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The Technium

Rafe Furst — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:10:27 +0000

Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68.

Kevin Kelly

View more presentations from TEDxAmsterdam.

Four Ways to Fix a Broken Legal System (TED 2010)

Rafe Furst — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:55:44 +0000

This was one of my favorites of the year.

“Bad people do bad things”

Rafe Furst — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:44:00 +0000

In listening to this account of Hemant Lakhani, convicted in 2005 of illegal arms dealing, I was reminded of another This American Life episode about Brandon Darby. Underlying both stories are accounts of seemingly incompetent, misguided, would-be bad guys who were actualized on a path of evildoing by law-enforcement agents during sting operations.

What I found most interesting was the quote in the title of this post, said by the prosecutor in the Lakhani case. This was his justification for why it was okay to have the U.S. military supply Lakhani the weapon that he was convicted of illegally dealing. (If you listen to the story you will learn that Lakhani had been making promises to the informant of being able to procure weapons for a long time and he’d been unsuccessful on his own).

While it seems on the surface that “bad people do bad things” — i.e. that’s how bad things get done, they require a bad person to do them — renowned Stanford psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, has a different theory, which he uses to describe what happened in Abu Ghraib:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reinventing Liberal Arts Education

Rafe Furst — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:53:30 +0000

This was one of the most important and encouraging talks of this year’s TED conference:

Don't Eat That Marshmallow!

Rafe Furst — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:00:51 +0000

Short but brilliant TED talk by Joachim de Posada. I love the economic point he makes at the end.

Technology Evolution Will Eclipse Financial Crisis

Rafe Furst — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:01:00 +0000

This is a precursor to Singularity sort of argument:

Mass Adoption of Electric Cars

Rafe Furst — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:53:13 +0000

The Vanguard of Science: Bonnie Bassler

Rafe Furst — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:50:44 +0000

The import of this talk goes way beyond the specific and stunning work that Bassler and her team have done on quorum sensing. In my mind, this is the prototype for good biological science:

Military-Industrial Complex Redux

Rafe Furst — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:39:06 +0000

Willie Smits Is a Genius

kevindick — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:49:34 +0000

Rafe posted this TED talk by Willie Smits without much commentary. I would like to add some. When I first started watching, I thought, “Wow, you can make a lot of hay out of simply applying Econ 101.” This was in response to the fact that they bought the former rainforest land in question, making it private property. This is one of the classic solutions to a Tragedy of the Commons problem. But then my appreciation made an exponential run upward.

Somehow, he managed to perfectly balance the economic and ecological package into a rapidly growing and self-sustaining system. You see, he had to figure out how much economic benefit the land could generate at each point in time and never have more than the corresponding number of people working the land. He had to figure out how to mesh psychological factors with incentive structures to get the locals to adopt the land both socially and economically. He also had to plot the path for an ecosystem in time and space.

Each of these three prongs represents an effort to control a dynamic system and he had to mesh all of them at once. He makes it sound obvious in retrospect, but make no mistake, this is a feat of sheer brilliance. I think there are some good general lessons to learn from this, but the real ongoing value is in the human capital he has built for managing this process. He should cycle through groups of apprentices that then go forth and attempt to replicate this miracle. I really hope this lasts and expands in the long term.