Why I'm Fed Up with TED
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
An open admissions policy would turn TED into something the size of Burning Man. Everyone would pile into the Rose Bowl, you'd get to "meet" the celebrities through binoculars, it would rapidly become even more of a scripted mass-market public event than it is now, and it would scare away many of the real celebrities, who would promptly go and invent TED II as a completely private, members-only meeting which we would never hear much about. You know, like Davos.
Instead of complaining about how TED isn't completely open, one should be giving thanks that it isn't completely closed.
I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's stories about how impossible it was to give a physics seminar after he won the Nobel Prize. If he scheduled a seminar under his own name, half the city would show up, it would get moved to a huge auditorium, and he would have to abandon his plan to discuss the tricky details of quantum electrodynamics with his peers and give a popular talk instead, because he couldn't bear to bore 95% of his audience to death. Feynman experimented with giving talks under a pseudonym, but found that this just made people angry when they found out, later -- there had been a Nobelist in town, and they didn't know, and they hadn't been invited!
But I agree the journalist's rant is poor because it doesn't ask the good questions. An invite-only conference is not a problematic concept. Having money as a criteria is, because it conveys the idea that intesteresting people and "thinkers of tommorow" are necessarily wealthy. History makes this assumption very questionable.
It's obvious to me that TED is, by design or by accident, an invite-only conference for people who tend to be rich. The fact that it's famous is just a side effect of that: if you invite one celebrity to a meeting, you'll get some press coverage; if you invite several hundred celebrities you'll get a slew of press coverage.
The fact that TED is full of smart people giving smart talks is also a side effect of the guest list: smart people are drawn to present at TED for the same reason that Willie Sutton was drawn to rob banks: that's where the money is. Convincing, say, Bill Gates that your work is interesting is a pretty darned good way to advance your work, especially if the press is there, and even if he doesn't pay you a massive fee for the speech -- which, for all I know, TED does.
(I don't mean to imply that rich people are nothing but walking piles of money -- although, if they were, many of us would still gladly talk to them. Many people are rich for a reason! Bill Gates is nobody's fool. Rumor has it that Larry and Sergey are kind of smart. And other people make use of their wealth to become very expert in one thing or another: money buys a lot of education and research. Al Gore didn't rise through the ranks of the climate scientists, but he's talked to one hell of a lot of them.)
If you want to talk to poor, misunderstood, trained "thinkers of tomorrow" with interesting ideas, go to any local university and you'll find several hundred. I should know. Shouldn't we hold conferences for these poor, misunderstood thinkers? We do! There's thousands of academic conferences every year. There are three going on right now in your town. You just don't know about them, because the cameras are pointing at TED.
I don't think it's a crime for rich people to hold a private invite-only meeting. (Whether or not they should be allowed to make binding, enforceable political decisions about my life in such a meeting is a completely different question.) I'm glad that, at this particular rich-person's meeting, they decide to invite scientists and technologists and great artists, instead of concentrating entirely on polo ponies and booze. And I'm glad that they film a lot of the meeting and release those films for free.
Additionally, I hate the rhetoric of Full Disclosure suggesting that somehow, now that you've explicitly mentioned why you are in no good position to write an article, your biases are no longer affecting you.
The guy just wants to whine and to point blame at a good thing.
You might talk about the perk of being at Google is eating free food by great chefs, even though the actual reason you work there is because you want to work on great things with great people. In the same way, of course you're are going to twitter about bono and al gore being there, even though the real reason you're there is to see what people on the forefront of technology, entertainment, and design are doing, and do something about it in whatever way you can.
It's not that people don't want to talk about why they're actually there, but it's far easier to talk to someone else about perks rather than core reason. That sends the wrong message to those like the writer that feels outcast.
People who comment on a site aren't members of some gang. Although it seems that all social news sites are eventually overwhelmed by people who think so.
"It surprises me that people can indict others with the adjective 'holier-than-thou' and not feel ashamed of themselves. The word screams, 'I'm going to bring you down to my level!'"
Smug, holier-than-thou, arrogant, self-righteous: one can easily inflict these words on pg for unashamedly littering his essays with references to Leonardo da Vinci and Jane Austen and Copernicus and Kelly Johnson. At times I've felt put off by the way he does this, but I'm rational enough to know this emotion - the emotion that coerces us to prevent our fellow apes from rising above their proper place - is wrong, at least in this case.
So what if TED is smug? They deserve to be - many of their videos are really, truly interesting. As an example, I recently enjoyed the one on African Aid: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/159. I'll warn you in advance that he's a very captivating speaker - it's hard to stop watching after you've begun.
I think you're reading more into what I wrote than I intended. I enjoy a lot of their content and I've seen a lot of their videos. That's why I am so annoyed with the opening. I click it and go, oh crap, not this thing again. Fast forward!
I'm sure they were thinking this made them all "global" and "in touch" or something. I think they were treating the poor guy like a curious little pet.
Here it is: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/153
Oh wait. There is. It's called "the internet", and TED is there.