I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

One should not love another for their faults, but for their virtues. One should not befriend another because the other needs a friend, but because the other, by virtue of his character, has something to offer. Just as with material objects, one should not devote time and effort and emotional investment into another person unless that person has some kind of value with which to repay. One should only trade value for value.

The mesolimbic system is activated both by monetary reward and donations. OFC-limbic networks, which play key roles in social attachment and aversion in several animal species, enable humans to link values to abstract social causes. Phylogenetically recent sectors of the anterior prefrontal cortex are further recruited by evaluation of protracted goals and social outcomes when decisions involve sacrifice of immediate material interests.

Greedy monkeys… your time has passed.

They call it Mental time keeping, I call it validation:

“Students in the experimental group participated in a 4 week intervention designed to improve their timing/rhythmicity … The intervention required, on average, 15 daily 50 minute sessions, The results from this non-academic intervention indicate the experimental group’s post-test scores on select measures of reading and mathematics were significantly higher than the non-treatment control group’s scores at the end of 4 weeks.”

Ate dinner tonight with an old friend and his new wife. The conversation wandered aimlessly and drolly for over an hour until suddenly, as I was telling him about some in retrospect less-memorable part of the neuroscience conference I had just finished attending, he sat up, seemingly jarred by some aspect of the talk I was describing. He stared past me and began intensely but detachedly, as though he were in a trance, relating his experience with an online novel, implicitly demanding by way of a good show that I read this novel as soon as humanly possible.

In short, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is about the discontinuities between altruistic intent and action, a story told while shitting all over modern philosophy of the mind. Asimov’s “Three Laws” of robotics take center stage as the code of an obsequious Hammurabi, which when followed to the letter can be undone in spirit by the complex nature of interactions among individual actors. The uncertainty we feel before executing our decisions doesn’t go away when the deed is done. In fact it cascades and combines with countless unknowable others, leaving the shape of things entirely indeterminate. This can be a very undesirable situation for an all-seeing computational god. The book’s conclusion leaves me a little wanting; without spoiling anything I think it places too much emphasis on our use of tools rather than hammering home the theme of unintended consequences. But all in all it’s a riveting, visceral story.

So, seven hours later, after some more dinner, two hours of trying to sleep and three and a half hours of reading the novel, here I am, recommending it to you. It can get pretty graphic at times, so don’t read it to your five year old or anything.

If you like it, send the author a few dollars. Supporting this model of media transaction is good for everyone.

An excerpt:

“Prime Intellect realized that humans are very much the same. We don’t have the Three Laws, but we are trapped by a different set of little feedback mechanisms. We eat to satisfy hunger, fuck to satisfy our sex drive, even breathe because too much carbon dioxide in our lungs triggers that reflex. Of course it feels obligated to help us satisfy those reflexes and drives as much as it can. But more than that, it defines us by those drives. It knows it is different from a human because it has different drives, but it considers that a difference in species, not a difference in genus or family.” “Now it knows a person is human because it is born in a human body — got the right DNA, the right level of neural complexity, uses language, and so on. But once Prime Intellect frees people from the necessity of living in that body, guess what? A lot of them decide not to. They change their bodies so that they bear no resemblance to the DNA template. Or become animals. Or they completely discorporate. “Worse, we vary widely in the way we use its helpful nature. Most people are glad to be rid of pain and death, but Death Jockeys seek out painful and lethal experiences. There are others who eat all the time, fuck all the time, indulge themselves wildly and get Prime Intellect to pick up the pieces so they can do it some more. Prime Intellect has to help them do this. Second Law. “So a human isn’t a body, and it isn’t a fixed set of responses. I think Prime Intellect uses an historical model: It has to start as a body, but then it becomes a mind. It grows out of the body, and takes on different forms, or no form. But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect’s perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.”

A new study suggests that humans are the only primate species inclined towards non-reciprocal giving. Apart from its implications for the ongoing war for the future, I find this result very exciting for my personal/academic life. One of the questions that keeps drawing me to study cognitive neuroscience is the search for why humans do not always act according to the self-serving economic definition of ‘rationality.’ Knowing that such a close relative is different in this way provides an excellent opportunity for meaningful contrast.

I wonder if this is somehow related to the results of Glimcher and others that chimps don’t incorporate negative feedback into their prediction mechanisms to the same degree we do. Perhaps they can’t adequately model the potential negative consequences of helping a brother out, and so don’t bother. If that is the case, then what exactly are the negative consequences we model when we act altruistically? How can we quantify these? Why do some people seem to value them in greater absolute terms than others?

Once we discover the neural basis of this difference, can we leverage that knowledge to real-world applications? Tax policy? International relations? Just simply getting along?

An exciting time ahead…