TED talks are lying
salon.com
salon.com
And yet I keep a really really advanced slab of glass in my pocket at all times on which I can talk instantly to anyone in the world, check stats about myself and my environment, and can access the whole of human knowledge since recorded history.
I can use an inexpensive device that not only protects me from unwanted pregnancy, but solves most other sexual hazards.
I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out.
I have algorithms at my disposal (for free) that often know what I'm looking for better than I do myself.
People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease.
If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version. Many can be replaced with artificial versions, sometimes printed to my exact specifications.
Humans without legs can compete at the Olympic level against humans with healthy legs.
Quadriplegics not only survive, but can have a surprising level of autonomy.
We have a veritable space race among private companies. A feat so far reserved only for the wealthiest of nation states.
I don't know about you, but progress is right here. Happening right fucking now. And it is amazing!
When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years"
Stop lamenting the lack of progress and look around. The world is completely different than it was even five years ago.
PS: I almost forgot -> humans have had a constant presence in space since 1998, and before that from 1986 to 1996. That's pretty awesome too.
Rubber condoms began large scale manufacturing in the 1930s.
Flu immunization the 1950s. Very recently upgraded with modern science, but heavily practiced as it was.
The algorithm you revere as knowing yourself only ever gets trained to learn where it can get you to spend money. Which it does in an ad supported manner.
Point you on programming bacteria. Go bio.
Transplants and health have gotten better. But healthcare in general is also less accessible and more costly.
Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.
I agree we're amazing, but glamorous long-shot works are fading from the world and in my consideration we are settling in for a long stretch of capitalist coasting on marginal incremental improvements. We would do well to rally against settling and re-envision ways to breath life into possibility-exploration. The inflection point for progress was two decades ago.
Why is this bad? That space is a viable destination for private businesses shows just how far we've come.
X33, the last great "try some crazy shit" we pulled, was cancelled after $922m from NASA and $357m from Lockheed Martin. (Leave it to congress to kill the interesting/tricky/useful stuff! Revive this project!)
X33 was 1/10th the weight of the VentureStar craft it was a demonstrator for. It was to pioneer radical new high efficiency high-control thrust vectoring engines burning the most gravometrically dense element, innovative cryonics, sstol, lighweight composite construction techniques, lifting body aerodynamics, metallic thermal protection, and unmanned flight controls. Any one of these things could produce massive massive spinoff technologies in it's wake, and would be incredibly important technologies to be able to point to, and set a new bar for progress.
It's not that private industry is bad (oh, it is), it's that private industry is boring, safe, incremental, and the only massive innovations this world have ever seen have jumped up from the shadows and stolen existing big buisnesses lunch in the split second it took business to blink. Business is the living antithesis of what is most interesting and uniquely human: the radical.
No, we are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United... http://www.alternet.org/fun-facts-about-rich-people-walmart-...
Dudes invent a a computer (1940s) > availbable to public (1980ish) > internet > I know more than my teacher and my dad
Dude invents penicillin > 100 years pass > people complain about not enough donors (1990s) > stem cells(now)
That looks like a rocket ship to me... and we are about to take off as far as I can tell....so buckle up man..
Or may be not if you are still carrying the glass slab from 1989...
Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.
How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.
What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.
It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.
However, I would like to say that I do know the importance of shoulders of the giants our current world stands on. If there were no Intel in 1961, then most likely there would be no iPhone in 2006, if there was no DNA model in early sixties then there will be no stem cell advances now. The point I was trying to make was that the fact standing on the shoulders of theses giants gives us a better shot at the kind of problems our predecessors couldn't even dream about. So the only time better than now, will be in future....when I am long gone up in smoke....I have absolutely no reason to complain...
edit: typo
Over the last 20 years or so, it seems like the smartest of us were spending our careers and lives building a better nervous system for the planet in the form of popularizing the internet and building services that connect to it.
Now that we seem to be in a good place with all that, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back to a more...physical place with work in self-driving cars, medicine, space, etc.
I think it's fantastic. The best photo taking app in the world won't drive me to a space port where I can catch a ride to Mars.
Agreed.
Hardware, hackspaces and many people I know are taking welding and machining courses.
As mentioned up the tree, I'm walking about with a Cray 2 equivalent in my bag.
And I'm glad there are some grass roots springing up on the well-tread physical planes. It's great that people are springing their own means here.
I pray to my gods every day that the net too starts springing up some grass roots to show for itself. This "nervous system"'s origins were the smart and the dreamers, but it's meteoric rise into the cloud has gotten it further and further away from being a thing people know and touch and can handle for themselves. I hope it's not too long for the net to spring it's own grass roots, and for people to feel the netgrass beneath their feet.
- flu, most of the common diseases wiped out: "Threat of flu pandemics has increased recently" http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0983_article.htm
"Common Infectious Diseases Worldwide" http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903696.html
- "People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease."
Are you? I'm not. Anyone else here doing this and using it to help any population (white mice don't count)?
- "If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version." "Each day, about 77 people receive organ transplants. However, about 18 people die each day waiting for transplants that can't take place because of the shortage of donated organs." http://www.womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fa...
So your chances in the USA are about 81% that you'll get an organ transplant. After that how long will you live (w/o regard to quality of life)? Well, it's organ-dependent. Kidneys might last 20 years, but for hearts the 10-year survival rate is 55%: http://www.nmh.org/nm/heart-transplantation-overview
-"Humans without legs can compete at the Olympic level against humans with healthy legs." The only person I know of who has benefited in this respect from technological advancement is Pistorius. So make that "one human (Pistorius) without legs, in some running events,..." and I'll agree. Other disabled Olympians made it on sheer determination (no high-tech required): http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/08/11-disabled-olympians/
"Quadriplegics not only survive, but can have a surprising level of autonomy." I'd like to hear quadriplegics' take on this. Remove the government support system and they're all gone in 5 days. Is that autonomy? This isn't technology; it's determination and the charitable nature of our society.
"Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years": Well, then, how's the "war on cancer" doing, other than sucking taxpayer's money down a corporate drain, paying for doctors' Mercedes and Rio trips and creating a government bureaucracy that will have people voting for politicians based on the state of their gall-bladders instead of on their personal freedoms? "Give me a heart transplant or give me death!" hardly seems an appropriate political slogan, but that's where we're headed.
Sure there's been progress but lay off the sugar donuts.
That's really surprising. What is methodology did they use to get to that number?
A lot of pregnancies result from incorrect usage ranging from things like not putting it on right (and so risking tears, or having it fall off), to ignorant ideas like putting it on first close to ejaculation.
I'd also debate the degree to which many of those are genuine advances. What seems like a great shiny achievement now may be considered foolish or irrelevant in hindsight.
Progress is indeed amazing. But how do you know it is progress, or a greater or lesser progress than before?
The inverse holds true as well. The Romans invented a steam engine and used it to entertain random passers-by in the square with a wheel that can move in circles on its own.
As for the slowing of innovation. No. I am fairly positive the rate of innovation is increasing at an exponential rate just like it's always been.
But you have to look at the nascent tiny scientific breakthroughs to see the everyday technology we're going to lament as "Based on old innovations" thirty years from now.
I mean, what use is a shaky three-wheel car that can hardly go any faster than a walking human could? You'd be better off using a horse, what a stupid invention and utterly useless innovation.
The rate of innovation has not always increased at an 'exponential' rate. Why should it? No one would seriously suggest the rate of innovation has always increased since the year dot, in a proportionately upward curve. History has shown that we are quite capable are going backwards, forgetting previous advances, and and then relearning from the ancients (such as your steam engine).
Now take another step back. Breakthroughs themselves seem to be happening at an ever increasing "exponential" rate. Perhaps this is driven by increased wealth and education, which leads to a bigger population of researchers. In which case this trend may also eventually be limited (not "exponential").
But taking another step back reveals another trend: information is getting more available and searchable. And the burst in communications enables the formation of all kinds of creative communities.
I can't take another step back, but I can guess that it might involve artificial intelligences, DNA, and a broadening of what we consider a person. Maybe even the Singularity.
Depends on which works you are reading. Iain M. Banks' Culture is probably several centuries or more out of our lifetimes...
Personally, I regard real sci-fi as that which engenders new and interesting thoughts around our current versus our potential condition as sapients (hopefully). That is of course, merely my opinion, but it suggests to me that there may be a place for "soft" sci-fi too.
Since you're familiar with the book, and it comes up as a classic of soft sci fi vs hard sci fi as the ultimate soft sci fi example, there's a specific part of the plot where the author search-n-replaced "plain old rotary telephone" with "videophone" without altering the plot which uses shiny to distract from the story, and confuses the reader because it makes a little hole in the plot where the videophone users act like telephone users who can't see each other or their surroundings.
You can't turn SiaSL into a better contemporary hip urban drama merely by adding a bunch of slang and S+R the videophone as per above into "iPhone". Or turn it into a better medieval fantasy by S+R the videophone into a crystal ball. If he had just written something like "Be not content" as a contemporary 1950s/60s/70s hippie adventure without the interference of soft sci fi jargonizing it would have been an even better book.
TLDR is usually search and replace soft sci fi jargonizes and obfuscates without adding any depth to the story, and usually causing some damage to the plot consistency.
Usually this is where examples like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the TOS star trek Doomsday Machine episode get brought up as great examples of sci fi where S+R was not used and the applied tech cooperates with the human story in a consistent manner instead of being shiny but conflicting with the plot. Would it have been a better story to S+R the trek episode as a medieval adventure, no it would have sucked.
> I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of people die from seasonal flu every year, pandemic flu can kill 5% of population if let loose. SARS and the recent H7N1 flu all have pandemic potential, not realized only because of massive social response at patient isolation. Not only are we far from wiping out common diseases, a lot of them is making a comeback. Some scientists believe we are on the brink of post-antibiotics era. > People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease. That is just not true. What synthetic biologists claim to be binary logic is basic common sense redefined. And the only reason they use bacteria is because they would be completely lost with an Eukaryotic cell. One should not mistake grant-hunting PR for reality. > If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version. Many can be replaced with artificial versions, sometimes printed to my exact specifications. You are probably wording this wrong. No one is replacing brain for instance. And from my corner of world, considering how little we know about the inner working of the immune system, no way all organs can be replaced to individual specification. In fact I don't know any ORGAN can be fabricated to individual specs. There might be, but I would be staggered. > When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years"
> Stop lamenting the lack of progress and look around. The world is completely different than it was even five years ago. I don't think most science fictions are picturing a technical utopia nowdays. If anything, there is more than a little hand-wringing. Progress can look different to different people, and we are no longer so naive as to believe the unalloyed good of technology.
I share your belief progress is being made, but as always, haltingly, especially for their social impact. People here are generally technologists and want to believe in the intrinsic value of technology. But I bethink myself and remember Goethe's "Faust" and its caution against head-strong rush toward power and "progress."
Teeth and bone/joint replacements are made to fit, they also aren't living tissue.
It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it.
There was a good essay about this phenomenon on HN a few years ago but I can't find it anymore. Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that.
The future is already here, just unevenly distributed?
The entire species has not triumphed over disease, especially not against virii. Only an unfortunately small percentage of the population who have medical insurance who live in a rich 1st world country and are somewhat lucky have triumphed (temporarily) over microbes, the rest of the species dies like flies from dumb infections. The rest of the list is innovation as defined by minor evolution or profitability or extreme rareness such that is irrelevant. I think that is the wrong definition.
Innovation is a Dr hanging out with the physicists and next thing you know the peculiar optical behavior of ultra-short wavelength xrays passing thru flesh to see bones is applied to patient care. Or resonating the nuclei of hydrogen atoms using unusual shaped magnetic fields to image the hydrogen density of living flesh is applied to patient care. Or blasting a very narrow, moving beam of radiation carves out a 3-d shape of death, surrounded by living tissue, and hopefully that dead tissue was a tumor. That's innovation.
I would contrast that to, now we'll do exactly the same thing we always did exactly the same way (although perhaps slightly faster or slightly more convenient or slightly cheaper) by looking at a pocket sized wireless graphics display instead of using a desktop sized wire connected graphics display. Boring. Maybe profitable, maybe highly profitable, but not innovative or interesting. The world is full of highly profitable completely non-innovative companies, innovation is hardly a universal positive anyway.
For instance, Watt is now known as the bringer of the steam age and its accompanied industrial revolution. But at the time, all he did was a really really tiny improvement on the already existing steam engine.
Or Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. But all he really did was find a half decent way of bringing already existing electricity into homes to power already existing light bulbs. He didn't even do that very well, but it worked.
And what did either of those improve, really? Watt's engine made it possible for miners to work manually a bit longer and slightly safer from flooding. Edison did nothing a candle couldn't. Lightbulbs weren't particularly good back then.
History is littered with Huge Innovations (tm) that were super tiny and incremental when looked at from the context of the time.
Usually you only hear about innovations that are a success, failure is an orphan but success has a million fathers, etc. Therefore by the rules of logic all innovation leads to success. Surely by all rules of logic anything true in one way it true the other way, so all success required innovation. Given that scenario as starting conditions and rules of the game, minor engineering evolutionary improvements that none-the-less are eventually profitable, must be defined as super tiny incremental irrelevant forms of innovation, although they're really just boring gradual evolution.
Or if you really want to muddy the waters there's some fun analogies you can make between evolution vs intelligent design and mere incremental product development and actual innovation, and how both mental models seem to make their owners both really happy and extremely binary in their outlook toward the opposite.
I think this is true of inflection points, but perhaps not true generally. The devil is in the differentiation.
"What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise."
- is what I took from it. It's not so much about the pace of progress, as it is about an establishment that chooses what constitutes creativity.
Your comment on the flu makes sense from a general argument point, but not from the point of the flu. Influenza is a disease which we cannot really treat well if you get it, and we have not yet made a great vaccine that works every year.
Tamiflu and other treatments for it are simply not that effective.
It is one of the most likely diseases to cause a terrible epidemic killing millions of people.
There are some very promising vaccines in the pipeline (including end of Phase 2 or in Phase 3) that protect well against even flu strains not specifically targeted. The risk is that, before the new generation of vaccines come out, an epidemic occurs and affects poor nations without adequate distribution of antibiotics. I know that is not what you generally hear, but it is where we are currently at.
For example, for people to switch to a new idea, it is often expected to be 10X better, i.e., allow people to do something they could not do before. In principle, 1.1X better is still better by definition, but it would never see a wide adoption due to higher costs of the people to switch. If the 1.1X idea were the first one to come to market to begin with, it may have been 10X over the existing ones and thus may have seen wide adoption that the reference 1X idea saw. In other words, ideas that are 1.1X better see resistance to adoption due to what is entirely history (= past progress) even though they are ultimately still better by definition.
Capitalism is risk averse and progress oblivious. The figure of merit in capitalism is one number: profit, and you can tweak the margin factor and cross your finger on the sales factor.
There are so many possibilities out there to spring a 2X better plan that won't cost a bundle, but capitalism isn't interested in that kind of better. Merit in capital is about how big a paycheck you can slice off.
I think there are huge amounts of innovation and progress that are easily within reach, radical ways of putting us societally in gear to be able to at any turn provide for ourselves without having to draw from afar. But my merit for progress- tooliness and sustainability for the individual- isn't shared and it's not the kind of progress this world's evolved systems march towards.
Progress requires a definition of a figure of merit, and this world today has lost any sense of what it means to progress except for raking in cash. We need bootstrapping progress so people can be free to unlock new value-systems for themselves.
Condoms are another matter. The Romans knew how to make them, and the problem was being allowed to. The solution wasn't a sudden breakthrough, but a hard grind over many centuries. A social breakthrough as powerful as the atomic theory could be amazing.
If the world were post-scarcity and those "unneeded" people didn't have to work, that wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But what's happening is that, while industry and technology and innovation continue, the percentage of people who get to be a part of those things (and therefore have a chance at a decent income) is plummeting.
Also, taking a standpoint that focuses on humanistic creativity and the arts, we see that that is dying off. The 0.01% with the talent to contribute to innovation's forefront are an elite and bright group of people, but there's not enough bulk creative energy to solve the problem in an artistic way. And having taught classes before and realized that most of what society needs is education (not of the formal kind) I will say that aesthetics really matter.
We need more people who actually care about the humanities and arts, yes. I'm not sure how much that has to do with the distribution of majors. The corporate system is pretty good, anyway, at undoing whatever good is done by college.
The best part in the modern world is not having to visit Greece or wait for papyrii to be hand copied. The bad news is we don't seem to be achieving six times ancient Athenian cultural production so 0.01% might be a bit optimistic.
And unfortunately, with current declining attention spans and younger generations preference for video over text we'll have to get used to this annoying media and its side effects. Even people learning programming want "video tutorials" and "code-casts" nowadays...
To me the argument should run differently:
- technical innovation has never been higher, both in absolute terms and in the products being brought to market.
- yes many innovations are tiny evolutions on existing products, but blame consumer surplus capture rather than a conspiracy.
- If we want more forward leaps in science and technology we should lobby our governments to double the STEM spending at least. It's hard to bring a product to market if it's core has not been invented.
- And really, TED talks, and all the other pop-insight industry, is not lying - they may be repeating some basic ideas (learn how to solve a problem, use that method in a new area, monitor the results) and we should not get upset if people try to hype up their life's work. No just accept that there are 7 billion people, and we need that many to see the next ground shaking concept invented in time.
One other point - I suspect the reason the author is hearing the same points raised time and again is a sign of an a creation of agreement over the accepted new paradigm for society to use. once upon a time slavery was an acceptable paradigm, so was anti-gay prejudice and so was religion and superstition.
What we see is the new modes of thought getting tried out like clothes in a shop. One day we will all quote Maslow.
I didn't read an argument so much as just a sneer against professionals who admire scientists and inventors.
But hey, sneering for sneering's sake is sometimes fun. The last paragraph has a little more structure than the essay as a whole, and is mercifully much shorter.
Maybe the best revision wouldn't be repairing the argument so much as reducing the whole thing to a tweet.
> the professional-managerial audience['s] members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
The cost to performance ratio of computing is increasing at an exponential rate, e.g. the human genome project. We have DNA printing that likely is going the same way too. There is software for compiling DNA (Genome Compiler.) I find this both extraordinarily innovative as well as increasing in at an exponential rate.
Humans like to copy each other. So, rock and roll in 1965 may have seemed wonderfully innovative. If you had listened to it from 1965 until 2013, it may not seem as much anymore. You've "heard it all." Perhaps the same could be said of network TV dramas.
Some things appear to innovate in spurts. Take for example the Oculus Rift. Virtual reality headsets, for consumers, were stagnant since the mid 1990s. If you bought one in 2011 it would have been more or less the same as one you bought in 1996. Seems like a huge lack of innovation! Well, now we have the Oculus Rift. It turns out all of this development with mobile phones is directly useful for making virtual reality headsets fast, light, and high resolution.
Who would have thought Angry Birds contributed to progress in virtual reality? I think we will see the same thing happen with other industries and products, where for 2 decades nothing interesting happened and then in a matter of months a company produces a game changer using advances in mobile technology, genetics, databases, etc.
Now, perhaps someone who looks at the Oculus Rift says, that's not innovative, the concept existed 25 years ago. If that is how we are measuring innovation, it seems both shallow and dismissive of the incredible amounts of labor and creative genius involved.
In 1953 Tintin went to the moon in a vertically landing rocket. I would be extremely embarrassed to call Elon Musk not innovative for having a working version of this rocket today.
We measure things in such short time spans. Many of the things done have yet to manifest themselves as recognizable solutions for humans. If we look at human history in periods of hundreds of years or thousands of years, the amount of innovation we have seen over the past decade is phenomenal.
Should the government be helping? Perhaps. Our larger concern should be innovation that doesn't do irreversible damage to the environment and consequently humans. Often government backed innovation is really about building very destructive weapons, which there is no private market for. If innovation is a little slower in exchange for not ending up with the next nuclear bomb, I won't be complaining.
If a MBA has a graph of it showing smooth change fitting a trendline, its not innovative anymore?
So something like a graph of NAICS & SIC codes over time, or a graph of folks doing something so new that no code exists so it gets graphed as "other"? Number of people employed by a business less than 10 years old?
The problem is not being more creative, the problem is having the space to use it.
Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century.
Quite true, but then, the most successful ones I've come across are those who embrace actual "creativity" and risk-taking (which are somewhat intertwined in the space we are discussing here). I don't know whether it's something that can be distilled down into a 10-minute TED talk or a pop-psychology novel, though; it seems to often be a personality trait that some have, and some don't (not quite as binary, of course, more a range).
Kind of like creativity itself.
What about science and art divulgation? At least two great talks come inmediately to my mind: Those by Benjamin Zander and by Richard Dawkins
(Which is not different from any other class of people.)
You get a similar thing in many fields, people don't want to hear the reality they want the myth to be "be a creative thinker, solve the problem make millions" when the reality was (for the post it here), a scientist who'd spent years in his field learning the state of the art in adhesives accidentally invented the glue used on post-it's which then languished for 5 years before someone else used it to stick a bookmark.
Creativity is the product of *well rested* minds!
And I don't even agree with the OP's assumptions that innovation is "slowed to a crawl", it's probably faster than ever before, but nothing nears as fast as it should be with all the new communication and connectivity enhancements (imho they act like a wonder-drug that is so good it unfortunately masks the symptoms of a serious illness - like a really good antiinflammatory + painkiller that can mask the symptoms of one's cancer until it's too late).
As a few examples:
- in medical research we've built complicated regulations, approval and funding processes and uber-complicated career paths that basically suck away 90% of the time and energy of medical-researchers and doctors, and we wonder why progress is so slow and so many grave errors committed
- in software we've gone so deep down the "worse is better" hole that we have all sorts of tools and programming languages that create more problems than they solve, and whole industries dedicated to solving tooling problems that should be trivial if OSs and languages were design with just a bit more hindsight (that we know is possible: take ta re-re-...-re-invention of Lisp and Smalltalk features), and have more time and energy for building cool software that actually does interesting things
- in hardware we have over-engineered designs and tools and concepts that are only understandable by a few very smart, well trained, but over worked professionals
- when it comes to our children we are so afraid that they will not be "good enough" or that they will be left behind that we try to fill all their time with "useful" activities, as schools fill it with homework
...we basically generate so much needless complexity in everything that we do that most of can never have "well rested minds". And this complexity grows like a freakin cancer and it will also be inherited by our children and their children and will keep their minds busy and tired for all their lives too.
There probably are people/situations trying to do more than one at the same time.
The other problem varies extremely widely from presenter to presenter, but an example is "here's three graphs, now listen to me spend 18 minutes making the obvious analysis you just did in 15 or so seconds each, as I steal 17:15 of your lifespan". Its the old documentary regret disease; would I have been better served, quicker, by replacing the video monologue (or documentary) with a simple wikipedia URL or a quarter page abstract of a paper?
I still watch them anyway. If 90% of most "stuff" is junk, maybe TED is excellent because its only 80% junk and the good stuff is really good. Best thing out there, can still be mostly junk.
That project is a very big lie. It will never happen. In a best case scenario, Rio's inhabitants - and tourists - will have 1/3 of that with a huge overbilling.
So, if you are intending to come to Rio to see WC and Olympics, expect heavy traffic jams and a lot of headache.
It is not possible that technology is progressing slower now than before. The more we innovate, the more innovation becomes possible. What can only be true is the changing in our perception of the amount of time between innovations.
http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...
It's like a mockery of responsive design...
Really, it bothered me too much, I had to share this.
(The talk was still enjoyable, and probably "insightful" at some level)
Yes, there is a lot of trash in TED (as well as in any place that become popular), we already know about scams, e.g. the dude of the vortex mathematics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRnhrOf0r0
Without thinking that much, two talks that had nothing to do with this "pop insight porn" come to my mind: Richard Dawkins on "Militant atheism" http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism... and Benjamin Zander on "The transformative power of classical music". http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...
So how does da Vinci fit in? Maybe genius, rather than creative? He seemed to be churning out ideas long before a consensus was taken about his merits of creativity... Or is this just again future bias?
The dark side of pop creativity is that it allows these deflated, managerial sorts to believe otherwise-- that creativity can come without sacrifice and opposition, that they can "have it all". It allows them to ignore the truth of their lives, which is that they made a trade they can't reverse. If you want to accomplish anything creatively, you have to have an extreme tolerance of social disapproval that less than 1% of people have, and you have that when you're young and before you're established. For people to continue to grow creatively, their 40s to 60s are their prime; but for the ones who lose that spark, 45+ (after two decades of long work hours and social climbing) is too late to get it back.
It really annoys me when I see people trying to limit what others can do based on the number of times someone has been around the sun. If you are physically and mentally able, then it's all just time and effort.
Maybe it's not about "too late", but I think it gets a lot harder to change yourself as you get older. If you're on a good track, you're more likely to stay on a good track; the same for the less-than-good tracks. Creative people will continue to gain creative competence, which is why most peak in their 50s-- it takes a long time to get good-- but I think that someone who voluntarily gives his creativity up, in order to become a social climber, if he hasn't reclaimed it by middle age, probably won't.
There are a lot of people who go into banking and consulting expecting to cash out, retire young, and become novelists or philosophers. Very few of those actually do it.
There are lots of people who don't go into banking because they want to write a novel first. Very few of those people actually do it either.
That being said, there are plenty of people (myself included), that use these dreams to get them through the drudgery of their working day. Giving hope to those without has merit, but it's worth even more when pursued.