We Are Now at Peak TED
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It is not related to the quality of the content.
The problem with Tony Robbins is he's mister positive and only focused on personal improvement. These are enormous constraints that ignore the bigger picture.
Feynman is great at explaining physics because it's not wishy washy - it is also really not that interesting past the cute basics, sooner or later you have to put in the hard work.
TED is fundamentally flawed because things worth knowing - cannot all be politically correct and positive.
Once you constrain yourself to being Mr/Ms Positive only, you end up being a delusional asshole because you are denying a big chunk of life any attention.
There is no fixing TED as a result - it's more interested in money than truth.
As are most people, hence why we are where we are :)
It's not in the pursuit of the truth. Therefore, it's in the pursuit of status.
You can see this among those who wave around TED talks they have seen as some kind of currency. "Oh have you seen the TED talk about Y? It's so amazing!"
But also, by their nature, the talks cant dive deep. People are there to be amused and kind of learn, but real education is difficult. TED isn't difficult.
Their manner of speaking reminds me of American Dad making fun of Ira Glass. Why is pausing??! Doesn't he know what he's going to say next??? AAAAHH. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvQdoOEDGw
I view Tony Robbins as a mystery - because I just can't quite figure him out.
He's rich so he doesn't have to continue. He seems genuine.
And yet, his overall message seems to largely be 'YEAH, YOU CAN DO IT! WOO!'
Just take massive action baby! Baby steps, start small, build, iterate, you can do it!
I am still not sure what the content is or if his presentation is a massive distraction.
That I can't quite tell what his overall point is worries me, and yet I can't believe that he's full of shit. So he's trying to do a good thing, he is succeeding in terms of money but maybe not so much in terms of actual results...
I don't know, Tony is a mystery remaining to be solved.
Those going to his seminars - I think they're just misguided. The steps to fix your life are not at a seminar, they're in improving your life, one step at a time. It's a life decision to strive for excellence. If you haven't come to that point and you're 30, it is probably too late.
If you have come to that point and you're 30, you don't need Tony's help.
So who's he really helping but the blow-hards who want to be 'inspirational' like him?
Programmers are almost nothing like him, being so confident about things you certainly can't be that confident about, requires being delusional to a considerable degree. As long as enough people buy the shtick, everything is fine.
With programming, it's not like that, you need to be good beyond convincing others that you're good (that seems like the primary difference between people-skills and real-work skills)
So I don't know, I mean, if it's not broken don't fix it, but I'd be genuinely concerned for anyone thinking the way to their happiness and peace is predicated upon TAKING MASSIVE ACTION YEAH!
I don't think the fact that he is rich and continues to work lets him off the hook. He may have simply deluded himself in the course of his touring. I think the thing we should challenge him on is whether or not he's thinking critically about what he's doing with his life. Indeed, this is what we should all be challenging ourselves on.
Self-deception is an extremely easy trap to fall into. The fact that it could happen to anybody is the reason we shouldn't let people off the hook for it. In my view, the way to truly respect somebody as a human being is to be willing to challenge them when you believe they're committing self-deception.
The self-deception is that part that I haven't figured out.
I can't put my finger on what's really going on there, because I am brutally honest with myself. At the end of the day I know why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Are they delusional without being aware of it? Do they deep down know they're full of shit?
Are they hurting inside because they can sense they're full of shit but justify it to themselves that it's 'helping others' and all that?
It's like those fundamentalist religious folks who talk shit about gay people and then get caught with gay sex workers. Are people who seem goofy all like that? They know they're broken but can't help but keep the charade going or is there something else going on?
I can understand why a dude who's been a pastor his whole life has trouble letting go. That's where I imagine people who got rich off of being full of shit at some point go 'ok I'm done'.
Kind of how Bill Gates quit Microsoft and let his wife run his life, because she's not a piece of shit like he is. He had the self-awareness.
Trump seems to still be playing the game. Is it just raging ego-maniacs when they're rich? They just love the bizarre ego tripping they're involved in? I honestly can't fathom what goes on in there.
The same is true for typical internet marketer stuff "I teach you the secret to start your own business".
Once you're on the hook, it becomes about them and not about you or your goals anymore. Now you wonder if they truly possess that secret to a better life they claim to have.
You try their stuff, read more, buy more and always wonder if it's their process that's flawed or merely your imperfect execution.
is that he's peddling dangerously wrong beliefs to gullible rubes.
A coworker came back from one his events telling me all sorts of fruity crap. Like how the germ theory for disease is bunk. So apparently I gave myself cancer with negative thoughts (blame the victim).
That flipped my bozo bit for Tony Robbins.
I love gifted, charismatic, motivational speakers. Sometimes called leaders or actors or politicians. But they shouldn't profit from causing others harm.
This wasn't just my experience either -- after struggling with this as a physics undergrad for a while (after all, they're supposed to help!) I started asking around. My academic advisor, several other professors, and many students felt the same way. Feynman may get closer -- or may do more to bring common understanding to complex principles -- but his approach broke down for actually learning to /do physics/.
But I'll agree that he's a major step in the right direction; I just want to caution against the hero worship. There's no magic formula, no one person, who can make learning complex concepts easier. Some things are hard, and trying to make them seem easier can easily make them more confusing in practice.
Summary: he wasn't a great undergraduate teacher.
[0]: Feynman's Tips on Physics: Reflections, Advice, Insights, Practice - https://books.google.com/books?id=FZ4fAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT32&ots=...
edit: wrong name.
BTW, I have this same experience with many other science books for laypeople. It is very possible that I do understand them while reading but then I am unable to remember the complex thoughts.
There's a programming conference in my city, a thousand bucks a ticket.
All the videos are going to be put online afterwards. Why would I spend a thousand dollars for the privilege of sitting through them with no ability to fast forward?
'Networking' and all that bullshit right? As if we can't organize people to come hang out at a pub with everyone paying their tab at the end of the night?
Huh. now, I've only been to technical conferences, for open source operating systems, but the only 'charismatic speakers' you get stay on the sales floor where they belong. I suspect that there is an inverse relationship between the specialized knowledge of the conference attendees and the 'charisma' required of the speakers.
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
Personally, I consider TED a form of high quality entertainment, and while I don't think it's changing the world, I do have a lot of respect for the people giving talks.
If I could talk like the people at TED, and was invited to speak about a topic dear to me, there's no way I'd turn down the offer.
Update: here's the talk https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee?language=en
Going for natural decomposition doesn't seem much worse to me than cremation and ash-scattering, and it seems way better than pickling them and burying them in a coffin.
Hasn't it always been?
> What I ask myself when confronted with any TED talk is this: why do they all sound the same?
...
> TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch. It’s a style that comes from corporate conference rooms, where product ideas are pitched to potential investors. It’s the fundraiser’s speech. You cannot sound needy—you should sound like there is a world out there waiting to buy your work, that you are here only out of a belief in the importance of spreading your idea.
...
> For various reasons, I find myself forced to sit through a TED-talk now and then. I squirm in my seat—feeling humiliated for myself and the speaker. This is a distinctly un-adult feeling.
(Amstrad Action was a great magazine. I was its freelance tech ed in its last years - gave me my start in journalism.)
First that TEDx events have little to do with TED. Second the prices for proper events are in the elitist levels of society. It's no surprise when you start to notice the audience members are more famous than the speakers.
hah. Yes, the continued existence of TEDx indicates that the organizers of TED are not aware of just how severely TEDx damages their brand.
I'd venture a guess that as soon as TED became a little popular, it's value actually went down because a bunch of blow-hards would spend the 8500$ to try and give a sales pitch to the elite caste. When that happens, the elite move on.
As an example - in Toronto there's a thing called 'Granite Club', which's just a big gym with tennis courts etc. The initiation fee is 53,000$ per couple.
That's just to make sure people who actually work for a living can't afford it.
Did they address a single concern or critique of TED in this article?
No... Just that it's 'awesome'.
Well ok then TED organizers... Thanks for reminding us that you think you're so great, you feel no need to listen to anyone.
Today TED is all polish and perfectionism and production value. The Academy Awards stage design and videography is planned months in advance. Speakers are carefully vetted, recalibrated, tweaked, and tuned among an upper tier committee. Corporate sponsors are courted by a large international sales team, and these accounts pay enormous sums for the chance to create branded "experiences" for the ticket holders. Speakers (those whose egos allow it) are coached relentlessly about storytelling, sincerity, posture...
These efforts may have increased the average-overall quality of the talks, and made the talks more palatable to a wide audience. But that came at an expense of a certain kind of magic.
Yes. Yes it is.
Except the depth is necessarily shallow. So I listened to a TED talk about how social media needs to change and it exacerbates problems. Except he's light on analysis and ideas.
Which is fine I guess, but to me, hearing about how the problem exists without the follow up of ideas on how to fix, just seems incomplete.
And yes, I know, I'm giving him a hard time, etc. But the problem is very real, and needs a very real fix. More videos about how the problem came about just isnt gonna fix it.
We can have it both ways, it seems. Peak means there is a decline coming. The article closes on a note that suggests otherwise.
Peak TED is actually this video on how to use one paper towel when washing your hands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc. You mean if you shake your hands and fling water all over the bathroom then you don't need as much paper to absorb the remaining water? How revolutionary.
Many of the talks from TED never make it online. They only post one a day, and have a huge back-log of great talks to post.
Nick's original talk just didn't make the cut. I genuinely believe that was an editorial decision, not a political one. To that point, he gave an improved version of the talk a few years later which TED gladly posted online here: http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocra...
But the presentations -- the ones I managed to catch -- dragged. Boston prosecutor Adam Foss had a compelling story. Lidia Yuknavitch's talk wandered ... a lot ... though perhaps that was part of its point. Cerfs was ... interesting.
And then because I live in the future, I left to video-chat for an hour and a half with someone an ocean away.
That done, I decided it was more worth my time to tap into another set of experts -- curated books, at the library, where I could tap into 4 million years of collected wisdom (though granted, only about 8,000 of that is preserved in literary tradition).
One of the most obvious characteristics of the TED livestream was an inability to bump up playback speed through slow bits, or to skip to a more interesting talk. TED also has a relevance problem -- really hitting on challenging problems. Part of which is an inherent conflict with exposure: some ideas really need to be developed and discussed within a safe space.
The livestream/remote program was an interesting experiment, but I'd rather have had the option to catch several days at one location, and perhaps _somebody_ in a role as a moderator / facilitator. There was at least one local TEDster, but no clear organisation on top of physical support (video, seating). That, though, was good.
"What if we could use data, to build the perfect snowboard?"
"In the average Silicon Valley tech company, 95% of time is wasted building tech products"