I associate TED talks with inserting a certain fantasy into the minds of people aspiring to be rich and famous, especially in the tech world.
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!
“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?”
Damn - does this mean I have to pull "thought leader" from my resume now? How else do I imply that I am more knowledgeable and intelligent than my corporate leaders?
This is half-serious, half "I would have gotten away with it if not for these meddling kids!"
Thanks. “What Is The Biggest Rock? - Onion Talks - Ep. 4” perfectly encapsulates the format of interesting -> inspiring from the article: https://youtu.be/aO0TUI9r-So
Randy Powell's 2010 talk mentioned in the article, on "Vortex Based Mathematics" - the secret of the universe, free energy, cure for all diseases etc...
"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."
A lot of TED talks are either window dressing or fraud, but TED Ed has consistently churned out high quality content over the years covering topics including science, history, mythology, medicine, philosophy, and more. Can’t recommend them enough
If a lot of them are frauds, how the heck are you supposed to know that these are high quality content, especially if you are being introduced to a theory and/or have little previous knowledge of the subject matter?
You don't. Knowing that there is garbage peppered into everything makes it all less reliable.
Well, this kind of blanket statement is true for just about anything. Such an extreme level of skepticism isn’t useful.
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.
I think you may have missed the distinction between "TED" and "TED Ed".
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.
And therein the biggest mistake TED made— poor naming of multiple TED brands that were were too similar despite the difference in presentation quality that they represented.
I remember a TED-ed animated video that claimed that isolated cultures prospered because they had peace, one of the three examples was Japan. They had an animation of a cute little rabbit practicing the katana. I couldn't believe something so blatantly false could make it past the editors of TED-ed, they even had iconic weapons of Japan's warring states period in the video! I can't find the video now, so I'm hoping it was taken down. But it definitely had TEDx quality information, I have avoided TED-ed for years ever since that video.
I keep watching these with my kids (at their request), ready to pounce when something ridiculous is said. But they're so far nice and informative. And not wrong on stuff I know about. +1 recommendation.
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.
This reminds me of Paul Graham's famous quote that ideas are free but execution is everything. The same applies to Ted talks. Sure, there are safe high-capacity batteries that would change everything from mobile phones in the developing world to high tech in the developed world but there are millions of miles from A to B which are not usually brought up in the talks.
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.
It is a "follow the crowd" thing. Or following a recipe for a successful story. It's not a problem only of Ted talks, read or watch any commercial fiction and they will bore you to death with the same story archetypes. The problem comes from trying to hedge the publishing risk: "see, if we are going to produce this talk/book/movie, we want some reassurances that is going to sell. So, you must follow this recipe." To make matters worse, there are like one recipe, the "hero journey", which is exactly what you described above.
Holy smokes I completely forgot about them until seeing this.
They were really something - I enjoyed the heck out of watching talks the first year or so post-discovery. The moment a fake looking one appeared, that pretty much burnt the bridge.
From that list, Hanauer's talk on inequality might not be super profound, but I just listened to it and I cannot even understand how was it seen as partisan and banned.
TED talks are overwhelmingly people wanting to be successful in capitalism. To have a talk pointing out the flaws of a system people desperately want to succeed in is abrasive and probably causes discomfort for the general TED audience.
I enjoyed a number of the early TED talks, but, for the last few years, I haven't found many worth watching. I was pleasantly surprised at Dolph Lundgren's TEDx talk, though[0]. I didn't know he had that side. He's never been my favorite actor.
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.
Isn't it just another poignant example of how ideas are worthless and execution is everything?
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?
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.
Our culture is overly obsessed with the concept of certification as being a necessary precursor for professional legitimization. Shakespeare did not have anything close to what we'd interpret as a modern education and it's interesting that you regard some imaginary English teacher as a major influence. Artists for the majority of history learned most of their trades on the job. We mythologize the education system as the only legitimate venue for learning when it's a fairly new invention. Robinson's point wasn't attacking teachers, but the bureaucratic factory farm of universal education that does more to categorize and institutionalize labor, then foster creativity and critical thinking.
I didn't bring up Shakespeare's English teacher; Robinson did. But there have been teachers since at least Antiquity. And speaking of Antiquity, where do you think Shakespeare learned about Caesar, Cleopatra, Alexander? (Not by watching Youtube videos.)
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.
This is wrong. Of course Shakespeare had a formal education.
"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.
You also learn to frame all previous learning within modern equivalents. Don't be surprised if academics choose to wedge their professional identities as the predetermining factor of genius.
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.
Perhaps we should adopt the Elizabethan school system then. All lessons were in Latin and students were punished for speaking English. 'Memorising texts and performing endlessly tedious translations of Latin phrases was the norm [...]. Creating situations of competition between pupils with an atmosphere of fear of physical punishment and humiliation was the usual approach.'[1]
Modern students might find a few exams preferable to this.
What people are obsessed with is the idea that someone's "good at" something as an inherent trait, as opposed to skill being learnable and, therefore, transferable. «Shakespeare was "good at" writing, therefore he must have the "good at writing" trait from birth», as opposed to «Shakespeare was a skilled author, so, while he had some amount of innate talent, he learned to write at some point, got progressively better at writing over time, and what we have is the end result of a learning process» which is the much more sensible interpretation. I'm old-fashioned enough to think there probably is such a thing as general intelligence, but g doesn't mean you're born knowing how to write a three-act play with believable character development and enough sex jokes to keep everyone amused. Ramifying whatever raw talent you have into an actual skill takes training.
>What people are obsessed with is the idea that someone's "good at" something as an inherent trait, as opposed to skill being learnable and, therefore, transferable
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.
Both sides sour into toxicity if taken too far, which can happen if a corrective is applied too broadly:
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.
Indeed, the former corrective is more what I wanted to get at. I wanted to point out that the "you can be anything if you put your mind to it" narrative is doubly harmful as children very much observe the contrary in reality but nevertheless still have the naive platitude repeated to them. I think this contradiction contributes to making the first bump in the road, never mind getting into AP Trig or something, so much more intolerable.
I agree up to a point and up to a certain level of achievement. But, for example, while I was good enough at math to get through an engineering program at a good school, I'm pretty confident that a physics or math degree would have been very tough and I doubt I could have done it. If I tried really hard and spent lots of time with the TAs? Maybe but I doubt it.
Oh I agree, and I hope my wording didn't convey some sort of unbound ceiling if you just "put your mind to it". I more wanted to point at the first bump in the road.
He also lived in a society they made more sense in some ways at the micro level.
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.
>> Our culture is overly obsessed with the concept of certification as being a necessary precursor for professional legitimization.
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.
> Artists for the majority of history learned most of their trades on the job. We mythologize the education system as the only legitimate venue for learning when it's a fairly new invention.
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.
Those people had teachers but no "schooling" i.e. mass produced education. 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.
They actually did. They went to actual schools - with standard programs all fellow students had to go through. Einstein specifically went to mass produced education and lived in twentieth century.
> 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.
I took my son out of school in 4th-5th grade and did absolutely zero formal education with him. He entered college at 15, and has since noped out (at 18). Very sharp kid who is not terribly inspired by the prospect of working for any of our institutions. I'm quickly joining him.
I hate my job and would like to "nope out", but I don't see anything better out there. I have to support myself and my family too. Are there other options?
> 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
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.
I think you are correct and I am struggling to understand why lots of intelligent people are missing the logical fallacy in their responses. I don't know the formal description but the logic is:
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.
I think the genius story is not only false, it is elitist and dangerous. What the joke says, in essence, is that a teacher's job is to identify the Shakespeares, and then prevent anyone from getting in their way.
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?
> Isn't it possible however, that James and Sarah would have had a child who would have become another Mozart, or Einstein?
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.
This talk is using "feel good about yourself" playbook, that's why it is the most viewed one.
- 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.
I have literally no idea how you can think that's what they're trying to say. I believe you, I'm not saying it's BS, I just can't see the path to it. Somebody slightly-awkwardly making the point that (they believe) modern schooling is doing more harm than good to the development of children in no way implies the claim that children should not have teachers, or be taught, or that somehow shakespeare didn't need to learn lessons from people about english or life. These counterpoints to an idea that isn't present are the worst form of strawman.
I think the whole point is erasure of the all the variables that might help make a person a success (education, parents, wealth, community, nutrition, etc.) The success a person has achieved is somehow an innate part of who the person is, these other variables merely distract or (in the case of Shakespeare's teachers) hold them back. If the world would get out of their way, these people would have been even more successful even earlier. How amazing would the world be if that was the case?
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 honestly do not think that the logical conclusion is that Shakespeare's English teacher was the best English teacher of all time.
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.
Is there historical reason to think that? That Shakespeare's would be better off without schooling and that his teachers and parents were crappy? Or that if Shakespeare's parents enforced bed time, it was at detriment?
In non-writing arts, I know for a fact that there is lineage of famous artists - each learning from predecessors.
Even if it was true that every bit of schooling hurt Shakespeare, that effect is dwarfed by the contributions to his career made by the various mediocre talents who wrote stuff like Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (where he got so much of his historical material) and the other playwrights in the revenge genre.
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 seems pretty clear that those in the upper 10% (to pick a random number) of broad intellectual curiosity, motivation, home environment, etc. would likely be much better off with more self-directed learning than a rigid program--with some exceptions like probably languages.
> 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?
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.
You're also assuming that Shakespeare had only one teacher. His environment was simply set up in a way to tap his inherent aptitude. The notion that having inherent aptitude implies that it will manifest itself to the world regardless of the quality of one's environment is at best toxic and at worse insulting.
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.
It can be both: that the teacher helped a _gifted_ boy grow into the author we know now, and the boy wouldn't have become the author we know now without them.
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.
> if it were due to the teacher, there would have been hundreds of Shakespeares from all the pupils that teacher taught throughout their career.
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.
The joke is about imagining a famous historic person as a child instead of an adult. I think it's just in there to lighten the presentation up rather than make a big point about Shakespeare.
I think the idea you are presenting is a straw man.
A long time ago I read Dan Simmons series article “Writing well”, where he argued that Shakespeare greatly profited from his education in a - very uncreative -grammar school, which emphasised learning of latin and imitation of latin rhetoric.
It's pretty irrelevant to derive any conclusion about mass public education systems based on extreme outliers.
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.
Bach has gotten tons of schooling. He got born in family of musicians and was taught by them. When his parents died, he lived with brother that continued to teach him.
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".
Not just classical composition either, I really should not be at this point but I’m regularly surprised about “contemporary” (50s and forwards) musicians having a strong classical (playing) or formal background.
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.
Yeah, Jazz is heavy on theory too. Especially for improvisation and jamming, you really really need to know what you are doing and which tone will match what the group is doing at the same time.
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.
That's the all selling point of the talk though. System is hiding potential outliers ( like the dancer example ) Although it is conveniently ignoring the failure examples.
I dunno. Maybe the joke is spot on. Sure we can chicken-and-egg the problem, but someone has to be the first to make scientific discoveries just as much as reach new heights in poetry. And we surely have enough known examples of luminaries who had absolutely horrendous parents or teachers or life circumstances. We don't have great records about the historical Shakespeare, and I don't dismiss your PoV out of hand, but I am not sure it's totally correct either. We have to leave room for natural genius and insight.
>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
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.
> 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
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'm not so sure. My OK brother-in-law was decrying the state of his primary education. He mentioned it took a full year of remedial tutoring to be ready for college at 18.
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.
> So, an entire primary education can be recapitulated in a few months by an 18-year-old.
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.
It's way faster to learn by yourself than from someone teaching you because you can go directly to what you need to understand etc. So it's more suitable for geniuses.
Counterexamples to your point: Mozart, guy was copying whole compositions by memory at age 14
> Counterexamples to your point: Mozart, guy was copying whole compositions by memory at age 14
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 had a degree in Maths and Physics and did his PhD as an external student while working at the Patent Office. How is he an example of schools killing creativity?
The 12-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer.
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.
> 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.
Eh. It depends on the kid and their circumstances.
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.
It's hard to know whether my experience or Tao's is more representative. There's selection bias going on with regards to people's conception of a typical child prodigy since people are going to be more aware of successful/properly educated prodigies than the others.
> It's way faster to learn by yourself than from someone teaching you because you can go directly to what you need to understand etc.
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.
TED was like clubhouse. It started out decently with good guests talking about interesting subjects, then it turned into a flurry of anyone who simply wanted to spout off.
The turning point for me was when I met someone at a tech conference who introduced himself as a TED talk speaker. I'm not sure I was able to walk away fast enough.
I gave a TEDx talk in 2009, which was very popular on YouTube back then, and it was chosen by the TED editors to be put as a ‚proper‘ TED talk on the TED.com website. It‘s quite interesting to see how they shortened the video even further down, and what they cut out - half sentences that I repeat for clarification, and so on, cutting out 40 seconds from the 4:39min (already edited) original:
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:
For some time after the talk, TED would send updated speaker agreements to sign, as they expanded the distribution channels for the talks – I remember signing an updated agreement for distribution via ‚on-demand DVDs‘ that people with insufficient internet connectivity could order for free, and also for in-flight entertainment on planes.
>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.
Well, the people that talk at TED never mention that the idea they claim to be behind the corner could actually be years and million of dollars of investments away, and therefore has a very high chance of never materializing.
the original TED talks I saw had people in the audience I felt were reasonably able to understand how much investment would be needed to achieve a particular idea.
well in our present world potentially everything communicated has a global audience, but it would seem a losing strategy to try to make every prerequisite of every idea understood by everyone who might ever encounter your communication because you would never get to the idea itself but instead be stuck in one of those silly comedy routines where someone says start at the beginning and the protagonist says "so, first I was born..."
on edit: in other words, just because something might end up uploaded to YouTube there's no obligation to dumb it down.
TEDx ruined TED, in my opinion. I worked for a person that did a TEDx talk and over the course of my employment learned they had absolutely zero authority to talk about any subject, let alone on a stage in front of a bunch of people.
The integrity died in the name of views, I think. I don't miss TED.
While I share your frustration with TEDx, it's important to note that the article is criticizing TED itself as being useless. It's not like TED has been a success, weighed down by the its association with TEDx. TED itself, according to the article, has been a disappointing failure.
I think you’ve stopped reading the article too soon. If anything, the article says the opposite. TED has been an amazing success, just not in the way we think of it.
>> 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.
You are right. I read the first part and added the article to my reading list to finish later. But the conclusions of the first part mirror how I personally feel about TED.
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.
I think your first sentence captures it better than the second (though there's some truth to that as well.)
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.
Well yeah, TED hasn't been relevant in a long time. The way I see it, it failed years ago. It turns out, even seemingly smart people have a lot of sensational garbage to say.
He’s not saying TED was a failure at all. He’s saying TED was and is a propaganda tool of a newly ascendant branch of the ruling class and its fans, at the time, were marks.
I too know a guy who did TEDx talk. After he did this talk, he suddenly became self-proclaimed intellectual authority on everything from Quantum Mechanics to politics to religion to what not, on his Facebook page.
He couldn't write a 3 line Python program or solve a high school trigonometry problem or answer a basic history question.
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.
The core problem is with TED itself, at least that's the problem the article talks about. TEDx is a sideshow to the real issue, just like the show itself. Entities like Malcolm Gladwell and TED have done a great deal of cultural damage.
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)
I agree, I recently found out about Lex Fridman [0] podcast and I am very satisfied with the experts in their field expressing their history and opinions, kinda reminds me of old TED... :)
To me it's been clear that the TED talk format favors good presentation skills above anything else. And I feel it's impossible for the audience to tell if an idea really matters given such a short delivery.
It's much harder to bullshit your way through a 1-2 hour long podcast conducted by a knowledgeable host.
If you pick up a bag of apples and find one bad, do you take that particular bag home?
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.
Sure, but if your brand is "apples worth eating" and I run across several completely rotten apoles with your sticker on them, I'm going to stop trusting that brand.
Of course not, that wasn't my point. I've watched a ton of TEDx talks, this was my conclusion after that experience. It's a sentiment pretty openly shared by many, too.
I agree. It's difficult to find a brand that devalued itself as much as TED did with TEDx. The vetting process for getting on stage at TEDx is vastly different, which provides for some rather ludicrous entries at local events.
I dislike TED as much as Oscar Schwartz (the writer of this essay). But TEDx has almost no standards. The local private High School ("Harker Academy") has TEDx talks given by high school kids who use it as just one more thing to put on their college applications to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.
Isn't it the spirit of the era ? availability of everything to everyone ? you can all produce and distribute content, have an audience, be heard ? so that whatever group can monetize the attendence.
My ex-business partner inherited $2 million, then burned through all of it on various startup ideas, and when he was almost bankrupt, he dealt with the stress by smoking more and more marijuana. He also promoted himself as a visionary, someone who could put into words how the future would answer the bright hopes of humanity. As part of his effort to sell himself as a visionary, he got himself invited to give a talk to the local TEDx chapter. You can see him here:
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:
Once I got over his… interesting… affect, I found this to be a pretty enjoyable watch. Certainly there’s not much technical merit to the ideas, and I definitely wouldn’t want to start a company with him or invest in him as a leader, but it was entertaining and at least a little thought-provoking about the future of media technology. I have a relatively high tolerance for bullshit though, so I can see how this could be unwatchable for many.
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.
That's just it though, he can be interesting. 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. However, it was more important to him to be seen as a visionary than a successful entrepreneur, which is part of why our projects never seemed to take off. Which is why I eventually left.
It's not an entirely uninteresting idea that he is presenting in that TEDx talk, although I can't see how it would be the basis of a business. It's very similar to the premise of the TV show "Devs" on Hulu.
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.
Well, hopefully I'm fair to him, and note his strengths as well as his weaknesses. And as I point out at the end of the book, my version of events is not the only version of events that could be told. If he also wrote a book, a fuller picture of events would emerge, though still not the 100% pure truth.
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.
And yet, surprisingly perhaps, it promotes the content of the 'salty' ex's ex rather than being whitewashed out, or being 'cancelled' that you might expect from true saltiness. Like TED therefore, its a clever trick to spice up the banal and offer it for consumption.
Not exactly. We began as a 50/50 partnership. I had spent 3 years developing some CMs software, and, to create the partnership, I was donating the software, and he was putting up some money. As time went on, his money certainly gave him an advantage, regarding our long-term direction, but there was the sense that I had given up something important on the assumption that we were going to work hard to build a successful business. So there was a sense that his impulsiveness undercut our original understanding. The same is true of the investors who eventually put up about $2 million. They took small slices of the company on the understanding that my ex-business partner had already invested a lot of his own money, but then, that investor money was put up with the understanding that it would be transformed into a successful business, so, again, his emphasis on aesthetics rather than substance did disappoint the hopes of those investors.
Right. Here is something that I've noticed some time ago and which applies to your history, but which of course isn't very useful to you now because it all has already happened, but partnerships are best formed between parties that are at the same level of commitment and with aligned goals.
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.
To me this is just the classic HN experience. If anything I hope there is some motivated founder that sees this problem and the post-pandemic lack of conference/user group talks with TED production values and starts innovating on the concept.
In Neal Stephenson‘s book Anathem, the monk-like students are punished by having to memorize incorrect mathematical proofs, because they know it takes years to extricate the false information that is affecting their thought processes. A cruel punishment indeed.
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.
Yep, not really thrilled with all the hate here. It's easy (and lazy) to throw rocks and people trying to share good ideas in new and interesting ways.
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.
> People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference.
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.)
To be fair, while not at those levels, this is true of a fair number of conferences that are covered by sponsorships. There's a price tag but there are plentiful complimentary passes for the taking if you're in the industry and do just a bit of looking.
I actually found Ted talks to be good for teaching English. You get great subtitles in real time, along with transcripts, so I teach English my way: students and tutor take turns reading out loud, then we play the Ted speaker. Practices reading, speaking and listening.
Meh. The article makes unsubstantiated statements in a matter-of-fact style, rendering the whole piece useless.
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.
> Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible.
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.
It seems like a TED talk might serve pretty well as a teaser for reading a book or scientific article about a subject? The problem isn't that teasers are bad, but that there's no next step, no recommended reading. The teaser is all you get and you're not expected to want more. This is anti-curious.
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).
My somewhat polarizing opinion is that, aside from tutorials/workshops, most conference talk are better around 30 minute length. I generally don't find it's a great format for really diving into a topic and 30 minutes is enough to introduce a topic and perhaps inspire me to dig deeper.
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.
I still think they could have been improved by thinking about what the call to action is supposed to be, other than just being inspired. It's like, okay, you got people's attention. What are you going to do with it?
I find the TED format of a talk disturbingly creepy. Yes, rehearsing and dumbing-down a bit your public talk is a good thing. But when it is done to such absurd extremes it becomes really disturbing, almost scary.
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.
For the radio version of creepy, the Moth Radio Hour creeps me out so much. There's something which I cant put my finger on, it's like the real emotional stories have been produced and refined by a team to become a kind of product.
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.
I get the same way about a lot of modern NPR shows and the podcasts that ape them... carefully scripted and produced to sound like two friends just hanging out and talking about the interesting article one read in The Atlantic. Notice how any "guest" gets their interview chopped into sub-sentence snippets with the hosts interjecting between... who knows what the original actually said before it got edited to fit the story!
Please keep nationalistic flamebait out of your posts to HN. There are plenty of people all over the US who don't like that style either. A lot of them are on HN for that matter.
That's what happens when the propaganda part of the project gets pushed too far. Fakeness, impersonation, histrionism and convincing more by use of producing psychological impressions, confirmation bias and peer pressure, than the often uncharming nature of the real.
TED has always been bad as have most technical presentations in a similar style. A much better arrangement is a discussion (not a panel) of experts in the field. At the level of most TED talks, most in the audience are unable to adequately judge the content.
Ted talks seemed like a form of Hero worship. Everyone loves a Hero and to stand up and yap on about something for an hour like you are changing the world you'll get someone to rally behind you, even if you are Elizabeth Holmes.
I disagree Gates' talk didn't have an impact. Prior to COVID, the US and others conducted multiple novel coronavirus "war games" such as Clade X. The results of these events helped inform the European and American vaccine development efforts (an absolute success) and their disease mitigation efforts (granted, a much more mixed result). I think this is about the best impact one could hope for from a pop science speech series.
When I was 18, I spoke at the flagship TED11 conference in Monterey in 2001. I argued for the human exploration of Mars, a talk which in retrospect wasn't anything special other than for the relative youth of the person delivering it.
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.
For me the TED video that reaaally made me raise my eyebrows was a poem [0] from Sunni Patterson. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy poetry very much and I have nothing against women-centric art, but this was so forced and out-of-place I'm getting second-hand embarrassed just watching it.
> "At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates’s 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn’t so sure. It seems to me that Gates’s prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don’t mean to suggest that Gates’s TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid."
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.
We have a problem with precious resources available progressively drowned in a noise of low quality resources.
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.
That sounds more complicated than necessary. Pretty much every conference has a conference committee of some sort that picks talks and reaches out to speakers if they want something that hasn't been submitted. (I imagine TED does more outreach relative to waiting for the abstracts to come to them.)
No, I meant that we need well conceived and effective rating mechanisms.
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.
I used to binge watch Ted Talks and then ran across How to sound Smart in your Ted Talk[1] Ted Talk where William Stephen spent 6 minutes talking about nothing.
While I find some of the points this article is making to be valid, I also find its deeply cynical take hard to swallow.
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"
I don't think the author of this article understands how change happens. Gates and Lewinskis talks (and others) are given as examples of talks that changed nothing, but they were both extra impetus to shifts that were already happening. Meanwhile countervailing forces push the opposite way. Like rowing against the tide, change does happen but effects can be subtle or take a long time. E.g. Maybe without that Gates talk, some butterfly effect would have meant we waited another six months for covid vaccines. Without the Lewinski talk, maybe some slightly different shift of public mood would have seen Weinstein aquited.
I think technological capitalism has fostered the idea that creative "big picture" ideas are entirely unrelated to the lower level technical skills necessary to realise them. This disconnect gives rise to a sort of ideas aristocracy, whose natural habitat is a Ted talk stage.
The rise and success of "TED talks" as a non-American struck me as the epitome of the American "post-empire" mindset - rich and successful people cheering on even richer and more successful people for spouting ideas that only bored, rich, successful people could come up with trying to keep themselves entertained and relevant.
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.
> The rise and success of "TED talks" as a non-American struck me as the epitome of the American "post-empire" mindset
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.
I seriously believe that they should have stopped producing TED talks after Reggie Watts. He said everything that needed to be said. All talks afterwards were just reformulations of his core point.
That has almost nothing to do with the point this article is making. COVID is a mere side topic with probably 5 sentences about it in the entire article. I would suggest you actually read it, as it provides a quite fascinating breakdown of the history, development, and downfall of TED.
Just a knee-jerk reaction, I stopped reading there, while I agree that TED is gone, I doubt it'll be for the same reason as someone who starts their article by shooting the messenger.
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