TED Community » Gianluca Finocchiaro

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Walking the thin line between logic and passion, reassessing our own perception schema with a rational approach to life and problems, while not forgetting that we still are fundamentally human beings.

An idea worth spreading

Distributed social data collection and analysis - often, as a socioeconomic research, I've found myself lacking the time, the knowledge and the resources needed to conduct a deep, systematic scientific enquiry on social topics of considerable relevance, such as assessing the efficacy of statistics applied to social matters such as poverty, hunger, sexual discrimination, etc. If these topics are a matter of concern or interest to many, then maybe it is possible to exploit electronic social networks not only to raise awareness on some issue, but also to collect and examine data, to distribute the research workload over masses of volounteers. Surely it's a challenging proposition, there possibily are many different kinds of difficulties, limits and obstacles to overcome, but what if, by dint of trying, we finally become able to tackle problems such as sexual or religious discrimination? The possibilities appear to be endless.

Talk to me about

Science, Religion, Logic, Psychology, Traveling, Movies, Nature and whatever else you think is very very interesting and important to you.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +115.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Conversation: Debt forgiveness, orchestrated across our modern economies, may be a plausible alternative to our current debt dilemma.

  Nov 5 2011: Wow, only 2K chars. I'll try. I see that you have an educations in economics, that will probably help me ;) As you probably already know, Carsten, reality isn't entirely captured by accounting. Alas, accounting barely works at representing a company! Nonetheless, live by accounting, die by accounting it is, for your cash flow dictates not the success of your B&B/sharing initiative, but it surely has an influence on its short term and long term sustainability. Given your education ,you probably have at very least attempted to factor the possible costs in the prices of the houses, factored the offer of the competition, have evaluated the possible demand and target audience, and so on. Or maybe, you guys just agree on a price with the owners and "keep it simple", knowing that no matter how sophisticated, no model will be able to factor in all the possible costs and problems. Now let's hope that it never happens, but all of the sudden 10 clients default, let's imagine you are acting as the administrator of the various cash flows incoming from rents, and that you are short of money. You have a lot of explaining to do, to the banks that are not in mood for forgiveness, to the house owners that need the money to pay their bills, and so on. Hell of Black Swan isn't it? As you worked in HR, you know how irrational an human can become in a snap! Indeed the lender should also bear the responsability (risky leding = you got it wrong, pal, shame on you), but what if the lender, anticipating this panic event, has placed a bet to cover his ass (exactly because of his risky habits) and is now obliged to pay? Enter undergulated swap contracts and similar instruments, enter excessive leverage and contracts whose language is so archane very few have a complete understanding of their implications. Hence, debt forgiveness, a simple and potentially sensible idea, becomes unmanageable in the short term..it's easier to "blame the market" (invisible hand, remember?) and spread the cost.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Philip Zimbardo: The demise of guys?

  Aug 6 2011: My being a TED enthusiast notwithstanding, this talk gave me quite some pause.Was this a TED talk? Only 4:47 minutes on a rather complex subject such as behavior of young males? And Zimbardo, an otherwise very interesting researcher and lecturer, who possibly took this as a publicity opportunity, ....damn it felt like it was a show of pure pointless scare-entertainment with a cheering crowd, cheering for reasons unclear? It seems like Kurt Cobain said it better then me "..here we are now, entertain us."
  
  Too much porn causes behavior issues? Is it possible that porn consumption is a symptom, as opposed to a cause?
  
  Maybe _confusing_ a reality show or a porn, (which are _acted_ and costructed fantasise), for a documentary on "real" life is as symptom of feeling comfortable only in a fantasy world?
  
  That's hardly a Peter Pan syndrome for young people, I know more then a few adults who more or less take cues and/or think that "reality tv" is "more real".
  
  Maybe taking Sex and The City as a "manual on sentimental life" for girls is exactly as distorting as watching tons of porn is for guys?
  
  What about those questions and other aspects of the phenomenon? I think these aspect are quite missing, but there's a limit to what one can say 5 minutes.

• A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

  Feb 20 2011: Great idea! What about encouraging youngsters to give TED-like talks online, in a sandbox TED like presentation at school or at home with a webcam?
  The player take a topic of his/her interest, and speaks for 10 minutes about it. Then the video is brought online and a voting process by TED watchers goes on for a few months.
  The vote is then weighted by the time the video was actually displayed,so that, even if you were the one that submitted the last video, you still can win.
  The prize? You get to talk to TED.
  What do you think about it? And Jane, wouldn't that be an interesting research topic for a new book?
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

  Feb 19 2011: Interesting comment, thank you.
  I wonder if it would be possible to present TED or some other reading/reasoning/commenting activity as a sort of a "game". As you know your parents well, maybe you can devise a way to reframe their perception, even if admittedly it's quite easier with kids than with grown adults.

• A comment on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

  Feb 19 2011: How do we know when we are playing a good game?
  
  I think that we could consider gaming as a being in a state of mind in which people feel (more or less consciously) that they are experimenting something within a relatively "safe" or "more controllable" sandbox, an activity that one can stop at any moment with little or no consequence.
  
  Not that everybody would define playing, for instance, in a soccer match as "experimenting running behind a ball", but what separates pro soccer player from amateurs is also the fact that, in pro soccer, deciding to stop playing a match may have important consequences (financial, professional etc), while quitting an amateur match possibily has, at worst, the effect of not being called when the next match is played.
  
  So, for a pro soccer player, maybe playing a "good game" means being able to score a goal, or to show active participation, all the while maybe having some kind of anxiety about the outcome of the game, for part of the player's future may depend on the outcome of the game.
  
  Whereas, for an amateur soccer player, maybe playing a "good game" means just having a pleasurable memory of the experience, regardless of the outcomes.
  
  So being in a "game" or "play" state of mind, is what really defines an activity as a "game". Possibily, playing a videogame help setting a state of mind that what is being done is "not really real" or, in other words, that it is "just a game anyhow" ; that's a quite interesting property of videogames, understood as a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes.
  
  For instance, in some cases playing a MMORPG could help some people overcome social anxieties, as much as they may provide an illusory self-inflicted shelter for others.
  
  In my personal experience, social games are the ones that yelded the better results (increased and improved social contacts), while shooters and simulators are a distraction that most of the times have appeared to be come potentially addictive.