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Comment by hughesjj | Hacker News Reader

I'm at the point where if I see it in a TED talk I'm assuming it's a bullshit grifter

I blocked the TED channel on YouTube a few years back as it was getting bad. They first diluted their "brand" or quality with TEDx, and it's been downhill since as they've been scraping the bottom of the barrel and tried to "scale" or "franchise". Happens everytime, growth at all costs. The only way to stop it is to have passionate leaders who care more about the goal than the money.

Unfortunately, usually by the time these leaders have established their company they are also on a downward life trajectory in terms of years left, so they switch to "extraction" mode.

I don't have a problem with the concept of locally branded TED talks under the TEDx umbrella, but I do have a problem of TEDx talks pretending that they are genuine TED talks. Generally actual TED talks have some quality checks built in, they sometimes allow garbage through, but it's far more rigid than the stuff you see at the TEDx talks.

I presume you just need to pay to get up on stage.

I don't even think you pay. The x ones are just local ones put on random organizations. They may pay something for the tedx branding, but I believe organization itself decides who to let speak.

Me too. Same for pretty much any "scientist" on NPR, or with a popular book. Not EVERY one is a hack or a fraud, but enough are that as a group, they're not trustworthy.

That's a big chunk of my adult life I need to forget, because I was so into the broad field of applied social science, Ariely in particular. It's a real shame.

Even 8 years ago that was a safe view to hold.

Indeed. By 2016 I think I had moved from "wow tedx is junk but official Ted still has some good stuff" to "man even the official ones really are more hype than substance are are in dire need of quality control"

Even if it is a Nobel prize winner like Jennifer Doudna?

Well the guy who invented lobotomy got one of those. Or the guy who invented microcredit. To not even venture in the peace nobel prizes area, where getting one is probably indicative of being evil.

I mean the Nobel committee gave the Peace prize to Kissinger. I’m not sure they’re a good bellwether for anything.

Tom Lehrer famously retired when Kissinger got the peace prize declaring satire to be dead. The really funny one to me is they gave literature to Winston Churchill because they thought they probably couldn't give him peace, then when Kissinger came up they thought "Why not?"

Churchill's autobiography [0] is actually a great read. I'm nowhere near qualified to judge a literature Nobel prize but I loved it. His history of the English speaking peoples is pretty good too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Early_Life

>Well the guy who invented lobotomy got one of those.

Yeah, and when you see a Nobel prize winner you must be assuming it's a bullshit grifter.

It's hard to generalize. The whole field of behavioural intelligence has lots of fake/unrepeatable studies.

Even Kahneman, who got a Economics Nobel has this issue:

https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...

Yep, it's hard, that's why sometimes it's better not to overgeneralize. But sure, that field is full if unreproducible "research".

I don't know who that is but applying my heuristic, yes, I'd assume so.

It's a heuristic, not a conviction. Generally I don't bother to listen to the TED talks anymore and I'm much more distrustful in my priors than "normal" for anyone I see giving one.

That said it's not like I'm going to dismiss someone with otherwise solid credentials out of hand just because they gave a TED talk, but it still lowers my trust.

Really depends on what you're trying to use the info for. I'm not a researcher so it's not like this affects my day job, and if I was I'd like to think I'd dive into the sources rather than ever just taking someone for their word. That's like the equivalent of copy pasting some code you found on discord into your production app.

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