What Was the Ted Talk?
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The fantasy is: being on stage, a thought leader. Dressed ever-so-slightly-casual. Holding the clicker. A nearly invisible headset and mic, the little foam ball hovering. Hands raised, arms parallel to the ground. And... saying profound things.
At some point, conference keynotes started to look like TED talks. It became a burning, hidden desire of many: to be up on that stage, saying those profound things. Witness the number of LinkedIn profile pics that look like they were taken from TED talks. Thought leader! Public intellectual! So smart!
/s
“If this one thing can overcome all these hurdles for no apparent reason then all these other things will happen for no apparent reason. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Not a new critique. There’s been a ton of parodying (and I believe self reflection) of the SV culture from the 2000s era.
Edit: the Onion talks parodying TED posted by another commenter were from 9yrs ago
This is half-serious, half "I would have gotten away with it if not for these meddling kids!"
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NL9i-Fu15hhYGB-d0hm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY
To survive in the new internet economy, you need to come up with a new service or product that people will want. Not likely, right?
Using your brain to think of an idea, and your skills to implement it: Thats the old model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyLKY9MyUjA
If that wasn't enough for you (doubtful!), here's 3 more Powell talks on the subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUSJxzYw3OU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-S39FDJtac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVN0vFAMfr4
and one by the inventor mentioned in the TEDx talk, Marko Rodin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic0gogjsPXU
Sadly, it appears not to be a clever hoax but an actual Thing.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Vortex-based_math
"Essentially, the idea revolves around a circle with nine points equidistant from one another. Number the points, and then draw lines connecting each vertex n to its double modulo 9. ...You get a vortex! Sort of. ...Rodin claims that it is the "Mathematical Finger Print of God", which is of course a perfectly reasonable assertion for a mathematical paper to make."
You don't. Knowing that there is garbage peppered into everything makes it all less reliable.
The worst TED talks are flawed largely because they were about the promoting speaker rather than the subject. (And with that, erroneous information followed). TED Ed has a dedicated team of producers and writers for each video that translates some complex ideas from a qualified educator (researcher, historian, science writer, etc.) into video form.
Knowing a portion of the "factual" information won't actually be factual and passing on a source because of that isn't extreme skepticism.
Areibman is saying that in the set of all "TED" talks, there are a lot of bad talks, but in the specific subset of "TED" talks called "TED Ed", the quality is much higher.
The quality of TED talks is probably the most variable of anything I've seen, but TED Ed is consistent. It may just boil down to taking more preparation and conscious effort to make an animation.
I think we miss this fact because we often listen to people who might already be successful so we treat their ideas as unique or special but they are just as cheap. Bill Gates might have a special interest in pandemics but the truth is there are probably a million people who have the same fears as him but who wouldn't be on a Ted talk because they wouldn't be impressive.
There is one thing that I think is great though about Ted talks (some of them) and that is they can encourage and inspire in general. William Kamkwamba's talk about building windmills from scrap in Malawi inspires people that you can have so little but with passion, you can change the world.
- here is the sob story about how I got involved
- here is how I toiled to come up with a solution
- the solution
It is emotive and would work just as well to sell someone on the latest crypto scam as it would the next big breakthrough in water treatment.
For example, Elizabeth Holmes gave a TED talk.
I wonder if there is a list of "deleted" TED talks over the years?
At some point, TED[x] became a marquée brand, with people practicing TED talks, in every video they make, getting headshot photos with flesh-colored headpiece mics, and timing all their work to be 18 minutes long.
Basically, the old maxim, that once something becomes a commodity, it loses its lustre. It's like when punk became a fashion statement, and you could buy ripped and stained jeans for $150.
When will we remove protections on ideas and let the best execution no longer be prevented by mediocre one made by the person who got the protection for the idea?
Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
At the 7'15 point, the speaker makes a big joke about Shakespeare "being seven, being in someone's English class" and the audience rolls over with laughter -- the joke being, of course, that it's ludicrous to think anyone ever tried to teach English to the greatest English writer of all time. The speaker continues with the same idea and same joke about Shakespeare's father.
But really? Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was, because (he) helped him grow into the author we know now? That his father, or his mother, or someone, probably helped him?
Instead we have this idea that Shakespeare, like Jesus, was born perfect and that what he had to do was overcome the stupidity and shortsightedness (and meanness) of everyone around him, until he could explode and really be himself.
This idea is a tale for little kids. But it's not just absurd, it's destructive.
Here's an extract of a critic of the book "How the Classics Made Shakespeare" by Jonathan Bate:
> Bate reminds us that in Shakespeare’s day, a boy from a solidly middle-class family like his would have gotten a rigorous classical education even at a regional local school in Stratford. In Elizabethan England the core of education was learning Latin and then reading and translating into English the Roman classics, including Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Cicero. It was thus largely the classics that initially shaped Shakespeare’s basic conception of literature, offering him models of lyric poetry, comedy, and tragedy that he followed throughout his career.
https://isi.org/modern-age/shakespeare-and-classical-antiqui...
"If William Shakespere had the grammar school training of his day - or its equivalent - he had as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries. At least, no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that is required." Baldwin, T.W. William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.
You could have just opened a history book book to find this out. One of those skills you learn in a bureaucratic factory farm.
What counted as formal education of the past is barely applicable to the education systems of the present. Shakespeare didn't spend half of his teen years getting coached in state and national examinations, nor were his teachers subject to performance targets that demanded test results from their students above all else.
Modern students might find a few exams preferable to this.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1583/education-in-the-e...
I use to coach high school policy debate in a major metropolitan public high school and the level of "I can't do this, I'm just not good at this" that shows up the minute kids encounter difficulty/obstacles, and specifically in non-physical labor, is mind-blowing.
We tell children "anything is attainable if you put your mind to it" then turn around and imply to children through our actions, cause they're good at reading those, that some people have "it" and most don't, e.g. sequestering the smart kids into completely different tracks from the regular kids; math teachers demonstrating disappointment that a student doesn't understand something while praising the kid who grasps it much quicker.
What's striking to me is that social media, and specifically IG culture, has made strides in tearing at this contradiction in the domain of personal appearance, e.g. not only weight loss/fitness transformation but even the celebration of 'confidence is all you need' for women with more robust bodies. But in the final analysis, I find physical accomplishment in our culture to still be a distinct domain from mental accomplishment.
If someone is saying they can't learn a skill they're manifestly capable of, then focusing on how they can likely do more than they think is the correct corrective to apply. However, everyone does have limits, and ignoring those limits and insisting that the same level of attainment is possible for everyone through effort is a toxic mindset which implicitly (or explicitly!) punishes people for being human as opposed to idealized automatons.
On the other hand, if someone is insisting that they can learn everything up to the highest levels and become a 21st Century Renaissance Genius, focusing the replies on how limited time is and how much there is to know is the proper corrective to apply. Apply that corrective too broadly and it's crab-bucket or tall-poppy mentality, and anti-intellectual bilge.
We do need to tear down the idea that people are inherently "good at" learned skills, however. That's never a proper corrective, it's always nonsense, and it devalues the hard work the successful people put in while demoralizing the people who wish to become successful in something.
Artisans would learn on the job, but recall that 90% of the population were peasants with rudimentary skills.
It’s popular to bitch about the school system, but the reality is we churn out nurses and doctors and programmers and engineers by the millions. Many/most of the problems are really about broader social issues that schools cannot address.
This! When I was a kid, no one thought making video games was a job, people made jokes about that. I was lucky enough to get to do it and have some success and work with many very successful people in that field. They all figured it out as they went along. Now my children are old enough to major in something that is approximately video games in college, although the name is fancier. By the way, teaching has become a great second career for my friends.
I think it is always useful to learn to think critically about anything and video games are worthy of that criticism. But I think to really succeed in a medium you have to above all else really want to do it a lot and try things no one can teach you. School can only teach you a few things you would pick up quickly if you were actually doing it.
People in this discussion keep bringing heavily educated individuals as examples of "schooling not needed". I don't know about Shakespeare specifically, but people use Bach or Einstein or Mozart as examples. People who had top education and/or came from families that made sure they were learning from early age - with teachers, tutors and formal schools.
If there is mythology alive, it is that these people had no schooling and went by raw uneducated talent purely. People just assume so and are so certain they dont even bother to verify.
> No person prior to the twentieth century had the schooling that you have and yet schooling has now monopolized the legitimization of competence and learning.
Compulsory schooling did not started in twentieth century. It existed since 18th century. Austria has it since 1774.
This isn't the joke exactly. It's a joke about what could have happened should Shakespeare at age seven had a miserable english education like many current people's experience. His argument throughout the talk is not anti-school or anti-teacher, his contention is with the arrangement of these elements that produce what we think of today as the schooling system. He's not advocating for children not to have teachers.
> Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was
If it was down to the brilliance of the teacher then that teacher could just produced more Shakespeare's throughout their career.
Shakespeare didn't have a teacher and became a genius, therefore nobody should have teachers and they will become geniuses.
It doesn't follow. Sharespeare like random other people were gifted in some way. If what others are saying is true, everyone in the olden days before widespread shooling would be amazing too. They weren't.
Why?
Because education is related to a whole load of variables. The support/lack of parents and the community they operate in. E.g. middle-class vs working class. Their nutrition level and ability to concentrate; the other kids in their classes who might support or detract from learning; the quality of the teaching in the school; and many other things.
Clearly the best way to learn is to hang around people who are passionate about their subjects but probably the next best thing is a school where you can get a balanced education that is hopefully partially related to the basic skills you need to get around in life.
And what do we do with the non-Shakespeares? I guess we just dump them and move to another part of the world... Just like little Sarah, the girlfriend of the speaker's son he mentions at 8'15.
> He [James, the speaker's son, who was 16 at the time] said 'I'll never find another girl like Sarah.' And we were rather pleased about that frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
Audience laughs and laughs at this.
I don't care for that joke either.
Yet the interesting part here is that, in some cases, it's apparently ok to intervene in your children's life -- as opposed to letting them do their thing and pursue their creativity.
Isn't it possible however, that James and Sarah would have had a child who would have become another Mozart, or Einstein?
We'll never know.
At least genetically this is unlikely. Several hundred genetic variants explain a good fraction of intelligence and a random mixing of Sarah and James’ variants will include ones that increase and decrease intelligence. Getting a really good random mix of several hundred variants is unlikely. That is, intelligence regresses towards the mean.
There is plenty of science to backup the claim that intelligence is heritable [0]. From there the rest of what I said is basic population genetics statistics.
- You cannot succeed unless you try. ( This is misinterpreted by average joe as "if I believe/try enough I will succeed, if not I didn't try enough )
- If you are a failure, it is not your fault. ( This one is the basic blame the system playbook )
Examples of exceptional people chosen specifically, Sharespeare, The Dancer, etc. Everybody thinks they have some undiscovered talent, nobody wants to be the average.
There will be some exceptional people, and with current schooling some exceptional talent will be lost, but it is much better than having less than average educated majority.
An obvious corollary is that these successful people don't owe anyone anything: all of these variables don't really matter. I don't think that's mentioned in this talk, however.
I interpreted the implication of the talk as being that Shakespeare's formal schooling, or lack of it, was at best irrelevant to his development as a great creative writer. This still supports the thesis of the talk - that the price children pay to participate in formal schooling is not worth it.
In non-writing arts, I know for a fact that there is lineage of famous artists - each learning from predecessors.
Same with Einstein, he had his problems with institutions but his breakthroughs relied on the work of their legions of average minds who developed physics and mathematics over the centuries.
We should think about how we can best support the handful of geniuses who are held back by the educational system, however I wouldn't be surprised if the kind of education that works for the >99.999th percentile would be terrible for the other 99.999%.
It should be more like:
"If you are an exceptional child, price you pay to participate in formal schooling is not worth it"
I'm sure he had help, but if it were due to the teacher, there would have been hundreds of Shakespeares from all the pupils that teacher taught throughout their career. That wasn't the case though. Out of all the pupils that Shakespeare's teacher had, only one of them became Shakespeare.
To quote Stephen Jay: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
For example, I grew up in a broken family, living with a stepmother who did her best to trip me until my father gets convinced that I should live with my mother instead. As a result, when my father was away, I received no help in my homework. Her kids did. In this scenario, the "nature over nurture" debater will argue that if I was meant to be good in math then I would be able to push through on my own without external assistance when needed. But when I didn't, my lack of understanding snowballed, my confidence got hit and I ended up being a gang member who avoids school to waste time in the arcade, smoke and pinball.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that what I'm saying is that I would have been the next Einstein or that I'm ultra-talented and I blame my stepmother for not having a math phd. But maybe I would have been good enough not to repeat the same school year twice. Maybe having access to someone explaining to me how important mathematics are to programming would stimulate my interest more and would motivate me to try and get good at them instead of dodging my responsibilities.
I dedicate my life in 2 things: Combat ageism and expose to programming as many people as possible. They don't have to want to become developers but, maybe they'll find it interesting enough to change their life or their workflows. Because I am not just a person, I'm also part of someone else's environment.
Just because their other pupils didn't turn out to be legendary doesn't invalidate the teacher's contribution, which is to say, doesn't mean the joke was in good taste.
They would not. Because many of those kids would move on to do something different. And also because success is more then just ability. Economy can not have hundreds of famous play writers, there are not enough theaters.
I think the idea you are presenting is a straw man.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170411075439/http://www.dansim...
No one will "become Bach" by attending a school with good music curriculum, and no school could have input a Bach-level talent and output a median musician.
And when he was 15, he went to prestigious school.
Also, classical music in general involves a lot of theory. It is not just about "make nice sounding tune by intuition".
Youtube has really opened my eyes on the subject as well: there are truckloads of jazz players discussing musical theory.
Which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: properly deconstructing and playing with structures is difficult if you don’t deeply understand those structures. But I’m not really musically inclined and I’ve never been fond of jazz so I never saw this.
But to play folk or rock music for example, you do not need that much of it. If you can read music sheet, you can reproduce the song. You can kinda create similar own going by intuition. But, creating the stuff Bach was creating absolutely does require tons of knowledge.
I didn't take that as the joke. Not much is known about Shakespeare's childhood but if you look at someone like Mozart he was coached by family from an early age. By seven if he had had a music class at school he probably would have been way better by the teacher. If I was to bet on it I'd guess Shakespeare was taught English way before seven.
Isn't it the point ?
That's not the joke.
The joke is, you can't imagine some teacher today tolerating Shakespeare-like talk.
See his intro anecdote. Someone fidgeting and being unruly is more likely to get medicated than educated.
> But really? Isn't the logical conclusion the opposite? That Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher there ever was
Do you know that he wrote because he had the greatest English teacher? Or was it his own passion? Or did he just hate someone's guts enough. For example Harlan Ellison hated his writing teacher. I think the teacher even threw Harlan out of the class. So Harlan being the tiny ball of spite, as he was, mailed mentions of his rewards to the man, some letters even found him post-humously. Because Harlan forgot to check up on him.
I'd imagine a fidgeting and unruly student in a 16th century grammar school would get beaten.
You might even say, as Shakespeare would, that it is a "tale told by an idiot / Full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing."
I asked "So, an entire primary education can be recapitulated in a few months by an 18-year-old. Why then do we torment children with 12 years of schooling? If it isn't necessary?"
He had no answer, being a teacher himself. But I wonder.
Also, school is as much a daycare so the parents can go to work, as it is a place of "learning".
Furthermore, you study specifically to pass tests. Actual learning is a secondary side-effect of education.
Daycare exists already. If that's what we want, that's what we should pay for and get. Seem like theatre to combine the two.
That’s not exactly fair. During his primary education, he learnt enough to complete it in a few months. This does not tell how long it would have taken had he never gone to school at all.
Counterexamples to your point: Mozart, guy was copying whole compositions by memory at age 14
Adrian Lamo: didn't finish high school
Einstein?
And many others
Mozart’s father was a minor composer, accomplished musician, and skilled teacher (he published a well regarded violin textbook the same year WA was born).
Mozart started picking up musical education through his father teaching his older sister.
> Einstein?
The tutored son of an engineer, graduate of ETH Zurich?
Both of them were geniuses, but in both cases their familial background and educational access were not exactly minor.
If you’re looking for something even remotely close to an actual self-made genius, it’s probably Ramanujan you want. And here you could actually argue formal education was unsuitable and damaging: dude was only interested in pure mathematics so failed out of two colleges (as well as his FA), nearly starved until he chanced a meeting with V. Ramaswamy Aiyer (the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society).
But such stark examples are not common at all. It’s almost certain we collectively missed on a much higher number of Einsteins and Mozarts because they did not have the early access and education to blossom, than we stifled and smothered ramanujans.
Would Jacob Collier exist if he’d been born in a slum of Chennai, on the streets of Bogota, or in a project? That seems doubtful. But how many Jacob Colliers did, and were lost?
Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem at age 12.
And more at Wikipedia. Point is geniuses learn way faster by themselves than going to a class. It's a huge waste of time to sit in a lecture of someone speaking at turtle pace, I would fall asleep. Sorry if you went through that.
You're generalizing from some poorly taught class, whereas it's unlikely that a genius would remain in such a class, and also unlikely that the education would not also be supplemented with other forms of teaching.
Terence Tao was a child prodigy the likes of which are rarely seen, and his bio is full of classes/teachings.
I was a child prodigy (I'm a much less impressive adult), and since I was from a rural area with divorced parents without much time for me, I spent plenty of time in 'normal' classes in addition to supplemental classes and educational opportunities.
The difference between me and my (non-prodigy) siblings was that the teachers normally didn't expect me to pay attention/I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted after I finished the assignments. I have to agree with hatsubishi to a degree: It IS boring as hell to be in a classroom setting made for people behind your level, and this is especially likely to happen at early ages.
I don't think it's schools alone that kill the creativity, though. It was interesting going to events/being around other prodigies, because often I was the only kid there whose parents/adults didn't have a career already picked out for them by the time we hit middle school. The expectations of perfection, the sense that you're public property (with great gifts come great responsibility), and the social isolation of child geniuses does more to stunt them than the education system, in my opinion/experience.
Absolutely, hence why I phrased it as "unlikely". The wrong environment will kill anything.
Mozart's father, a professional composer and director, had a lot to do with Mozart's early musical development [0]
That is a pretty weak conjecture, I think. I can think of a ton of issues where the fastest way is almost certainly having the guidance and counsel of a great teacher.
Sure it's possible to teach yourself calculus, relativity theory, or even QED. I find it highly doubtful though that any student of Feynman's, for example, would have learned faster in self-study than from sitting in his class.
Einstein went to school, graduated and all that. It was only really at highest level when he went to work at that patent office.
I thought Nelson had given one and was just using him as an example of another loser, but maybe I'm misremembering.
YouTube version (4:39 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCmsvXgxdDY
TED.com version (3:58 mins) https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_hemmert_the_shape_shifting_...
Reputation-wise, it was life-changing (literally hundreds of emails coming in) and I am thankful for that. It was also challenging that this is something you can almost certainly never repeat (including the media attention, overnight ‚expertise’ and all the associated dopamine in your blood).
Today (well, in 2018), TED ‚features‘ TEDx YouTube talks on their site, but it doesn‘t seem to edit them like they did back then:
YouTube version of my 2018 TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LNjVmcVF68
TED.com version (identical): https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_hemmert_protecting_our_crea...
Here‘s a 2011 ‚recap‘ of how the talk ended up on TED.com (a plead for blind optimism!):
https://tedx.tumblr.com/post/6981020824/how-ted-impacted-my-...
Ah, well. Good times!
>I watched those articulate, audacious, composed people talk about how they were building robots that would eat trash and turn it into oxygen, or whatever
that 'whatever' makes me suspect that they never actually watched a Ted Talk about trash eating robots so
>, and I felt hopeful about the future. But the trash-eating robots never arrived.
Seems sort of unfair.
I'm pretty sure some of the stuff that I've seen Ted talks about has progressed significantly, to talk about something that people working on arriving, and to be complaining about a pandemic fighting idea as not having succeeded six years after it was being discussed seems to be the province of someone not familiar with getting things done on a big scale in the real world.
on edit: in other words, just because something might end up uploaded to YouTube there's no obligation to dumb it down.
The integrity died in the name of views, I think. I don't miss TED.
>> TED of course can’t be held solely responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort [the tech elite]. That would be, in a way, to buy into its hype too much. But as the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
For a while it was cool for people to do such talks, the problem is that those people don't have unlimited things to say, so naturally when all important stuff is said and done, only lower quality content is left, with the expected spiral to the bottom until it doesn't matter any longer and is time to move on.
TED talks tend to have a certain style and pattern. And, like a given TV show, there comes a point when the particular style and pattern starts to get repetitive and tiresome. Once you've seen 50 TED talks, even if the 51st would be fairly compelling in isolation, it maybe feels like more of the same in context.
The fashion has mostly moved to other things.
He couldn't write a 3 line Python program or solve a high school trigonometry problem or answer a basic history question.
Couldn't watch it beyond 5 minutes. But comments there was fun to read.
At a TEDx I attended, wind powered beach robots dazzled, a consultant gave a powerful spoken-word poem suggesting that consultants’ reports should be written as poetry to actually drive real change... [I actually have done bug reports as poems, which was great.] Both truly wonderful and stuck in my memory.
But another sticks in my head for just being a weird thing in that forum: a woman upset after her uterus crapped out after three kids, when she wanted like 6+... Normally such a talk would be about dealing with grief around broken dreams and moving on with life, or about her adventures with adoption... but rather this was how she stuck with those dreams for a biological child even though hospitals were like “you have three healthy kids why are you trying to do IVF with a surrogate?” and eventually they got the IVF done abroad but it didn't implant but they have new schemes and plans. I'm not even opposed to her goal, just it didn't seem very TED-y.
IIRC Holmes appeared on TED, not TEDx. There's been plenty of hucksterism associated with the main TED. The concept itself is a bit grifty. It's sugar coated glittering generalities and idea peddling (what if xyz were true?)
If it's truly for entertainment value, there's nothing wrong with TED, but it pretends to be something else. It pretends to be a beacon in society; a marketplace for the hottest new ideas.
When you listen to speakers like Gladwell (who I've heard accurately described as the walking embodiment of a TED talk) they are very convincing with whatever idea they're selling. After you peel beneth the surface you find the evidence is really shaky for what he claims, but he makes it seem like such a sure thing; settled science. In some ways I think he acts as an information distortion/amplification device. He makes claims with certainty no self-respecting scientists would make.
Also, this isn't talked about much, but TED has always been a gathering of the elites. You're literally not invited. I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't showed up in more conspiracies. They've been running these shows in a cult like atmosphere, too. This has never been an accessible program. It's where billionaires go to smooze and decide how to spend their money. You might as well be watching a Goldman Sac's retreat (but this is silicon valley, so it's supposed to be different for some reason)
It's much harder to bullshit your way through a 1-2 hour long podcast conducted by a knowledgeable host.
A great take, in one line... ;)
Probably not. You would be reasonable for avoiding the bags touching that one, just to avoid the rot. The reason "on bad apple spoils the bushel" exists is because obvious rot generally means there is other rot you cannot see without further inquiry - and that those without rot will probably be tainted soon.
And that's the problem: Once you find one bad speaker, you have to be suspicious of so many more. It is probably better to move onto something more trustworthy because watching nonsense means you've increased your chances of remembering and repeating nonsense later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg
He gave that talk during 2015, the same year that Bill Gates gave the talk about the possibility of a global pandemic. As the article above suggests, Ted Talks were at their peak in 2015, but also TEDx was ruining the brand.
If anyone is curious about my ex-business partner, I talk about him, and my time working with him, in the introduction of How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps:
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
So, this is a great example of the ideas discussed in the article. Entertaining, a little woo-woo, preying on optimism, and ultimately, probably entirely inconsequential.
Your book looks interesting, too. I’ll check it out.
I wonder how your ex-partner feels about the fact that this book exists documenting his missteps and misfortunes. Ironically, with your book, you have created a durable artifact of the type that he described in his talk, giving people a chance to replay a portion of his lived experience.
As I said elsewhere in the thread, I worked with him for 6 years. I wouldn't have stayed that long if he lacked all merit. He has an obvious natural intelligence, and some creative ideas. Especially in the early days, he had a charisma that allowed us to raise more money. We did some really interesting work.
Don't be too salty, the idea was shitty from the beginning :-)
If not it is a fairly surefire recipe for disaster, there are some exceptions but the majority of the cases that I am familiar with the party with the money ended up either taking advantage of the other(s), ended up with a disproportionate share of the loot or was able to take more risk. This skews the outcome in their favor more often than not.
It is a pocket edition of why when you're born wealthy you are likely to end up even more wealthy.
Now that a thread about them is full of people linking the ones they _did not_ like, which is the opposite of what I want from this forum.
For all I know, there's might be a perfect HN replacement on TikTok which is incomprehensible enough that Zoomers get to participate.
In the wake of the replication crisis, TED Talks kind of remind me of this, because now we are uncertain which of the 50% of talks are fake and which are true.
Probably a good argument that TED talks are filling in a hole that "Academia" is supposed to be doing, but is presently not very good at.
I went to one TED conference back in early 2000s. (This was before the TEDx franchise.) I was working for a Fortune 50 company directly for its CTO. He was invited to attend and didn't pay. Neither did I, and our company didn't pay a sponsorship (though I suspect TED hoped the invitation would result in future support).
Most of the "important" people in the audience there didn't pay a nickel (and as I learned over my career, wealthy people never pay for anything). I don't think anyone--except for random suckers who really, really, want to attend TED--pays that money. (Of course, I don't expect speakers to pay; I'm talking about the audience.)
Among those, the key statement: TED talks ideas do not impact our world, is, in my view, completely false, and would at least deserve a closer examination. What does the author expect ? That in the months after Bill Gates makes a dramatic intervention countries all over the wolrd have prioritized his ideas, devised new contingency plans, voted on them, and implemented them ? How fast is fast enough ? Those things take time, and changing minds is only the first but crucial step in a long series of changes in the cultural, political, and legal domain.
Changing opinions and improving cognitive flexibility around stale issues is high impact.
This doesn't seem right. The Gates Foundation funnels billions into research. I think there are people who think that them complaining is what changes things, and perhaps that does need addressing, but personally I've observed that less from the extremely smart, tech-adjacent crowd.
Often memes are kind of similar in that they're basically headlines without a link to an article.
?! You are naturally supposed to do your homework.
Normally, e.g. "desertification", finding a bibliography is not considered the issue. And when the talk is about an upcoming technology, e.g. "creating soil out of discarded garments", well yes explicit bibliography would be nice to have, but the matter is more complicated (and large parts of the matter could be in pre-bibliography state).
Perhaps it's my modern attention span but I find a lot of things that we've traditionally slotted into hour-length period, are better handled with 30 minute ones.
It is a purely US-style thing; like exaggerated smiling and plastic-white teeth. Sure, smiling is nice and brushing your teeth is also nice. But when somebody has teeth that are unnaturally white and they show them all the time through their forced smile and uninterrupted eye contact, it becomes very scary. The stuff of nightmares. Like a TED talk.
Each story is told in a similar way, using hooks, pauses, climaxes, introductions, wavering voice and a personal message at the end to give maximum listening impact. They are crafted as much as a TED talk.
It's creepy and doesn't feel natural because the stories are all true and personal. It's like an uncanny propaganda but where you know the content is real and true, it's just the way its being told which is weird. You can hear the persons stories have had many people working on them.
It's so off putting and weird to me.
Or is it the way the ted talks focus on one generally animated person that is creepy?
Or that it’s the speaker adjusting themselves or their message in some way according to some circumstances?
Hopefully they are gone for good.
Personally the TED talk I liked the most. It's funny but I actually find it interesting, showing that appearance of meaning is not actual meaning.
TED was practically unknown back then because the founder wasn't interested in publicising it widely and because we didn't have good streaming video yet. As a result, my uni was extremely unimpressed by me taking time off to visit it (but there's a TEDxCambridgeUniversity now). It also meant there was less incentive to play to the crowd, so while there were still some "inspiresting" talks like mine, you'd also see Matt Groening show off a preview of the Futurama pilot and complain about the laughable notes he received from Fox executives.
But that didn't mean there was no incentive. I arrived a day early and didn't have anything to do, so I wandered to the lobby and saw Sergey Brin and Larry Page. We went out to get a sandwich with a couple of other people and talked about games and tech and shit. When we walked back we saw Jeff Bezos in a Subway. And if I recall correctly, my talk was after a Nobel prizewinner and before Herbie Hancock. The point is that with such an influential audience, it almost seems wasteful not to hype up your shit in the hopes of getting investment or making connections or whatever.
I was too young to realise this. If I had, I should've just begged the Googlers for a job and rode that rocket to the moon. But what I did get out of the experience was something far more valuable: the realisation that even the richest and most famous people are just people. And events like TED? They're fun in a way. I wish everyone had the chance to see what it's like. But there's no point in organising your life around trying to get in, as many seem to do. It's just not worth it compared to the other things you can do with your life. Even doing a successful TED talk is inferior to making a successful career or building a worthy app or writing an important book.
I barely remember any of the talks at the conference. Maybe that's because I was knocked out by a deadly combination of jet lag and my first and only ever migraine, but frankly, they just weren't that impactful. What's had a more lasting effect on my life was the thing that got me to the conference in the first place: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and his later books, which converted me to socialism. Of course, there weren't any 18 min talks arguing for socialism at TED11.
It seems more probable that Gates' enthusiasm for preparing for and preventing this future did indeed hasten it. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is a kingmaker and gatekeeper for biomedical research worldwide via its massive network of associated NGO funding agencies. Gates is one of the primary sponsors of the GAVI initiative to push vaccine research. The development of vaccines is, ironically, a primary motivator for gain-of-function research. The connections between NIH and gain-of-function at the WiV are pretty well-established at this point. And the connections between BMGF and Dr. Fauci are also on the public record. Bill Gates is also an important player in the extremely influential globalist institutions, the WHO and the WEF (among others) and his 'war gaming pandemics' was absolutely something that was funded and organized by these supranational organizations. This is relevant here because there is the pandemic (the pathogen) and the Pandemic (the response). In this Pandemic there was a coordinated set of policies distributed via the WHO and WEF to its partner nation states for implementation. If you ever wondered how so many different countries in different places with different populations could respond almost in lockstep, checkout Operation Lockstep, one of Gates' beloved "war games". Without attributing to any one person too much power to affect the world, Gates in particular is a meddlesome, megalomaniacal billionaire who seems to pop up in all the places where global governance by technocratic elites is pushed on an unsuspecting population. It's hard to resist the impulse to attribute his obsession with viruses to some kind of psycho-drama going back to his Microsoft days working in vain to secure Windows from software viruses. Let us hope at least some of his more ruthless business instincts are safely in the past.
Solution: somebody volunteers to create a platform where registered members contribute collectively in rating the single resources, and rating and clustering mechanism over the reviewers are implemented to evaluate those ratings.
There are a thousand items in that set (e.g. 4500 conferences in TED)? We need a rating system that works - this involves for example rating and clusterizing the rating agents themselves. Which is very complicated, but achieve a system that does not promote the horrendous and does not hide the precious - this is a key indicator in the goal - is not impossible.
(Sorry for the delay)
A platform for self-promotion.
I would prefer to look for the nuance, the diamonds in the rough, and not write off a vast body of (in my view) highly valuable content, just because in later years the output quality of the platform deteriorated. (The latter point being one I don't disagree with).
Firstly, too much weight seems to be being given to the "ideas" part of "Ideas worth spreading". The best TED talks are not just about ideas. Many of the most engaging and inspiring talks are retrospectives on what individuals and teams have done. In fact I'd argue that the most valuable TED talks are about conclusions formed from decades of research, or exciting technological advancements made through thousands of hours of deep work and experimentation.
In other words, they are often talks about about consistent, dedicated execution, as much as they are about ideas.
Like all new ideas, some will have potential and continue to develop, others will not. Some things will come to fruition sooner, others will take vastly longer than expected. This is the nature of progress.
The author seems to think that just because someone presents an idea, or some work that they've been doing, that this somehow constitutes some form of "promise" that can be broken or not delivered on in the future. And if that assumed promise is subsequently broken, this invalidates the whole work and renders the originator of that idea a charlatan.
Rather I prefer to think of it like this; we are watching people who are excited and passionate about their work, who have a sense of belief and conviction in the value of what they're doing. Every truly great (and truly bad) idea throughout time has been presented in this way. Some ideas have legs, others don't. As consumers of content, whether books, online talks, articles, we are not meant to be passive and switch off our critical thinking apparatus. When consuming such material, we should be cognisant of the fact that - of course - the speaker, or author is going to be the strongest, most vocal evangelist for their work.
No one would do anything if they didn't believe in what they were doing.
Some specifics from the article:
> Of course, Gates’s popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn’t alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other “ideas worth spreading”..
I find the writing off of Gates' pandemic talk baffling. Whatever you think of Gates, I don't really understand the conclusion the author is leading us to here. Are we saying that Gates shouldn't have bothered doing such a talk? That the 43M viewers of that talk left it with their thinking about the risk of worldwide pandemics totally unchanged? Perhaps they would have been better off spending that 10 minutes watching American Idol?
> including Monica Lewinsky’s massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy
How to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy. Are we suggesting that fewer people talking about this would be better?
> it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year. A president took office in part because of his talent for online bullying.
In my view, the logic (or lack of) behind this flow of arguments is rather nonsensical.
I think there is some truth in what the author is saying elsewhere in the article, but for me it's marred by the somewhat irrational points like the above, and difficult to therefore take seriously as a whole.
I could say more about why I think we shouldn't write of TED talks fully and unequivocally, but instead, here are some of my all time favourites. Each one of these are superb and well worth watching. The nature of the medium means that the talks can't go deep into their subjects, and are generally a means to introduce people to ideas and concepts that they may want to follow up on and research further, if so inspired.
There are many more than the few listed below.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - "Flow, the secret to happiness"
https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_s...
Chris Hadfield - "What I learned from going blind in space"
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_hadfield_what_i_learned_from...
Martin Seligman - "The new era of positive psychology"
https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_the_new_era_of_pos...
Carol Dweck - "The power of believing that you can improve"
https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...
Malcolm Gladwell - "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce"
https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...
Tim Urban - "Inside the mind of a master procrastinator"
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...
Stephen Hawking - "Questioning the universe"
https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_hawking_questioning_the_un...
Reggie Watts - "Beats that defy boxes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_beats_that_defy_boxes
Tim Ferriss - "Why you should define your fears instead of your goals"
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_why_you_should_define_...
Because most TED talks were like "hey, we don't really know what's beyond a black hole, but what if we could jump through a black hole, learn from the advanced civilisations we find there, bring back this new knowledge, and fix all our problems??"...and the audience going "Whooaaaaa this is an awesome idea nobody has ever formulated before!"
All I know is the next Wozniak, the next Gates, or even the next Zuckerberg won't be at any TED talk, be it as a speaker or in the audience.
TED talks were limited to «rich and successful people»: there have been researchers and just experts. The rise of TED talks could have struck you as the positive potential of being able to informing a public in very condensed messages.
While you see a «"post-empire" [local] mindset», others would call a worldwide-spreading virus revealed in the thirst for "inspiring". Which not only is unleashed emotion for the sake of it: oftentimes it is emotional porn, when acted on basis which are thinner than its dried-up context (when the "feel" is much larger than the facts). This celebration of the "feel" blinding the "see" may be decadent, but it is not limited to the «"post-empire"».
Anderson (founder of Zzap!, for example) was and is an enthusiast, an enthusiast he remains, his creatures may naturally be consequently influenced. He had a chat with an irritated Linus Torvalds, who had to explain it that his pleasure as an engineer was to see cleverly built engines, not, well, "emotional porn" (and an unhappy Anderson greeted him at the end with a "Thank you for the Internet"?!). But mind you, good results can be an emergent side effect of enthusiasm: without Anderson, no Zzap! and no TED, and we all would be poorer.
Poorer, because TED, more and more unfiltered (the selected number of issues of 15 years ago has multiplied - the quality fall is as expected), produces lots of noise mixed with the signal, but good TED talks have been had and are still produced today.
The three names you threw in may indicate you check TED with an interest leaning towards colossal business enterprise; an interest towards research aimed to productive enterprise would be a more fitting target, sometimes met.
Feel not as though it is a sphere we live on
And then it turned out to be "Look, it's kinda Bills fault that we ended up this way".. I'm not buying.