking, presenting and designing (a valuable source for the how of the ideaspreading-business, btw).

There I found a reference to Ken Robinson's talk, which was the first I watched.

This was in early February of 2007.

I never got off the hook.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +1780.10 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +3

  A comment on Talk: Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species?

  Jun 4 2012: There's much food for debate to be found in this talk, actually, and it is not in the final rather speculative musings about evolution in real time but in the passages before: Specific genes that are linked consistently to extreme achievements is the one information with a huge disruptive potential for the current understanding of the statement that human beings are to be considered as "created equal". The other hugely disturbing bit comes with the cloning of a mouse from a mouse's skincell. There's several possible Faustian deals to be made here.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Catherine Mohr builds green

  Apr 14 2010: My two favourite quotes:
  
  "[...] I'm very suspicious of all of these wellmeaning articles by people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kind of things."
  
  "And remember: It's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest to changes, that are."
  
  Carpeting (see William McDonough's talk on "cradle to cradle") and alternative drywall (see Kevin Surace's talk on "eco friendly drywall") have already been featured on TED. It is amazing to see how the mass of talks has become a sturdy weave of information and crossreferencing. Thanks for sharing.

• A comment on Talk: Richard Dawkins: Militant atheism

  Apr 14 2010: Have any of you seen David Deutsch's talk explaning explanations? What makes a good explanation is the resilience of its constituent elements to be arbitrarily varied. This is why there basically is one theory of evolution with the constituent elements of mutation (random) and selection (non-random). All parts that fill out this explanatory framework are directly linked to occurences in the real world via direct observation or replicable experiments.
  
  A myth, on the other hand, is an explanation with easily variable elements that have no link to the observeable universe other than their being part of the explaining myth itself. This is why competing myths are so resilient to reconciliation: Their constituent parts can only possess intrinsic value, and to remain of value they must be preserved.
  
  So yes, the world came into existence - somehow. Now let us look for the constituent parts of the explanation how. We don't need a common denomination for this. We need a common denominator.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

  Apr 14 2010: Another interesting quote: "You're entitled to your own opinions [...] but you know what you're not entitled to? You're own facts."
  
  This implies that
  
  a) information is available and distributed in such a way that the participants in a debate are on an equal enough footing to really interact meaningfully (science professionals and laymen, doctors and patients, therapists and therapees, etc.)
  
  b) that all participants in a debate agree on a given dataset as the basis for making their argument
  
  c) that the dataset in question is final (sufficiently representative or all-encompassing)
  
  d) that there is an agreement on the methodic approach to gather relevant data on questions regarding matters of life and death
  
  and this is not the state of affairs we find ourselves in. To come even close to this we would need a near total remodelling of education in all age levels with the main aim to convey the ability to think critically rather than how to know things for sure. There is a challenge!
• +1

  A reply on Talk: David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

  Apr 14 2010: As I see it the whole point of this passage is to show that a myth is not falsifiable, only easily varied in its comprising elements. Falsification applies to hypotheses and theories. Myths are debunked.
• +20

  A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

  Apr 12 2010: My two favourite quotes.
  
  "Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here is the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that."
  
  
  "You know, science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea. It's a process. It's a process. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening and it prevents millions of people from prospering."
  
  Well said. Thanks.

• A reply on Talk: Sasa Vucinic invests in free press

  Apr 4 2010: Interesting thought. What good, do you think, would a stock market for social enterprise do?
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Sasa Vucinic invests in free press

  Apr 4 2010: According to www.mdlf.org there are three choices for investing (although you can always donate): For US-residents there are "Free Press Investment Notes", for non-US-residents a certificate (Voncert) issued in cooperation with Vontobel (a swiss bank) and responsAbility (a swiss-based social investment service provider), and for everybody the option to invest directly with negotiable terms. The certificate is backed by a guarantee issued by Vontobel, the FPIN has no hard guarantees, and the direct investment has negotiable terms - I am sure investment security is one of them.
  
  For more information see the website.
• +6

  A comment on Talk: Michael Shermer: Why people believe weird things

  May 19 2009: Pardon me for being mockingly rude to the commenter from May 4 2009, but there is one piece of faulty logic that I can't help but dissect a little:
  
  Science allegedly invented "blood transfusions that cause AIDS in children". Well, no it did not! It did invent blood transfusion and identify the HI-Virus. A small portion of all the donated blood contains it and in rare cases this blood is transfunded to children. This - if it happens - may seem a terrible fate. But when does someone usually receive a blood transfusion? Most receivers of blood transfusions would die without in a matter of hours. Most HIV-positive people have a life-expectancy measurable in decades. At worst, imminent disaster is averted. How can this be deemed a bad thing?
  
  Kind regards,
  
  Matthias Daues
  
  PS: Just by the way, Mr. Shermer's publication is the "Sceptic Magazine", not the "septic magazine", though it may be considered toxic by and to certain minds.

• A comment on Talk: David Gallo: Underwater astonishments

  Apr 23 2008: @Motti: There is an exemplar species page on the "Encyclopedia of Life": http://www.eol.org/taxa/16486539
  
  @Trevor: Alas, it seems they must.
  
  Cheers!