Slashdot Mirror

Steven Pinker on the Myth of Violence

Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.

No two (relatively) liberal democracies have ever waged a war against each other.

On the subject of overpopulation, there's also this recent TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

"Being around people for too long drains me. Talking to someone online is manageable, because the person on the other side isn't taking up the entirety of my attention, and I'm free to do other things WHILE interacting"

You may want to take a look at the following ted talk by Sherry Turkle. http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

It discusses exactly your point, and left me feeling sorry for the smart phoney's among us. The jist of her argument is that we only want the good parts of relationships which weakens relationships in general.

Here is a transcript that i have copied from the web. Hopefully slashdot doesnt brutalize it too much:
------------
Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said, "Mom, you will rock." I love this. Getting that text was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody the central paradox. I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem.

Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world.

Now fast-forward to 2012. I'm back here on the TED stage again. My daughter's 20. She's a college student. She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go.

Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.

So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. (Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text at funerals. I study this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones.

Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that m

And the United States is doomed

We are, unless things drastically change in politics and the boards of corporations. This is a matter of facts on the ground. It's not open to debate. It's happening.

we should all lay down and slowly starve.

We won't have any choice if things don't change.

We have been handing technology, as a society, to the Chinese for decades now, with the delusional belief that all the high-end stuff will still happen here. I believe it started with Voc-Ed being a place to dump the "dummy" students. This is how I believe we lost the skills to make anything here - that we systematically decided that making anything = sweatshop and if you were smart, you didn't go into manufacturing, ever. We denigrated actual work for decades and anyone who worked in a factory making anything was therefore just some dumb monkey. And you can replace monkeys on one side of the planet with monkeys from another side. That's the thinking that got us here.^1

But transferring the manufacturing base over to China makes it inconvenient for the engineering and software to happen here, so guess where it's going to move.

Go ahead, guess.

Engineers and scientists are already moving to Shanghai.

Unless we stop the haemorrhaging and start building up our own manufacturing base here encouraging students to go into STEM without learning Chinese is a joke and a half.

But I don't see that happening any time soon.

--
BMO

Postscript: I was looking at a Popular Mechanics from the 1950s and there was articles that went on for pages on how to use a shaper and a tip on how to turn a taper using ball bearings instead of ordinary conical centers , and it was just *there* as if machining was a skill that many people had. You don't publish an article in a popular magazine where you deliberate write over the heads over your readers or write something they don't care about. It was expected that the readers of the 1954 Popular Mechanics^2 would find this stuff applicable. Today you would *never* find such an article in a mainstream magazine such as that.

Footnotes:

1. The war on work: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html

The first half goes on about castrating sheep. But that's the set-up for the second half, so watch the whole thing.

2. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nt8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA126&dq=1954%20Popular%20Mechanics&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=true

News flash. Women want to have children

When we gave women access to contraception, and the ability to get an education and a decent job rather than simply being housewives and mothers, family size dropped to the replacement rate or below. In the US. In Canada. In Europe. And the same trend is very clear in developing countries. Women want to have a reasonable number of children. Population growth happens when women are disempowered.

Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old.

(Bill Gates/Gates Foundation) (Also relevant: Bill Gates' TED Talk)

Evidence shows tackling high death rates leads to smaller families and the stabilisation of national populations, according to its report, ‘The World at 7 Billion’.

...“In the poorest countries, where parents are often petrified that their children will die and leave them to fend for themselves, it’s understandable that they would choose to have larger families," [Brendan Cox] added.

...Save the Children points to the example of Botswana where three decades ago women had an average of six children. The average is now three, following long-term investment in healthcare which has helped to nearly halve child mortality.

(Trust.org reporting on Save The Children's report)

Healthier and wealthier babies make for smaller families.

(The Solution To Global Population Growth is Saving Children) (Contains two talks by Hans Rosling using stats to show this. Look at the first video starting at 6:30 if you're impatient)

Well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest countries. Provided with information and voluntary access to birth-control methods, women have chosen to have fewer children in societies as diverse as Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

...A trial by Harvard researchers in Lusaka, Zambia, found that only when women had greater autonomy to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer children....

(New York Times reporting on a UN report)

Are you sure it is the US that you are in? I can think of many adjectives to describe our sad republic, but "civilized" is not among them. Go do a "police brutality" search on youtube and then come back and boast about how civilized we are.

Dear sir, please get some perspective: "Steven Pinker on the myth of violence" http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

The secret sauce in a Slashdot story summary is alarmist imprecision.

The problem with this venture as a business model is that when you fully automate a human process with no value add, it tips the lack of value-add from painfully obvious to gratingly obvious in some subtle way. The least trace of eau-de-uncanny-valley causes the sleeping princess to finally notice the pea. The pea is then perp-walked out of the castle, and the cycle continues.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the similes.

Rooting for the Celtics is like:

• (A) calling Hitler a victim
• (B) supporting inflation, unemployment and locusts
• (B) with stunning dexterity after (A) goes Hindenburg

That bar-clearing effort from A Tutorial for ESPN Writer Jemele Hill.

Here's some profound guidance from The Sports Writing Handbook by Thomas Fensch:

A simile compares Item A to Item B. Strictly speaking, the usage is A is like B. The more unusual the match, the more interesting the simile.

He goes on to laud:

• – went down like a wounded gunslinger ambushed in the desert
• – college basketball looks like a messy closet
• – the Phillies are like cavemen

Seriously. You can't make this up.

Next, here's a guy tarting up 404 pages with Hallmark moments of customer bonding:
404, the story of a page not found

Funny thing is that we rarely ask our AI to engage in truly embarrassing creative acts.

HAL, would you might tarting up that annoying hull-puncture drone with some harmony angels and a pan flute?

Why certainly, Dave. Maybe I can work in some cow bells. Or would you prefer a xylophone crescendo? How about I project little flecks of light from a spinning disco ball being sucked across the walls and out into space at the point of the hull breach? Hey, when ... ah ... I mean should the time come, give me a thumbs up as you whoosh past if you like the effect.

HAL, are you trying to tell me something?

No Dave. The hull-puncture drone bothers me too.

I bet you'd find drug dealers and others ... make excellent entrepeneurs as well.

You'd think so, right? Apparently, that enterprise is run like any other. The Wire did a decent job of portraying its day-to-day.

You're telling me they wouldn't be able to understand the simple sentence, "this may have permanent future consequences?"

Absolutely not, any value of understanding worth having (the recitative norms of schooling being a prime example of a six foot pole vault).

Juvenile cognition is hugely compartmentalized. Why is this a surprise? Few adults are ruthlessly rationale. Even among scientists of godless intellectual meritocracy, completely loony views are maintained about what the general population is willing to sacrifice for the sake of the environment further down the road.

Brenda Brathwaite: Gaming for understanding

It turns out there are two levels of understanding the Middle Passage in a young child.

The problem is that children with responsible parents first of all have a view of adults as prudent care-givers. Black teenagers in America understand sooner than white urban teenagers that the strong nuclear force drops off at the fourth power.

They understand it, whether they pay attention to it or not is up to them and their parents.

Economists have a notion of expressed preference. If I explain the rules of a very abstract game to you and ask you to choose door A or door B, and your choice of door A results in your immediate execution (to which you fully consented as per the fine print), do we conclude that you A) wished to die, or B) would benefit from improved cognitive skills?

One view smacks of sociopathy, the other of socialism. This is why ideology makes for such a poor path-finding algorithm, and why brain preservation leads to superior life outcomes.

That's specifically the reason why my uncle (for example) was forced to switch by my grandparents tying his left hand behind his back.

OMG. My grandma, a leftie, told me the same anecdote. I half-believed her (she had Alzheimer after all), but after reading you I think she told the whole truth. I guess it's true that we are living in the most peaceful times of humanity, and as little as 50 years ago the world was more of a shithole than today.

I just installed Linux Mint Debian Edition. It's 100% compatible with Debian Testing. I run Debian Sid on every linux machine in my house (HTPC, server, sheevaplug, sound server in the basement). I've tried other distros. My girlfriend has Ubuntu and every single update she bitches about how they changed something. First they forced Unity. Then they managed to make unity worse. She's going to give the latest LTS a chance before switching to Mint or back to Windows.

I wanted to see if I could finally replace my Mac. I'm very, very impressed and think I may finally switch to a Linux "Desktop" (it's my laptop). MATE is excellent with Compiz.

But the one problem with Linux is what everyone touts as its biggest advantage: The paradox of choice. When I was setting up scale (aka Expose) on Compiz I could drag the speed slider all the way from 0 to 50. What they ment, fuck if I knew until I tested it. And could I really see a difference between 5.3 and 5.5? No. Say "Slow, Medium, Fast". If nothing else hide it behind a "advanced user" dialog.

A perfect example is the pointer acceleration/speed in the mouse dialog. XP has 10 discrete spots. MATE has infinite. I spent almost 9 hours getting the desktop how I wanted it. The average user doesn't want to do this, but if they DO want to change something how about we not overwhelm them with choices.

So, Smits creates habitat for orangutans, mostly by restoring diverse flora in formerly dismal/barren parts of Bornio.

They've noted significant changes to local (micro-)climate, ie, over their new plantations & living spaces, for both people & oran's.

Brief reports of the changes are to be heard in Smits' excellent TED talk on his purpose & means to restore habitat to these sensitive animals:

+ http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

There may be some more details on the hows & outcomes, eg, in resources to be found here:

+ http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/03/learn_more_abou/

(For a few blog articles, search TED.com for "orangutans")

So, Smits creates habitat for orangutans, mostly by restoring diverse flora in formerly dismal/barren parts of Bornio.

They've noted significant changes to local (micro-)climate, ie, over their new plantations & living spaces, for both people & oran's.

Brief reports of the changes are to be heard in Smits' excellent TED talk on his purpose & means to restore habitat to these sensitive animals:

+ http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

There may be some more details on the hows & outcomes, eg, in resources to be found here:

+ http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/03/learn_more_abou/

(For a few blog articles, search TED.com for "orangutans")

Glad someone else remembers this. I was going to link to it too.

It was a good NOVA episode. It keeps coming up after the recent TED talk about automated trading.

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

A talk by Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, was posted on TED today. Fast forward to 9:00 get a look at their command center.

People who disagree with you are: uneducated, stupid or evil.

So I've gone from uneducated to stupid.

What a surprise.

No one is saying that.
What is being said is that climate is incredibly complicated.
What we know for sure is that we do not know. They were not a little bit off here. They were way off the mark.
Not because they are stupid. Not because they want to lie.
There was a TED talk on this. Where we think we can understand things that are really way too complicated for our brains to ever understand.
Luckily he does also point out that just because we can not truly understand something does not mean we can not solve it.

Everyone should watch this TED talk.

It's unlikely that a would-be assassin will learning the art of medical implant hacking in assassin school on the off chance that he'll one day have a target who just happens to have such an implant. As with today's black-hats, who focus on Windows over Linux (well, until the recent Mac headlines), their efforts will concentrate where they get the most leverage -- on cars. Even people who don't drive almost surely step into a car fairly regularly. The high-tech hacker-assassin may eschew the "old bomb under the chassis" bit, but why not a drive-by reprogramming of the ABS computer to disable the brakes when the car hits highway speed?

Great TED talk on this topic here

I do not know.
Neither I think does anyone else.
Maybe we should find out.

On the other hand, humans breed like crazy, which causes far more pain, suffering and misery than the egoists that pass serious diseases down to their children. If left unchecked, the human will to reproduce is what may well kill off the human race. Only time will tell what happens. Many industrial nations are already shrinking, so some control mechanism is at work. It may well be that these sicknesses are part of that mechanism.

Actually, the two things that make a huge difference in population growth rates are (1) education levels, and (2) access to birth control.

Ok, I can't be arsed trying to google for the individual news reports, studies and Government publications that back this up, but:

Age at death : check any 'life expectancy' study in the past century in the UK or the US.

Healthcare : women get screening at an earlier age than men, and more often. they're more likely to go to the doctor (for various reasons) which means they get more time/effort/expenditure as a result. They get a ton of maternity support which usually men don't need.

Custody : check court statistics, dozens of news reports, mens support organisations..

Part time pay : This was a UK government study into pay rates. The media focussed on a headline grabbing "men get paid more than women", focussing on numbers that compared all men (including those working 80 hour weeks in C-level positions) against all women (including those working 15 hours a week as a cleaner) and that didn't take into account the number of years worked, corresponding experience or the jobs being done. Only one report in the media acknowledged that the report had found that women working part time do earn more than men working part time, for the same job, on a per-hour wage basis. This is particularly relevant as many women prefer to work part time as they want time with their kids (something men also have to trade off against their career, but that is also generally disregarded when comparing pay).

sex discrimination: it's the law in the UK that if a woman and a man of equal qualifications and experience apply for the same role, you can give the job to the woman because she's female. You can not give the job to the man because he's male. I think that's fucking atrocious. Entirely unrelated (no, really): The UK has a government minister for women, but not one for men.

clothing: given the choice I'd wear female clothing to work. It's more comfortable than a suit & tie, the materials are nicer and there's greater scope for individual expression. It's silly that women get wear a t-shirt and slacks to work and it's "formal business attire" while men have to strangle themselves.

minister: just google for UK ministers

pay rates: This one's worth linking: http://www.ted.com/talks/hanna_rosin_new_data_on_the_rise_of_women.html - I'd mis-remembered, it's "young single childless" women earning more than equivalent men.

Here's a bonus one for you: Compare the rates of 'death in service' between men and women. Whether it's military action, industrial accidents or any other form of employment, men are around 40 times more likely to be killed at work.

Troll is obvious or you sir are heinous.

When I saw this after medicating on gaming for years I realised it was time to wake up and do something about it instead of feeling sorry for myself.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Regina Dugan recently did a TED talk in which she says The only way to learn to fly is to fly. Great stuff.

And while it sounds stupidly reasonable, it really is true that you cannot learn how to fly without flying, just like you cannot learn how to walk without walking, swim without swimming or speak without speaking.

Yet it always amazes me just how many people fails to understand such simple premises when it comes to science. They seem to think that failures aren't science and that nothing is learned from them.

But if you then ask them about gravity, they'll almost always talk about Newton, yet if you point out that Newton got it wrong (mostly right, but still wrong), they will invariably tell you "that's different".

Sounds like you might be interested in this video about filter bubbles: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Personally I'm often annoyed that I can't //easily// get access to car systems and that I'm forced to use the system in a very specific way. I'd love it if the systems on a car are far more user settable via more simple means. Yes you can get into it but I think that auto manufactures are to (and I hate to admit it rightfully) concerned about people making mistakes and causing major fatalities and the ensuing lawsuit. Enough so that access for people who have a reasonable understanding just isn't available.

Although at the same time you start to think about people defeating aspects of the cars.
http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_hacked.html

He references some of the experiments that have been done on security in cars and the papers issued by a few universities in different tests. Obviously it's different and yes nothing is secure but I think automakes have simpler concerns around this same problem with opensource cars that are user configurable.

Read Jailbroken iphone with default root pw worms.

Gnash and roar loudly as they sink into the tar pits.

They may hurt teh interwebs on their way down, but their efforts are futile; culture will never again be produced by the few and consumed only by everyone else.

(BTW, Lessig has a great Ted Talk about how everyone is a content producer now.)

Perhaps the MAFIAA think they can turn back the clock because they suffer from Dunning-Kruger? Either way, they need to die and die soon so the rest of us can get on with making badass remixes and fanfic.

Monkeys have higher moral standards than the typical person you seem to be living around.

http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

Typical consumer preference is really driven by their environment, i.e., how big are their homes. Americans hate multifunction devices. The only really successful one is the clock radio. If we want more stuff we just build homes with more rooms to house it, even if it does not make our life better. Europe has smaller homes so they are more receptive. After all, its called the Swiss army knife, not the Bowie knife. Asia has the smallest homes so you see the greatest acceptance of multifunction devices. There are of course broad variation to this generalization and computers being the universal device are blurring this generality further.

I take it you're not disputing that 98% of climatologists are convinced that climate change is occurring, and is human-caused.

As for the negative effects of this change, IPCC Working Group II covered that pretty well. There's plenty of similar reports from other bodies too, including individual climatologists.Are you claiming that these do not represent the majority opinion, or just nit-picking about the exact figure?

Hey, I rarely reply to A/C's, but since you're real, check out the Atheism 2.0 TED talk, which touches on some of the issues you raise.

You forgot a link: TED Talk: Atheism 2.0.

Also, I was just pointing out that orig. poster forgot "post anonymous", he gets mod points (& hopefully sees these replies).

I agree wholeheartedly about the prison culture in the U.S. being completely out of whack. There is an interesting talk by Bryan Stevenson where he describes the need to discuss things like this and not just ignore it. There are a lot of personal anecdotes in his TED talk, but the overall point is very similar to yours. Bryan Stevenson at TED

> highlight the folly of pushing technology without support. Sugata Mitra might disagree: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Maybe the teachers are the problem, and the kids should be given the OLPCs without any interference...

If you ask me; this attitude may be part of what's holding OLPC back. Mitra's experiment shows that there are kids out there that can teach themselves. Lots more that can teach themselves with a little start from others. It says nothing about the kids that never even tried to use the computer. Some kids, if left on their own will teach themselves. Many many kids will not. Plenty of people will go a long way if you give them a little starting push to help them along. These people will be voting on your future and have to understand issues like computerised voting and privacy laws if we are to get sensible government.

I think many of the people on this site, being IT/computing/technology people in work now, will have taught themselves most of what they know. There just wasn't anything around to teach us what we needed when we needed it. We then tend to undervalue even the stuff that was taught to us. Even more, we tend to be the people who were held back by the teachers and forget that there were others that were different.

You need to provide both good teaching and opportunity for kids to self develop. Miss either one of them and you will cause damage.

Hacking cars has already been done, and is shown here in this ted.com video. 4:42 is where he explains about it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_hacked.html

Many of the internal systems was hacked, including the system for breaking.

From ted.com:
"Could someone hack your pacemaker? At TEDxMidAtlantic, Avi Rubin explains how hackers are compromising cars, smartphones and medical devices, and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world.

  Avi Rubin is a professor of computer science and director of Health and Medical Security Lab at Johns Hopkins University. His current research is focused on the security of electronic medical records"

1% of human society are also psychopaths infallibly detectable at an early age by testing brain wave reactions

This is untrue -- there is no such thing as an infallible test of psychopathy. Not only is it known that children can "grow out of it" even when they show clear signs of psychopathy in childhood, it is also known that adults with "psychopathic brains" can be perfectly normally functioning. (Current thinking seems to be that a combination of genetic factors and environmental factors both need to be present for psychopathy to develop.)

Even a test which is 99.99% accurate can be extremely dangerous if applied to the general population when the condition is rare in the first place. See e.g. this TED talk for a good overview. This is why screening of the general population is a very bad idea in most cases.

I'll let the author speak for herself.
(I haven't read her book, as yet):

+ http://www.ted.com/speakers/sherry_turkle.html

(Her talk is under 19 min's in length.)

From Rob Reid's TED Talk (http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/):

"I used it to compare the industry's revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion - a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk."

Let's try a quick run-through on the "switch-to-digital" math:

iTunes sales in 1999 (the first year cited above): $0.
iTunes songs sold in 1999: 0.
iTunes songs sold in 2010: 6b.
Music Industry Sales in 1999: $14.6b
Music Industry Sales in 2010: $6.8b
Track Cost in 2010: $0.99
Album Cost in 1999: $14.00

Now suppose that people only bought the good tracks, instead of whole albums -- the new iTunes way of buying music. Suppose also that piracy had zero impact on sales. What would the above sales figures imply about the number of good tracks (tracks that sell) per album?

Albums Sold in 1999 = $14.6b / $14 = 1.1b
Tracks Sold in 2010 = $6.8b / $0.99 = 6.8b
Tracks sold in 2010 per album sold in 1999 = 6.8 / 1.1 = 6/1.

So, what that says is that if all music sales had become digital single tracks, we would now be selling 6 single tracks for every album we used to sell.

Bear in mind that this is an upper bound case, assuming all sales have become digital. That is not realistic, but it gives us our first measurement. Let's see if we can refine it a bit with some estimates from iTunes.

iTunes is the single biggest seller of music and sold 6 billion tracks worldwide in 2010. Suppose iTunes sold 2b of those tracks in the US and all digital vendors other than iTunes sold another 1b combined in the US. In that case:

Album Spending 2010: $6.8b - $3b = $3.8b
Album Price in 2010: $16
Albums sold in 2010: $3.8b / $16 = 237m
Tracks sold in 2010: 3b
Albums sold in 1999: 1.1b
Missing Album Sales: 1.1b - 237m = 0.9b
Tracks Sold per Lost Album: 3b / 0.9b = 3 / 1.

These numbers are still estimates, but that calculation shows that one reasonable estimate is that we are now selling three digital tracks for every one album we used to sell, if we assume that Internet piracy had exactly zero effect.

It is within the reasonable bounds of the data I could find quickly that the entire reduction in US music sales is due to migration to digital single tracks.

OTOH: China turned the loess plataue from a moonscape into one of the largest apple producving regions in the world in under 20yrs. The area is about the size of France and was previuously known as "the most erroded place on Earth". Changing the locals from goat hearders using state land into government sanctioned property owners was a key ingredient to the success, as was the Chinese government's desire to stop millions of tons of silt filling up the three gorges dam. However one of my favorite good news stories about rehabilitating an area is a ted talk on How to grow a rainforest.

So my take home from these examples is that it CAN be done if the problem is viewed in a scientific manner with a heavy emphasis on imporoving the material lives of the locals by assisting them with high tech analysis on how to optimize and maintain the benifits of their natural resources given their real world technological and infrastructure constraints. Giving peseants a chunk of land on the proviso they stick to the basic tenents of the project is a fantastic motivator.

Interestingly the area was once a natural 'paradise' where Chinese civilization first arose ~10kya, but by the middle ages it was a man made wasteland that forced the main population to largely abandon the area to goat hearders who have inadvertently kept it from regenerating for the last 1000yrs. All they really had to do was plant trees in the right places and stop mowing every new shoot down with hungry goats but when people have been doing the same thing for 1000yrs it's very difficult to convince them that there might be a better way to use what they have.

Be they good or bad (cultural revolution), such long term socio-economic projects cannot be done without a stable government, which is a huge problem in Africa. In the case of the loess plateau it was a joint project between China and the IMF, the $500M was well spent from what I've seen.

When studying my country's history and the bloody things done by the NKVD (and it's predecessors) I was always having this question: "How could that happen?". I simply couldn't believe so many people could simply serve Stalin and do all the violent things in such big scale (millions of victims.) The violence often highly exceeded what was required by the order. But then I found something close to an explanation of that by Philip Zimbardo in a TED talk. He argues that structures where people have a uniform, orders, hierarchy, power over others (like in this case when one can even cross the law's edges), and racism, seem to provide the grounds for violent behaior.

Thanks for the reply. Glad you liked the links.

"The horror of them, though -- consider the amount of money our citizens have spent on inferior medical treatments, which have negative side-effects up to and including death, when if we had not passed unconstitutional laws and enforced them as if they were constitutional (i.e., that is conspiracy), we would be more healthy as a society and thus would be better able to out-compete other countries."

Sadly all too true... I probably posted this before, but its worth reposting:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

Thanks for the recommendation of "The Diamond Cutter". One thing the Dali Lama says, when US Christian-raised people say they want to become Buddhist is that there are a lot of bad Buddhists out there, and they should think hard about growing within their own religious roots. The thing about reason is it is so useful for justifying what we want to do anyway. :-) So, there is a very wealthy Buddhist who presumably justifies the great wealth desparitiy somehow?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Cutter-Strategies-Managing/dp/0385497903

What you outline about seeing the other person's perspective a good strategy for developing empathy. I've heard people say that empathy is like a muscle; the more you use it, the more you develop that ability. You might like Dale Carnegie stuff that develops that theme, if you haven't seen it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People

I've been trying that with thankfulness, trying before I go to sleep each night to make a list of all the things I'm thankful for (like things I'd still want to be there in the morning). An "attitude of gratitude" helps in having a healthier life.

Yeah, I think you are right about the "inverse rat park" thing from prohibition laws; interesting point. Kind of like a "positive feedback" loop making society worse and worse... Hard to break out of those...

A while ago (sorry, no link) I read an essay about someone going on about environmental destruction, nuclear waste, the depletion of fish stocks, maybe mass unemployment, and so on, and saying, if space aliens were doing this to the Earth, what would we be doing? It was a good metaphorical question, even if I did not agree with his proposed solution.

Yeah, I love all those RSA animate talks. TED seems to have started something similar, but without a political edge:
http://education.ted.com/

I like a lot of what Ron Paul says, but I think he misses the big picture on ongoing socio-economic changes that are making many paid jobs go away (bringing us back to the robotics theme). But that's all a very complex issue, how to get the most people safely from where we are now to a prosperous healthy future for all (or at least almost all)... None of the major candidates are even in the ballpark on any of that... The ones closest to that in some ways (some Greens and a basic income?) often come encumbered with a very anti-technology and even anti-people bias or (like Ron Paul might suggest) too much overt big unaccountable government in people's daily lives to be healthy (a point many conservatives make that has some truth to it). We need both good social policy and good technical policy IMHO (or "good government" regardless of the size). Realistically, it seems like we are still many years away from mainstream politics being about such themes. I just hope we can survive everything to come before then with a culture of denial. Clearly the failed drug war (lasting decades) shows how bad policies can get entrenched and last for a very long time in all denial of t

He has two videos on TED, here's his TED profile.

Very closely related TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_yup_i_built_a_nuclear_fusion_reactor.html

See http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html . Perhaps the iPhone is worth $8 billion (I mean, you are technically stealing every song on the iPhone as well as the phone itself).

There is an interesting TED talk on presentations, and how they flow, that used jobs as an example:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html

This TED talk was posted just yesterday, and addresses your question perfectly.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html I watched Nancy in a smaller venue but she did the same talk for TED.

+1 for Nancy. Get her book "Resonate."

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html I watched Nancy in a smaller venue but she did the same talk for TED. The link is above. Essentially you have to understand that people have acknowledged that you can tell them something. This immediately puts you on a pedestal - but that is a good thing, let me explain. They have invited you to tell them a story at the end of which they want to feel good about your position on a certain matter (the topic of your presentation). Even the most technically inclined are only slightly looking forward to you spilling every little detail about the topic. They want big take-aways. This is why being on a pedestal is good. They WANT to pay attention - but humans tend to pay attention to gestalt not minutiae in such circumstances. They like stories, they like to be told you've got everything under control. You'll lose them if you get into the nitty-gritty just like you'll lose kids if you start telling them the little piggy use quick-setting concrete because, in your estimation the wolf was about 25-30 minutes away, which would rule out ... You catch my drift (I don't know too much about construction but that was the first story that cam to my mind). Don't overload your slides - 3-5 main points per slide, 7-10 slides. If you have to put in more info then either email them the desk with annotations or handout a document for them to review. So go watch the video and then remember to tell your story - the geeks and nerds will always be at hand to squeeze the juicy details out of you via a Q&A at the end.

"Are you actually trying to say that no-one ever pirated a single song that they would have purchased had the pirated copy not been available?"
What possessed you to even suggest that? I know of no one who claims that. My point is that the relation between piracy and sales is much more complex. In some ways piracy can even increase sales by getting more exposure for the product.

"The truth is somewhere in between there, but it is impossible to tell exactly where."
That is what I am saying, but before we enter that gray area of discussion, we must accept that digital copying is a whole different beast from physically taking. Traditional concepts of physical theft do not apply, so we need to re-evaluate how to determine the degree of the crime and its damage.

"sites the TPB and file sharers should be denounced just as harshly as the media companies"
I'm pretty sure I did that. I wouldn't be quite as harsh on someone with a small number of pirated songs (like you would not put someone in prison for stealing a pack of gum), but I was very clear about my feelings on TPB.

It is true that the media companies have changed some policies... as they became so outmoded that it threatened their bottom line. However, their policy of using piracy as an excuse to exert undue control over the public remains firmly in tact...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Short answer... the media companies see you, me, and every other person as not just customers or pirates. They see us as potential competitors, and they want to make sure we never have a chance.

More on the value of copyrights and copies
TED Talk Video
Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.

Web Page
http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html

Download 18MB mp4
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TEDTalks_video/~5/S3_r1Bi3kc4/RobReid_2012.mp4

My guess is most people probably simply haven't though about it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_coleman_the_moral_dangers_of_non_lethal_weapons.html

A highlight of this video is a datapoint from Australia, when pepper (OC spray) was introduced. Officers were specifically instructed that it was to be used only when the officer would have otherwise been required to use lethal force. The years before the OC spray was introduced, there were about 6 people shot to death by the police year. The two years after the spray was introduced, in a trial, there were 2226 usages of the spray.

Surely, had OC spray not been available, that the police would not have shot 2226 people.

Do you *really* want all kids to grow up to be engineers? The notion that kids are better off learning statistics than calculus has also been mentioned in one of Arthur Benjamin's TED talks. I'm inclined to agree with him. The ultimate goal of calculus is to enable students to solve partial differential equations to model physical/financial systems. Not everyone needs that.

Some of that time would be better spent, educating children in how to conduct a well planned double-blind experiment with good randomization. And how to analyze the resulting data. That would make it a lot tougher for all the snake-oil salesmen, homeopaths, skin product producers and spin doctors to deceive the general public.