TEDx Tysons
My talk about the UN Live Museum for Humanity at TEDxTysons.
The Hubble volume
“The Hubble volume is the sphere of space visible to the Hubble telescope—i.e. everything that’s not receding from us at a rate greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe. The Hubble volume is an unfathomably large 1031 cubic light years.”
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
The old system is dead
“We are a new generation of artists, makers, supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which we exchanged content and money is dead. Not dying: dead.”
"He doesn't win because he's a better fighter…"
“He doesn’t win because he’s a better fighter. He wins because he doesn’t give up.” At 7:30, from the marvelous Every Frame a Painting
“When you’ve had a monopoly for a hundred years and you’ve never seen change, change may seem like death to you.”
“The new planet we live on is inherently more expensive than the old one. The wind blows harder; more rain falls; the sea rises. It would cost more to settle it if we were just arriving from outer space…”
McKibben continues: "“…but the price tag comes because we built it up so thoroughly during our ten thousand years and now must defend the investment.”
To share a common life
“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. … For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”
What do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem?
“…Too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply problem solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original question. you simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.”
“When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises.”
"How is that possible?"
“The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…”
The whole passage: "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are the conditions, now what happens next?’ But all our sister sciences have a completely different problem: in fact all the other things that are studied — history, geology, astronomical history — have a problem of this other kind. I find they are able to make predictions of a completely different type from those of a physicist. A physicist says, 'In this condition I’ll tell you what will happen next’. But a geologist will say something like this — 'I have dug in the ground and I have found certain kinds of bones. I predict that if you dig in the ground you will find a similar kind of bones’. The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…"
“They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old”
“Life generates energy from microscopic electrical motors that are embedded in cell membranes and run off electrical currents driven by pH gradients across the membranes. It is impossible for words to do justice to these amazing molecular machines.”
“I heard an interview with the renowned evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson in which he addressed why, as a senior professor—and one of the most famous biologists in the world—he continued to teach non-majors biology at Harvard. Wilson explained that non-majors biology is the most important science class that one could teach. He felt many of the future leaders of this nation would take the class, and that this was the last chance to convey to them an appreciation for biology and science.”
https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/
“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”
"People never stopped coming back"
“Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time, says one person familiar with the one-time experiment. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether. The company wasn’t able to reach the threshold. ‘People never stopped coming back.’”
Millions called
“Dial-a-Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author…Millions called.”
“Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”
The Great Works of Software
“Computer people often talk about products. But each of these five have come to represent something else—an engagement with hard problems that are typically thought to be in the domain of philosophy, literature, or art, rather than programming.”
"More willing to help you…"
“A third advantage of mission oriented companies is that people outside the company are more willing to help you. You’ll get more support on a hard, important project, than a derivative one. When it comes to starting a startup, it’s easier to found a hard startup than an easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand. It’s difficult to overstate how important being mission driven is, so I want to state it one last time: derivative companies, companies that copy an existing idea with very few new insights, don’t excite people and they don’t compel the teams to work hard enough to be successful.”
Literally that much
“The outcome is something like idea x product x execution x team x luck, where luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand. Literally that much.”