http://getdocued.net/fresh Fri, 18 May 2012 05:28:51 +0200 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://getdocued.net/img/introVideo.jpg http://getdocued.net/fresh http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-391 In his hour-long Keynote Address for the 28th National Space Symposium, space enthusiast and astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is delivering a passionate argument for raising NASA's budget and making space - once again - the final frontier. DeGrasse's point, which followers of his public persona probably know already, is that space and space exploration have had an astonishing impact on mankind's cultural as well as technological development during the past half century. He states Wernher von Brauns V2 rocket design as a major, if subconscious, inspiration for automobile designs in the 50s, and continues about how the publication of Apollo 8's famous "Earth Rising" photo has catalyzed the rise of such entities as the Environmentalist movement and Doctors Without Borders. No matter what your personal stance on space exploration or the funding of such ventures is, this speech is a remarkable plea for the re-vitalization of mankind's curiosity and spirit of invention, as well as a celebration of the global effort that has gone into this ever challenging project, the pushing of our collective boundaries. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-390 Eric Beinhocker, Senior Fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute and author of "The Origin of Wealth" talks about what he believes are the major errors in current economic thought. Beinhocker wants to convince us, that neo classical economics should be more or less abandoned. He suggests that we substitute this old Walrasian thoughts with what he calls evolutionary economics. A very thought provoking lecture! http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-389 This is the best discussion on Green Energy which I have found so far. Andrew Morris – the author of “The False Promise of Green Energy” – and Kate Gordon the Vice President for Energy Policy of the “Center for American Progress” discuss Green Energy in every detail. Putting two persons in a room with contrary opinions is almost always interesting. But these two speakers are both extremely knowledgeable and highly outspoken. Both know exactly how to best defend their respective cases. I also recommend listening until the very last minute of the video. At the end the moderator asks some questions which even put more light on the topic. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-388 Usually on getdocued we don’t link podcast. But for this one, I will make an exception. Russ Roberts an outspoken Hayekian and Steve Fazzari an outspoken Keynesian talk about macroeconomics. The chat is at all times very friendly and truly insightful for every listener. In the first part the discussion is about theory while the second part is mostly about the financial crisis. Many of Econtalks podcasts start to slightly bore me in the last years, but this one is truly terrific! http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-387 This thirty minute long animation wants us to tell the story of the FED. Like almost all of the independent animations on youtube, it is highly critical of his subject. Its main idea is that a fight for freedom is basically a fight against central banks. For one part I like the film, because I think our knowledge about the banking system and more fundamentally our knowledge about money is not big enough. I mean, when you think about it, at school you spend hundreds of hours learning about gens, about physical laws and what have you. But at least in Germany you learn almost nothing about money at all. I assume that the animation is highly biased, so I wish to find a good critique on this movie. In combination with a critique, it might be even more valuable. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-386 “The Story of Stuff” has been one of the most powerful political videos. Its message is: if we don’t stop our current life style, the earth will collapse. Not only because of global warming, but also because of waste and depletion of ressources. It also his highly critical of consumerism in general. Many videos try to push that same goal, but this video is different. It’s very nicely done and quite entertaining. Contrary to most people Lee Doren of “How the world works” thinks that the whole video is just pure indoctrination. The first minute might come around a little childish or cheeky, but all in all the critique seems to be quite substantial. I especially love the video because it symbolizes the power of freedom of speech and discussion, it would be great if there would be more direct intellectual confrontation like this. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-385 Prof. Richard Thaler talks about his and Cass Sunstein’s very influential book “nudge”. In his book he introduces us to the idea of libertarian paternalism. The idea of libertarian paternalism is, that the “state can help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will as well as the sharpness of mind. But unlike 'hard' paternalists, who ban some things and mandate others, the softer kind aims only to skew your decisions, without infringing greatly on your freedom of choice.” (wiki) One of Sunstein’s and Thaler’s core idea concerns choice architecture. The idea of Choice architecture in turn is, that decisions are influenced by how the choices are presented. Thaler suggests that governments and enterprises could hughely influence the people by just meddling with the choice structure. Since every choice must be structured in someway, Thaler argues, that such a paternalism is very soft and almost libertarian, since it doesn’t cut any choices entirely. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-384 Communitarianism is one of the most interesting contemporary moral philosophies, because it is one of the few moral theories, which is not rooted in the enlightenment. On the contrary one of the main features of communitarianism is its criticism on the enlightenment endeavor. The communitarian thinks that the rise of emotivism (which means: moral judgments are basically judgments of taste) and complete moral subjectivism is a necessary consequence of the enlightenment. Another feature of post-enlightenment thought is the triumph of instrumentalism. When goals become irrelevant the humanities, economics and the social sciences will focus solely on the question of which means will attain which ends. The communitarian thinks that ethics – and society in general – should refocus on goals instead of means. Ethics, says MacIntyre, should be about how to improve behavior, not to describe or aggregate it. To give an example: In business schools we learn methods which we could apply in the various companies, regardless of what they actually produce. This kind of education in itself already implies that goals are inherently subjective. Such an education – says the communitarian – is absolutely misguided. Let Yale Professor Shapiro tell you more about communitarianism at Academic Earth. [Two part lecture series, 45 min each] http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-383 Daniel Goleman brought up the notion of "EI" as an alternative to more traditional measures of IQ with his 1995 mega-best-seller Emotional Intelligence. In this talk Goleman speaks about compassion. His main idea seems to be, that studying ethics or even pondering about ethical question won’t necessarily affect your actual ethical behavior. Goleman tells the following story: “A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in -- to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. Half were given random Bible topics. Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help? The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all.” Goleman goes on and criticizes our self involved life style, which leads to us not having enough compassion for strangers. I personally think that reasoning is a bit faulty. Actually, there are just so many people we can care about. And most our lives – especially when we are parents – we already have a big load of responsibility to carry around. Goleman’s argument is, as it seems to me, that we are by default compassioned. But honestly I don’t what that means, because what would be default way of acting? Acting always implies that we already are aiming at something. So it seems to me, that to act compassionately most of the time requires from us discretion. That means to stop, what we are doing and reprioritize. I guess my point is, what compassion really requires from us in our everyday life, is in the end a kind of flexibility and also multitasking. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-382 If you ever have problems to stick to what you truly want, than increase the price of vice, to decrease the might of vice, that’s the basic insight of Ian Ayres’ talk and book “Carrots and Sticks”. Weakness of the will, or as the ancients called it: akrasia, is a problem certainly know to everybody. Imagine you want to lose weight, but year after year you stay chubby. Imagine you want to learn a new language, but every Sunday you realize again – looking back – that you haven’t learned a single vocabulary in the past week. Applying “commitment contracts” to tackle these recurring problems, says Ian Ayres, outperform every other tool we have to cope with weakness of the will. But what’s the difference between ordinary incentives and “commitment contracts”? Ayres answers: „Ordinary incentives seek to guide prospective choices. Commitment devices instead try to take prospective choices out off the table.” Ayres also claims that “commitment contracts” could have some potential in the realm of politics. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-381 Ian Ayres main idea in his 2007 published book “super crunchers” is that human beings put way too much weight on their intuition and would be better off if they would start listening to the numbers. What’s new about “super crunchers”, says Ayres, is not the technique, but the size of the data sets and the speed and cost of data analysis. Ayres claims that, we can enhance our understanding of the effects of such different fields like medicine and advertising, if we just stick to the numbers. We even can predict the quality of Bordeaux wine better with statistical data than any wine grower and wine experts can do. Ayres interestingly enough wants us to question the “knowledge” and “intuition” of experts and instead rely more on statistical analysis and randomized tests. If you are interested or skeptical about Ayres ideas, I suggest that you also listen to the conversation between Russ Roberts and Ian Ayres about the usefulness of statistical data (link below). http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-379 Michael Shermer – author of many books – develops an interesting thought in the first part of his evolutionary economics talk: “We correctly surmise designed objects such as stone tools to be the product of an intelligent designer, and thus naturally assume that all functional objects, such as eyes, must have been similarly intelligently designed.” Shermer in this lecture tries to make sense of the question why our intuitive understanding, when it comes to science, will lead us often in the wrong direction. To explain this he tries to make an analogy between folk astronomy, folk biology, folk psychology and folk economics. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-378 Sometimes it is good to familiarize oneself with strong arguments of movements which at first glance seem to be just ridiculous, because sometimes they have a point – and in rare occasions they are just plain right. In the US the struggle between people who subscribe to “intelligent design” and people who subscribe to evolution is still going on. While we Europeans – even the religious Europeans I guess – think that evolution is just a scientific fact, very few of us have even considered the question if the intelligent design fraction might have a point. Here is one of their strongest arguments. (If you start doubting after watching that clip, go to Wikipedia, there is plenty of stuff about the biologist Michael J. Behe.) http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-377 Most people think that evolution is about nature, about survival and extinction of animals and plants. But actually evolution is a concept which goes beyond biology. Evolution at its core is about complex adaptive systems. It is about creating, adapting and amplifying. From Igor Nikolic’s talk we can learn that it is highly interesting and possible fruitful to model social problems in the language of evolution. In his entertaining talk Nikolic tells us that we have to learn to fail gracefully. Evolution is about trial and error and not trial and success, he says. When we understand that, we may come to the conclusion that the following questions should be at the heart of our efforts in social policy: How do we make mistakes in such a way that we can recover from them? How can we structure our social-environment in a way that we can learn from mistakes? http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-376 "For many, Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico marked a tragedy in Soviet history, cutting off the possibility of a humane version of communism taking hold in Russia, with Trotsky himself arguing that he would have held back the tides of arbitrary rule and terror. But is that so?" (Uncommon knowledge) Joining the conversation are Hitchens and Hoover senior fellow Robert Service. I like this conversation quite a bit because it is touching all the sensivite points of the narrative of communism. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-375 A journeyman picture documentary about the japanese criminal organization "Yakuza". Often called the 'japanese mafia' this influential and widespread organization is known for its brutality and corruption all over the world. And also - mystified, as it is hard for an outsider, to actually get to know more about it or realize it exists, even when living in Japan. Lately, the Yakuza have not only been involved in the usual corruption, brutality, drugs and assasinations but also in the growing and lucrative business of child ponography. Journeyman Pictures creates a short but interesting insight in a somewhat mystical, deadly and dominant force - even in the 21st century. (elysion) http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-374 Thomas Sowell is one of the brilliant minds who I found exclusively through my work with getdocued. He is a strong critic both of American liberalism (left wings) and conservatives. Sowell wrote many books about the question why intellectuals always have a huge crush on ideas like socialism, central planning and big government. Sowell is one of the few thinkers (at least from a European perspective) who constantly defends ideas which are most of the time against our first intuitions. Great stuff! Additional information --------------------------------------------- This link brings you to number 1 of 5 parts. If you want to find the other parts: try this one link==http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/ http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-373 Physicist Steven Cowley is certain that nuclear fusion is the only truly sustainable solution to the fuel crisis. In his short talk he explains how fusion works and what steps we need to do to actually get energy from fusion reactors. Opinon: Mr. Cowley actually says that fusion technology needs another ten billion dollars to work, not to mention that just recently big and expensive fusion experiments were done. I always think, if things are so expansive, maybe it is not the right time for it. Because in ten years from now on, our whole technology will be on a whole new level. And with that technology it is reasonable to assume, we can have this fusion experiments for a lot less money - but maybe with better results. http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-372 If you liked Powers of Ten, the iconic documentary from the 70s demonstrating the scale of the universe, you'll love this. It's like an updated version of the aforementioned, giving a good impression of what astronomers presently know about space - and how much yet remains to be found. There's no narration, instead your journey through the lightyears is accompanied by soothing chill-out sounds. (an) --awe-inspiring ride, 7 mins-- --additional information (see link box): • American Museum of Natural History Official Site • Download of Digital Universe Atlas @ Hayden Planetarium http://getdocued.net/docuinfo/dokumentation-370 As someone who has heard Coulter talk on quite a few occasions, in addition to having read a couple of her essays, I was pretty surprised when I saw this in the listings at Fora.tv. She may be seen as one of the most controversial political pundits of the US by some; the majority of commentators are a little less generous in their verdict. In fact, her over-the-top conservatism and outrageous statements have earned her notoriety at best, and outright hatred at worst. Anyway, she is a best-selling author and remains a regular guest on several widely broadcast talk shows as well as debate forums. Coulter really is an expert on everything, from foreign policy to financial crisis, and covering such a broad field, her occasional disregard for details is excusable. In this hourlong rant she gets to recite an assorted collection of her most blatant commentaries, delivered with juicy punchlines such as "Not all muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are muslims". What you make of this - satire, polemic, hate-speech - probably depends on where you're coming from, so don't worry if you're actually captivated by this woman's charm. You can always claim it's irony. (an) --Self-righteous tirade, 59 mins-- Additional resources (see link box): • Coulter's official site • Column archive (2002-present)