Category: Viewing

I love Jack Horner. He and I go way back. Well, not really. I read an article once that was an interview with him in which he discussed his Halloween preparation (which, apparently, are quite elaborate) and his work on the recently producer Jurassic Park movie in which he was consulted regarding the look and appearance of the dinosaurs.

In this lecture: he discusses a realization (“Where are the little, as in juvenile, dinosaurs?”), a theory (that dinosaurs change over time much like their avian posterity) and a discovery (many of the ‘different’ dinosaurs are actually the same dinosaurs while they are growing up).

Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs (TED)

The technology of money has been evolving for several centuries and is now facing its midlife crisis. After recapping a brief history of money through time (a really fascinating dissertation) and then suggests that we should disband the “cash economy” in order to progress money to its next phase of life.

Dave Birch: The Future of Money (RSA)

An economic lecture in which Frank discusses how the current capitalistic model is likely to lead us to a place with massive corporation that have to act in extreme, economically and socially, bad ways in order to continue to compete. He attributes this to the evolution escalation principles identified by Darwin. In this principles, individuals do what helps them survive best, even if it is detrimental to the whole. For example, the antlers of the modern bull elk, measuring at some massive four feet wide, represent an enormous investment on the part of the elk. In order to compete, the other bull elks need to grow equally large, or larger, horns representing a similar individual investment. In the end however, if all the bull elks grew foot long antlers, they would all have the same relative advantage without the deep personal resource investment.

To manage the some competitiveness in a capitalistic model, Frank suggests removing the income tax and installing a progressive consumption tax. Such a tax, he argues, would discourage the enormous waste that comes with lavish spending because it would in effect bring the upper end of the extreme to a lower margin. Instead of having to build a 4,000 square foot house to spend a million dollars (with most of the money going to the builder), you would only have to build a 2,000 square feet (with say, half the money going to the builder and the other half paying a consumption tax).

Robert Frank: The Darwin Economy (RSA)

Strangers tell an average of three lies in the first ten minutes of their meeting. Most people would adamantly deny that they lie so often but most people would indeed be lying. Leslie suggests that we in fact need lies in order for society to continue. Self-deception is itself critical to advancing creativity and innovation.

Ian Leslie – Necessary Lies (RSA)

There has recently been a lot of research on choice, much of which is interesting. Salecl discusses how we used to think that choice was a liberating force, that the more choices on has, the more freedom and sociable they would be. We are finding that this is not true. Instead, we spend a lot of time being anxious over our choices and their moral and social implications. When we make the wrong choice, we feel strongly judged and by society, that we have somehow failed to live up to our humanity and we become ashamed of ourselves. When we make the right choice, we feel a bit of joy from making a good choice and then are plummeted into self-doubt about whether we actually made the right choice. Additionally, as we continue to make so many choices about consumption we begin to feel empowered by our consumption and thus liberated when in reality we have actually subjected ourselves to consumption and are not really the masters we thought we were.

Renata Salecl – The Paradox of Choice (RSA)
RSA Animate – Choice