There are some genuinely excellent TED talks, of course. But overall I tend to find it a bit like a diet of pure chocolate... I suppose it depends on what the goal is. If it's edutainment, then it probably should stay the way it is. If it's actually about enacting change, then it shouldn't. For that you need historians, philosophers, politicians, psychologists, sociologists... and a lot more examination of the darker cynicism of human nature.
Snippets from the transcript :
But have you ever wondered why so little of the bright futures promised in TED talks actually come true? Is something wrong with the ideas? Or with the notion of what ideas can do all by themselves?
The first reason is over-simplification. Now, to be clear, I have nothing against the idea of interesting people who do smart things explaining their work in a way that everyone can understand. But TED goes way beyond that. This is not popularisation. This is taking something with substance and value and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not how we'll confront our most frightening problems, this is one of our most frightening problems.
TED is perhaps a proposition, one that says if we talk about world-changing ideas enough, then the world will change. Well, this is not true either. And that's the second problem.
You see, when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation. And if you're not cynical, you should be skeptical. You should be as skeptical of placebo politics as you are of placebo medicine.
The future on offer is one in which everything can change, so long as everything stays the same. We'll have Google Glass, but we'll still have business casual. This timidity is not our path to the future. This is incredibly conservative. And more gigaflops won't inoculate us. Because, if a problem is endemic to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore's law also amplify what's broken. It's more computation along the wrong curve, and I hardly think this is a triumph of Reason.
Our problems are not "puzzles" to be solved. This metaphor implies that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It's not true. "Innovation" defined as "puzzles", as rearranging pieces and adding more processing power, is not some Big Idea that's going to disrupt the broken status quo — that precisely is the broken status quo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5cKRmJaf0
Here's the deal with TED talks and why they always fail.
ReplyDeleteGentle reader of this comment: by dint of a difficult and exacting education, combined with a long, tough haul through the jungle of your career and life, you've gotten really good at something. Doesn't matter what it is. Not only are you good at it, people are now depending upon you to do it. Probably paying you, too.
And let's not get sidetracked by that simpleton Gladwell's assertion about how it took 10,000 hours to get that good. To get as good as you presently are, you accumulated some scars on your ass. Glad to see Bratton took that ninny Gladwell to task.
In my part of the Forty Acre Wood, we have a term called Knowledge Transfer. KT. There's an outfit called Pluralsight and they're very good at it. They break these skills down into small, useful chunks. I'm taking one of their courses now, on Apache Camel. I knew a bit about Camel before, even used it some. Now I'm actually learning it from stem to stern. And it will take me more than four hours of sitting in this chair, just taking the course - plus the work I'll have to to, implementing the examples.
TED Talks want to spin down KT to ten minute talks. Bratton compared them to megachurch sermons and I can see why, but honestly, I don't think Bratton understands why megachurches work and why all those well-scrubbed suburbanites turn up to hear those sermons. He's never cast a shadow on a church parking lot in his life - and it shows.
If only TED and the other would-be KT popularisers would take a page from religion and apply it to science. Those preachers believe in something. They preach those homilies and teach those lessons because they understand the needs of the people out there in the audience, the sullen teenager who's so alienated and angry his internals resemble nothing so much as Edvard Munch's Scream ,
That pastor has an answer for him. There's a bunch of people in the church who have kids just like him and they can all go to the church gym and work out and play b-ball and go on canoeing trips and there are plenty of well-scrubbed girls for them to hang out with and he can live out his whole life in that church, there are more social outlets and job opportunities than he can cope with. That's an amazingly appealing offer - it works, too. Since WW2, it's been those church kids who have come to dominate American society - because they were part of a goddamn society, which met their needs .
And of course, the TED folks don't really understand human society. If the TED talk is ever to mean anything, it will start out with something like this: "There's no way I'm ever going to explain this fully, but I can tell you, when I was an twelve year old boy, my Aunt Valeria gave me an old Zeiss microscope from the lab where she worked..."
The way of science is the way of truth. It starts with children. You don't give ten minute talks to adults. But you do give them to children.