[ExI] Critics view of TED lectures

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Wed Jan 1 07:02:13 UTC 2014


Anders: "No time for questions, emphasis on wow."

The thing is, asking question, listening to the answers, and
understanding the answers, requires time and attention, both very
scarce commodities these days. You need to be strongly motivated to
give your time and attention, and that's why wow must come first.
After the time for wow, comes the time for questions.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 2:39 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> On 2013-12-31 11:54, BillK wrote:
>>
>> Science, philosophy and technology run on the model of American Idol –
>> as embodied by TED talks – is a recipe for civilisational disaster
>
>
> Yup. No time for questions, emphasis on wow. I actually called it mental
> pornography in an ethics blog post this summer (
> http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2013/07/censorship-pornography-and-divine-swan-on-human-action/
> )
>
> I will also speak at TEDx Oxford on the 26th of January. Go figure :-)
>
>
>
>> Because, if a problem is in fact endemic to a system, then the
>> exponential effects of Moore's law also serve to amplify what's
>> broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve, and I don't it
>> is necessarily a triumph of reason.
>
>
> This is an interesting and important point. Of course, if things just broke
> when inherent contradictions became untenable everything would be fine - we
> would have Schumpeterian creative destruction. Instead we get problems that
> also mutate as fast as we try to understand them. Obesity today is not
> obesity 20 years ago, surveillance today is entirely different from 20 years
> ago.
>
>
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford University
>
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