TED Community » John Freestone

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I'm passionate about

Joy, the kids, human relationships, international co-operation, the environment, comedy, education, the internet, camping, blogging

An idea worth spreading

The Munchhausen Trilemma

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stuff

People don't know that I'm good at

secretly whistling

My TED Story

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Comments

• TEDCred score: +11.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: Bandi Mbubi: Demand a fair trade cell phone

  Sep 23 2012: There's a lot of argument here about who's to blame, consumers, manufacturers, people of the DRC, its government, but it's a complex political web in which we all take part. It may be impossible to analyse accurately what the effects would be of any particular action - politics is largely chaotic. But let's look at what we CAN do, wherever we find ourselves in the web, and on as many of the things we use as possible. One thing that consumers can do is resist the fashion pressure, advertising and other rationalisations to upgrade their mobiles and computing devices at a ridiculous rate. We could make do with a simple mobile phone that we use for calls, and wait till we get to the office, or back home, to surf the net. My phone is about 7 years old. Don't think that everything is planet friendly because you're sending your phone off to be recycled. Electronics recycling is typically vastly wasteful and ethically unsound too - large quantities are shipped to China, using a lot of fuel, where people take circuit boards apart all day without protection from toxic fumes, on subsistence wages. The tantalum is - I feel failry confident - only a tiny part of the environmental cost of changing your computer or phone: there's the plastic, the metal, the rare minerals in the batteries, etc. What annoys me is consumers treating goods that have been made with other people's suffering like candy bars, "consumables". They chuck them about and let the kids use them as hammers. They wreck the camera lens and screen in a month and casually buy another. That's partly because they're far too cheap. At one time you bought a record player or TV or telephone and expected not to have to buy another one EVER, even leaving it to your children! Consumers are selfishly wrecking the planet and fretting that their mate has a newer iphone. They're not sure they believe in global warming or economic drivers of conflict. They will soon.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

  Sep 7 2012: I'm not at all convinced by this, and I get sick of the whole gamut of advertising techniques this is part of. First of all, she gave no scientific rationale for her supposed pattern of contrasting the status quo with the brave new world being a significant mark of a great speech. She takes a roughly binary condition (present/future) and maps her target speech onto it, which you could do with anything (talking loudly/quietly; smiling/looking concerned; stepping forward/standing back) and almost any speech must fit somehow into those pairs. Then, to show that any such pair is the mark of a good speech, she would need to differentiate between good and bad speeches (ranked by volunteers in controlled trials). And from my first point, it is clear that bad speeches are also likely to oscillate between one and the other of whatever pair of opposites we check. If her "research" in fact involved this scientific contrast with bad speeches, she should have made that important point in her speech! Following only the logic presented here, we can say that King and Jobs both blinked, so great speeches are characterised by alternately opening and closing the eyelids.
  
  More likely, this is just someone pretending they've done careful research to validate their idea, and selling it - getting the audience's praise, selling books, getting invited elsewhere, etc. To me, this technique is just another facet of capitalist manipulation and corporate advertising. The iPhone, indeed, and Jobs' high praise, follow more from self-obsessed marketing and consumer gullibility than real advances for humanity. The kind of advertising Duarte engaged in here appeals to your egotism and raw emotion, and tries to switch off your critical thinking.
  
  Another more subtle danger of the chosen approach is that we are being encouraged to be discontent. If that's with racism, fair enough; if with not having the latest gadget, it's insidious and dangerous.
• +8

  A comment on Talk: James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global security

  Jul 28 2012: Nup. No idea what he's on about. All the buzz words of a sales pitch. Security, but open-source. Erm, share information for better security. Right, but with whom?:- allies, friends, presumably. I don't think he said. So that we can compete against/outsmart/overpower enemies, "criminals", hostiles, terrorists. Am I somewhere close? He's recruiting people to send the military more intelligence? Or is the Admiral intending to share military secrets with us? I think he's just on a mission, trying to win hearts and minds at home so as to strengthen NATO's (USA's) power interests, which are not impartial.
  
  His "thesis" pretended to be about global peacemaking (turning down the rheostat, getting softer on folks, teaching, treating), but I'm not sure that's what it's about at all. He's concerned to protect what he calls the "global commons", but wtf is that, and how is it threatened by drug trafficking or terrorism? Doesn't he actually mean Western capital? Open source security information sharing - would that include sending reports to Al Qaeda? No? Not that "open source"? What about Palestine? How does any of this address the problem of rival religions fighting for 2000 years over a church in a desert, demands for a bigger share of less oil, countries possibly gearing up for Armageddon? By winning YOUR hearts and minds, so as to make those things go "our" way, with OUR global commons?
  
  And when are we going to sign to say we lost the war on drugs?
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Mina Bissell: Experiments that point to a new understanding of cancer

  Jul 21 2012: The problem Sheldrake seems to be having with his experimental results, from what I hear, is replication. Which is ironic: from his theory, you'd predict that demonstrating that people or animals are psychic should be getting easier, but he's been at this for decades and all I see is him whining about how science is too rigorous. In that video he talks about doing experiments "without sceptics breathing down your neck", which suggests he's unscientific to the core: scepticism is the absolute crux and powerhouse of science. He wrote The Science Delusion, which I have to admit I haven't bothered reading. He keeps claiming that psi is commonplace, yet after a hundred years nobody has been able to provide anything like good evidence - evidence that can be repeated (which is the basis of good science; it's how we show it's not confirmation bias, which he keeps saying it isn't). There seems to be some kind of Morphic Murphy's Law that makes the proof of Morphic Resonance keep going pear-shaped.

• A reply on Talk: Don Tapscott: Four principles for the open world

  Jul 17 2012: I'm not sure whether the last bit - "actually it looks like we should all ally for a purpose, like birds do against an enemy" is what you advocate, or what you see as the collective intelligence that Don advocates.
  
  I think the idea is that we all work together for the collective purpose of surviving on the planet, as the collective action of the birds helps them survive predation by a hawk. I guess the meandering flight and ripples represent our diverse interests and actions within that, our networking (Tweeting? Haha). In that sense, I think it's not a bad metaphor. Not only that, significantly, as he said, there is no leader, yet there is "leadership" - exactly what that means in the ornothological reality or his vision for our social interaction I'm not sure. However, knowing a bit about biology as I do, I'm pretty sure it's not a completely cooperative dance of birds all sharing the risk equally. I am sure that as we study such behaviours we'll discover all sorts of tactics the starlings are playing in competition with each other, presumably utterly unwittingly. Darwinian principles predict that almost with 100% certainty, since the birds are not genetic clones. Some will turn just a bit earlier or later, some will follow more readily than lead, some will have more energy from eating more, some less from eating too much - a vast array of micro-variables will interact to favour some "tactics" over others. We may even find that birds appear to engage in behavioural deception, "pretending" they're about to change direction. If they can direct one of the others into the path of the predator, they're off the hook for a bit, and they get the chance to breed and feed their chicks.
  
  Humans aren't much different from (angry?) birds.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Don Tapscott: Four principles for the open world

  Jul 17 2012: Yes, this talk is somewhat naive. I think there's a very widespread, but unrealistic, vision that the new tech is going to usher in a lovely free world of peaceful collaboration with a global, crowd-source intelligence solving the world's problems. We can learn, I believe, from the most powerful and pervasive process in nature, evolution. It could well be that human individuals are beginning a process rather like the merging of single cells into a multi-celled organism or the organisational success of hive insects. What we can note is that (perhaps) every system in nature has some kind of hierarchical structure - certainly the vast majority do.
  
  Most social revolutions have instigated a *better* form of hierarchy - from slavery to feudalism, for instance - never removed the power imbalance. Now, the powerful are working hard to monopolise data control, as your article describes, which is at the hub of all our "free" networking processes, the global economy, food production, water sources, the weather, and military might. The miilitary are at the forefront of just about everything from surveillance to AI. They're not a hawk trying to catch starlings.
  
  Don gave no hint how the world could possibly undermine the evolutionary advantage - which is what has always and will always matter - of the rich and powerful, while he enthused about an open future. He did acknowledge the problem of the power vacuum, however, which nature abhors and - I'm sorry to put it so bluntly - fills with the most ruthless and selfish, ready to exploit the new ecological niche. Nature is an arms race.
  
  I hope the elite realise that they, like the ordinary person, depend on the health of the whole world, and that, rather than manipulating the world to satiate their hunger first, with crumbs for us, they orchestrate and enable and protect diversity. On the other hand, unrestrained individual freedom could lead to our demise too. Freedom has to be balanced with responsibility and self-sacrifice.
• +2

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

  Jun 13 2012: Which is why most of the world's leaders score highly on psychopathy indices. They fight their way to the top, manipulate us to vote for them, and snarl ferociously at other leaders.
• +1

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

  Jun 13 2012: Were there different species of hominid living alongside each other? Species? Didn't Neanderthals breed with Homo sapiens? Doesn't that make them the same species by definition (in order to be reproductively viable)? I'm fairly sure Enriquez hasn't much of a clue about anything, but I don't know the answer to this point, so thought I'd ask. Yeah, I could google, but then if we always did that there'd be no conversations.
  
  Moving forward, the idea that geographical concentration of any particular gene would have the effect of human speciation is ridiculous. For that to happen, there would have to be some very powerful social pressure against "geeks" ever breeding with non-geeks. Such an eventuality is politically highly unlikely, and he gave no indication of any reason for one. These two points are related - geeky sapen women couldn't resist a bit of knuckle-dragging Neandertal action when hubby was off flint knapping.
  
  Nobody seems to have noticed that for our offspring to be "a different species", we/they/whoever would have to alter their genetic makeup in such a way as to make intergenerational procreation impossible. We don't generally breed across generations (not the same as incest, note), but can. Again, it seems Enriquez gives no rationale (nor indicates he noticed the need for one) for such changes to take place.
  
  I'm no geneticist, but feel confident to challenge him, since he clearly isn't one either.

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

  Jun 13 2012: Haha! +1 on point 1.

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

  Jun 13 2012: You think that? Wow.