2008 June - The Emergent Fool

Environmental Ideology and The Ascetic M...

Posted by kevindick in Climate, Cooperation, Evolution, Genetics, Society on 06 30th, 2008 | 15 Comments

I’ve always been ambivalent about environmentalism. On the one hand, my gut instinct is usually to conserve and preserve as a default policy. On the other hand, a lot of environmentalists seem to adopt an absolutist posture. Any harm to the environment is bad. No tradeoffs. No cost-benefit analysis....

Top 10 TED Talks...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 27th, 2008 | No Comments

There’s a great highlights reel here with links to the top 10 most popular so...

Dynamic Architecture...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Architecture, Technology on 06 26th, 2008 | No Comments

...

TED Talk: Larry Lessig...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 17th, 2008 | No Comments

How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law ...

TED Talk: V.S. Ramachandran...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 16th, 2008 | No Comments

A Journey to the Center of Your Mind ...

TED Talk: Bill Clinton...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 15th, 2008 | No Comments

World-class Health Care for Rwanda ...

TED Talk: Robert Fischell...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 14th, 2008 | No Comments

Medical Inventing ...

Posted by kevindick in Interventions, Poverty, Socio-technical systems on 06 9th, 2008 | 4 Comments

I recently alerted Rafe to the latest Copenhagen Consensus, which aims to set priorities for the most cost effective interventions to improve global welfare. Items (1) and (3) were micronutrient supplementation and fortification. Rafe expressed concern that these were a “band aid approach”....

National Popular Vote...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Government, Interventions, Politics, Voting on 06 6th, 2008 | 7 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about personal vote verification. At the group level, I recommend supporting the National Popular Vote. While most people (70%) favor a popular vote for president, the U.S. Constitution calls for an electoral college system. The National Popular Vote movement is extremely clever in...

Crowdsourcing Election Verification...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Crowdsourcing, Government, Politics, Voting on 06 6th, 2008 | 5 Comments

I take it as accepted fact at this point that the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election would have gone to John Kerry if everyone who attempted to vote that day were able to and all the votes were counted correctly. Here’s the the Wikipedia entry on the subject and here’s a documentary to get you...

TED Talk: Steven Pinker...

Posted by Rafe Furst in TED on 06 5th, 2008 | 1 Comment

The myth of violence ...

TED Talk: Susan Blackmore...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Culture, Memes, Socio-technical systems, TED, Technology on 06 4th, 2008 | No Comments

Memes and “temes” Apropos of Kevin’s post yesterday on the “Singularity“, we need to be taking more seriously cultural agency (which includes technological and socio-technological agency): ...

Stray Thought About the Singularity...

Posted by kevindick in Alternative Institutions, Cooperation, Government, Singularity, Society, Socio-technical systems on 06 3rd, 2008 | 1 Comment

Rafe’s post on complex systems defending themselves randomly collided in my mind with this post and paper by Robin Hanson on the Singularity to spur a stray thought. What if the Singularity were catalyzed by changes in organizations rather than intelligence or manufacturing? ...

Complex Systems Defend Themselves...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Autocatalysis, Socio-technical systems, Stability on 06 1st, 2008 | 2 Comments

I’ve talked on here about the importance of taking seriously the notion of agency as it applies to systems other than biological. In reading a recent Wired retrospective on what they called wrong, I was struck by feeling that their error was the same in all three cases, and that is underestimating...