"TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch. It’s a style that comes from corporate conference rooms, where product ideas are pitched to potential investors."
Someone in HN linked this in a previous discussion about TED, but especially with that quote in the piece it's even more a dead-on satire home run from the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s Part of a series though my impression was that it's the same basic joke over and over... still, for at least one iteration, it's dead-on, and this is probably the most pure illustration of just the form in that series, with no content, for the author's point.
I criticized TED years ago on Twitter, and someone responded to me (who had gone) about how life changing it was and how she was motivated and now was going to really make a difference the world. I challenged her on this and said "honestly, what are the odds that you're going to do anything?" She was certain that TED was significant and she was empowered and she was going to make a difference.
Now, I use Twitter so rarely (in part because of that kind of exchange-- I wasn't rude to her at all, I was just trying to make my case) -- that going back it was easy to see years later if she'd actually done anything. I checked, googled her name, nothing.
TED made her feel a certain way. Important for sure. She was very full of herself and she felt that TED was a place of rate "doers" who "will make a dent on the universe" (this was before TEDx, before TED videos when you had to pay boucoup bucks and be part of the special group of invitees in order to go, IIRC)....
She paid 5 figures to TED for a weekend seminar, at the end of which her self esteem was boosted (don't think it needed it) into the range of smugness and she felt it was important.
I disagree. I think it was an ego stroker and she accomplished nothing (and based on what she said I can conclude this from google searches because she didn't do any of the things she said she would do.)
I didn't write back to her to point this out... but this was my little ad hoc experiment.
I remember when I first heard of an acquaintance who got invited to TED and how supremely smug he was when he got back, and how he'd share little stories of rubbing elbows with celebrities and references to events.... I've never been a fan of exclusivity and so that sorta made me jealous and not really like it. But over the years it became more and more irritating.
TED is propaganda. Propaganda of high form.
I think americans are so saturated in propaganda that like a fish who can't recognize water as a thing, Americans don't realize how much of their beliefs and perspectives are shaped by propaganda. When they see propaganda that disagrees with the propaganda they've internalized they react really negatively, and not in a critical thinking here's how it's wrong from a logical basis-- but from a tribal get-rid-of-the-alien perspective.
It's important to stay out of dogma. Something that makes you feel good about yourself and important should be considered critically. IT might be healthy, and it might not be.
I think TED is unhealthy and actually corrosive and anti-intellectual.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It strikes a chord based on my own professional and academic background, in that I've attended conferences. The nature of conferences are to, basically, advance learning and sharing in a collective format. TED is about consuming something being pitched. Very different. In a way, TED is like watching television, and actual intellectualism is like visiting the library for a couple hours and browsing and reading. Or, as a famous movie character once said..."See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"
The one thing I find more distasteful than TED is are smug commentaries writing about how distasteful TED is. It reminds me of of jazz musicians criticizing "watered down jazz-pop".
> "What I ask myself when confronted with any TED talk is this: why do they all sound the same?"
Well, why do criticisms of "mainstream, middlebrow" works all sound the same?
I personally have found TED talks to be useful introductions and primers to all sorts of subject matter that I might not have otherwise engaged with. That's something I can appreciate. I've learned things and had my interest piqued in many others, which is more than I can say from reading the original post.
The idea that TED should be ignored to death, and that only the unwashed masses watch it– it's cringe-inducingly elitist and holier-than-thou. God forbid people make an attempt to learn something, and to share their learnings with others, if they don't do it according to the hallowed principles of the Harvard elite.
Anyway, these rants are not going to have much of an effect. People are going to continue consuming TED, just as people are going to listen to jazz-pop.
And you know, just as some people end up inspired by jazz-pop to pick up an instrument and dive into the deep end, some kid who watches a TED talk is going to go on to have an illustrious career in some field.
Way better than anything you can say for a grumpy old fart who sits around criticizing other people.
>Way better than anything you can say for a grumpy old fart who sits around criticizing other people.
And what you've done here is so much different?
Let's not have a fight between hipsters and anti-intellectuals.
Mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand. That is it's often incredibly difficult to maintain quality in an endeavor which has become wildly popular - or your motivations between creating something great and maintaining popular appeal get muddled together.
Take jazz music -- it takes a lot of listening, knowledge, and understanding to fully appreciate really great jazz. Mass audiences aren't going to have that understanding so there's a strong tendency for the subtlety which makes the genre great to be bred out -- most of the consumers can't tell the difference and simply don't care.
It's not elitism that says jazz-pop is awful, it's simple truth that jazz-pop is a shallow approximation of the real thing.
Maybe it's okay that some things are shallow and simple and fun, there's a place for such things; but let's not elevate them to greatness so we can bash folks who appreciate the real thing.
TED talks are increasingly at risk of being very much more about being engaging than having valuable substance. It turns out most of the real world doesn't have much of the pop, shine, and sparkle TED talks make it seem.
Simply TED is pretentious.
>attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed
Its heart might be in the right place, but its execution can be lacking. There are real problems between the sciences and the mainstream and people are right to criticize things that make this interaction worse by giving wrong impressions.
What do you know about watered down jazz-pop? It's real. It's easy listening. Have you heard the rampant sameness that plagues new jazz? It's like a pastiche that I can hear from a mile away. Norman Brown is an excellent guitar player, but I can't stand to listen to that sugary, over-saturated production garbage that seemingly took over the industry. Real jazz doesn't have a damn wind chime stroke every third song. There's a place for criticism, and you just picked a really bad example for your case. How bad? Try this on for size:
TED talks are to intellectualism what Kenny G is to jazz.
Sure! The point still stands– I could utter loathe Kenny G, but the fact remains that some people pick up the instrument because they enjoyed Kenny G, and some subset of those people go on to develop an interest in "real jazz", sans over-saturated production garbage and windchome strokes. And some of those people might create music that I would really enjoy.
So I'd argue that Kenny G is good for jazz, and TED is good for the sharing of ideas.
TED, I think, serves as a modern version of high-brow oration as the middle letter suggests: Entertainment. It's a double-ended marketplace platform of content providers (speakers) and content consumers (paid attendees and non-paid viewers). Since the cost is high to paid attendees, the content must be as good and fresh as humanly possible. From what I've seen as a non-paid viewer, I think TED accomplishes this reasonably well. It seems hard to have perfect criterion to choose whom to select and whom to not, when there is an abundance of interesting of voices, but unselected folks can always speak and publish on other platforms.
(Forward thinking can be controversial, but in order to not offend audiences and prevent attracting the wrong elements, it seems customary that such topics are passed on because the forum (e.g., intended audience/speaker experience) is inappropriate, although the topic may be vital, insightful and have a legitimate fora elsewhere. (Blasphemy, politics, etc.))
TED talks are predigested intellectual pablum that make the people hearing them feel smart. Seeing one is mildly entertaining. Seeing two is cloying. Seeing three makes you aware of how intolerably formulaic they are. In fairness I've only seen half of a few, because they bored me stupid by the time they were half way through and it had become apparent that the whole schtick was to make the audience feel special and insightful. So I may be missing something wonderful.
TED suffers from the same malaise as all "cutting edge" forums: it has no apparent effect on the world, other than transfering money from attendees to speakers and organizers. Which is great: taking money from willing dupes is as old a humanity, but as the years role by it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that anything more interesting than the release of the latest forumlaic blockbuster is going on.
Refuting this claim is easy: all you have to do is show a dozen or two cases of people who came away from TED changed in a some permenant and actionable way. People who didn't just go back to the same jobs doing the same thing in pretty much the same way. Does anyone have any data rather than anecdotes on this? It would be easy to prove my judgement wrong using it.
Besides deliberate job skill training and radical religious conversion, what educational media satisfy the "obvious change in lifestyle" test? Like any nonfictional media, the value is in perspective. Maybe you criticize newspapers and Scientific American on the same grounds, but otherwise I suspect you're holding TED to an unfair standard.
FWIW, I know my dad has taken useful insights from the occasional TED talk. The one about how the first follower is as important as a leader comes to mind.
> Seeing three makes you aware of how intolerably formulaic they are.
This is certainly true of you and me. However, I believe this is not true of the vast majority of people.
Making people think they are thinking while turning off their critical thinking skills is an accomplishment in propaganda, for sure, but I don't think most people realize it's happening.
Really cutting edge forums or salons do have a measurable impact on the world-- but they are simultaneously more exclusive (because the vast majority are not aware of them) and less exclusive (Because the vast majority are simply not interested, not because they're actually excluded.)
"taking money from willing dupes is as old a humanity"
I love that line. Well put. Reminds me of how Mark Twain actually made far, far more money on the public speaking circuit than as a writer. Granted, the writing is what got his name and celebrity going, but from what I read about him and his thoughts, it kind of surprised him that people would be willing to pay as much as they did just to hear him get up on stage and do his thing. Genius!
I've seen a few TED talks: notably, from those published on Netflix under "Head Games". There are some interesting topics there. Cults, consciousness (always amusing to hear people claim they've cracked this one), self-deception, the optimism bias, and so on.
It's not something you should watch a lot of. I'd consider it mostly "inspiration" and not actually a learning experience, as most of the speakers make grandiose claims (fluent in a language within a month, on the brink of understanding the entire brain, etc.).
TED should be watched and enjoyed if you like that sort of thing, and then heavily supplemented with more trusted academic material.
I don't remember if I saw the TED talk first, and then read that book, or vice-versa...
TED talks make me feel like I'm living in the future. Even if the speakers are overconfident to the point of foolishness, it's enjoyable to watch as long as you remind yourself that it is sometimes only conjecture and science-fiction. I think the author of this article is overreacting.
I think we can add a few more genres to our list...
Popularizations
- The Paradox of Choice
- The Long Tail
- The Shallows
- Freakonomics
- Where Good Ideas Come From
Podcasts
- This American Life
- Freakonomics Radio
- 99 Percent Invisible
- Stuff You Should Know
Aggregators
- Hacker News
I'm being tongue in cheek: I grant you there's excellent content, above, but I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the following: WHO consumes this kind of content, and WHY do we/they/I find it quote-un-quote "interesting"? I distinctly remember a car trip I had recently in which I realized, after about 10 minutes of talking to the passengers, that we were all regurgitating podcasts! It felt genuine, but we weren't adding anything much of our own in the mix. Is it a class thing, a source of social cachet? What are we trying to signal to each other when we share it?
I have a sneaking suspicion that the smarter we get, the more gullible we are. That the world can be "counter intuitive" and that we feel good about ourselves and our intellects when we recognize this superficial fact, seems all very strange. Like a slight of hand. Come to think of it, there's a great TED talk about a pick-pocket...
I've started noticing more and more that a shockingly large amount of conversations are little more than continuous references to things both me and my conversational partner have read, seen or heard. With my brothers it's Reddit. With my fellow coders it's HN. With my college friends it's a grab-bag of New Yorker, NYTimes, Instapaper / Longreads articles, and our national 'top publications'. Whichever one has recently published a particularly thoughtful (or really, viral) article.
Sometimes I find myself in a conversation like this with multiple, and it makes me feel like I'm in a Family Guy episode (even weirder: referring to a family guy joke that is itself only funny because it's a reference).
I've started avoiding these conversations, because it's just too easy to get stuck in a 'small-talk loop' that just goes on and on. I think that says something about the subject matter, because I noticed that when discussing, say, a book we've read or a lengthy documentary, we inevitably end up in a fascinating conversation about the subject matter.
(another solution, I've found, is to pretend that I didn't also read/watch x, and get someone to explain and reason about it.)
I remember the exact moment when I decided to stop listening to Freakonomics Radio. It was when I looked down at my phone and saw the next podcast in my feed was titled "Are Gay Men Really Rich?".
The absurdity of TED is not its content, and I think any critique of its content is wildly misplaced. There's actually some OK stuff there if you ask me. The absurdity of TED is any claim that they're doing anything particularly innovative when it comes to curation. It just feels like your average medium impact journal using a video format and publishing to youtube.
TED is a conference that produces videos as a side-effect. Well really the videos serve to increase the prestige of the conference so they can charge more money for tickets.
I think the point of the article is precisely that it's not (only) about the content. For example, the author speaks about the uniformity of uninteresting pitch-like language in TED talks.
"The inert masses today are defined simply and purely by the energy that they channel into consuming things. The critical TV or internet consumer is an addict like everyone else, but his criticism shields him from accepting that reality. What’s needed instead of the constant study of mass culture is a sort of barbaric asceticism. Distaste must have its day."
I thought this was going to be about this interview posted today. He claims that TED, the organization, has become a Scientology-like cult. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JhwQ17mLjo
Instead the article is just complaining that he doesn't like the speaking style of TED talks. This is extremely subjective of course, but I really don't mind the format. Yes it's a pitch, but I don't feel like its embarrassing or shameful like the author keeps saying.
They mentioned Sarah Silverman's TED talk deflating the pomposity of TED, but it is unbelievable that they didn't mention the TEDx talk "2070 Paradigm Shift". A guy made up a completely false story about himself to get on a TEDx roster, then for 20 minutes made up complete nonsense like going to Rwanda with Elon Musk to give African villages ipads so they could learn javascript.
TEDx conferences are run by people peripherally related to TED, if at all, and they have a long and unfortunate history of giving a platform to frauds, hoaxes, and charlatans. I think it's gotten a bit better after some particularly bad talks came to light in late 2012, but quality control is still frequently lacking.
Strangely, this guy does not even promote his book. His book completely changed my mental approach to language learning. I highly recommend it to anyone who is learning a language.
I somewhat agree on TED, but even more I appreciate the author's "meta" point -- that it is perfectly okay to be annoyed or disgusted at something. One is not required to like everything, nor to pretend to like things in order to be "PC" or something.
When Amanda Palmer delivered a TED talk about the "art of asking", I knew the platform was more interested in money and publicity than any sense of intellectual rigor. Mostly because they allowed a person a platform from which to spew anecdotal garbage, and secondly, because the platform presents itself as immune to criticism. It is, to me, an embodiment of the phony image that Amanda Palmer has based her entire career upon (she's not the only one, simply the most obvious), and it's that selfish faux sincerity that strikes me as f#*king disgusting.
Some might question my basis for this, but I didn't earn my National Forensics League membership easily. TED is essentially feel-good, disposable information. Compared to Nova, or pretty much any issue of National Geographic, it's a pile of profitable hot garbage.
This hits the nail on the head on so many levels. (And maybe that's enough; maybe the college-educated need their megachurches as well).
Like megachurches, TED offers highly-produced "public speaking as entertainment", but the purported content of the talks isn't entertainment, but $SERIOUS_ISSUE being told to you by $PERSON_WHO_KNOWS_BEST.
This grates because TED events are inherently artificial; everyone knows that they're there to be entertained, despite the trappings of importance. Contrast with political speech, which is (usually) ugly, but has the solidity that comes from serving real (if often equally ugly) purposes.
Once might say, hang on -- what's so bad about public speaking at TED and megachurches? What's the difference between TED/megachurches and, say, standup comedy, or storytelling, or politics?
The difference is both 1) honesty, and 2) the role of the audience.
Honesty: Speech at TED or a megachurch comes with almost suffocating trappings of weight and import. In contrast, storytelling and standup and all sorts of ordinary entertainment are much more honest and down-to-earth: they don't claim to present anything more than a good yarn, some ear-tickling.
Audience: In both TED and megachurches, their audience does not expect to think critically, or to in any way hold the speaker to account. They do not expect to ply the speaker with questions later. In contrast, the audience keeps standup comics honest and can turn on them viciously; and politics invites constant comment and criticism from all quarters, of a kind that mostly keeps politicians from indulging in extravagant and exalted speech that could distance them from the everyman.
Could we make it more honest? That's tough without making TED itself have more of a functional purpose than just entertainment. The world does need exploration and discovery and curated content, but TED's format is clearly "preaching as entertainment", not discussion, and not journalism. It's like a Church devoted to episodes of "The Price Is Right".
But apart from TED developing its own 'platform' for change in the world and becoming a more functional organization, to go along with the views it invites ... as a thought experiment, I can imagine for instance having 2 experts on the same subject, each presenting it through their own lens. This would complicate preaching tremendously and keep it much more honest, but it would probably be far more instructive and nourishing to the audience.
TED speakers do take questions from the people in the audience and there is a comments section on the TED website, videos usually get lots of discussion.
Some nice things about TED/TEDx:
* They have made intellectual talks "cool".
* Video equivalent of a Scientific American article.
* Encourages people to give short entertaining talks instead of 40 min powerpoint "presentations".
* With TEDx anyone has the opportunity to get onto the TED website.
People on HN complain about the crazy cost of attending a TED conference, but this is just a networking/conspicuous-consumption event for rich people -- is that any different than $10k charity dinners?
I think, boiled down, that it's purely the exalted tone at TED talks that really grates on me (and it seems a good number of others). Intellectual talks may not have always been cool, but they rarely used to sound like preaching.
I wrote a little something about TEDx [1] a while ago. This format is destructive because it is monopolizing the idea of an "event" and almost no other format is being considered anymore.
This talk is so out of line with the other TED talks that I was a bit disturbed the first time I saw it, but actually this is the one that I still remember the most vividly five years after. Of course, it takes a real genius, and not just a marketing "genius", to deliver such a particular performance, and get away with it.
> I will be crass: the most interesting thing about Bratton’s talk is that in the early minutes of the lecture, just as he has delivered his main thesis, he suddenly forgets what he is supposed to say. There is a pause. It would be perfectly natural in another format to wait and gather one’s thoughts, but the pause is strangely disturbing in this context. He loses his place, then his nerve, and for the rest of the talk he struggles under an invisible weight. He has to heave a breath into each sentence, trying to propel himself into a rhythm that he doesn’t regain until the very end. What he is struggling under is the pressure of the TED style.
TED world is made up of thousands of speakers. Some are completely and sincerely excellent, informative, and inspiring. Some are mediocre or are smart but pretentious and mostly hot air. Some are really lousy.
To judge TED on the basis of a misc. selection of talks isn't all that useful. The difference in quality and value between the best TED talks and the lousiest is HUGE. We should not trash great value just because a bunch of lousy stuff is mixed in.
TED is like www.edge.org combined with the recent trend of presenting ideas only in videoed live "talks" you have to sit and watch and listen to, rather than as textual documents you can peruse silently at your leisure.
It's a perfect forum for R.U. Sirius and Jaron Lanier. Not people who get shit done.
It isn't just "TED". TED is a symptom (and not all of the talks are bad; the format must be shallow because it reflects the short attention span and quick-to-dismiss mentality of the upper class). It's this horseshit faux-liberal self-congratulatory corporate house-slave culture. That's where this speaking tone of "pitching" rather than teaching or exhorting or enlightening (when needed) condemning comes from. I can't fucking stand it. It glorifies saying nothing in a vacuously charismatic and uselessly intelligent, but extremely socially acceptable, way. It legitimizes the existing elite's sense of its own "meritocracy" and encourages the passive-aggressive behavior for which the California business culture is known.
This whole culture (and I can't blame TED for this; it would exist with just as much force regardless of whatever TED did or didn't do, because TED really isn't a big deal in any way) castrates the people who are supposed to be "intellectuals" and it often galvanizes the upper-middle-class against truly creative people, who are almost never socially acceptable because those two objectives are often diametrically opposed.
That said, I've been on the pro-distaste vector for years and look where it has got me such as... well, let's start here, on this TED-Junior forum we call Hacker News. Anything I say, 5 people I've never met who've only read the name and not the content come and downvote it to shit. None of that matters in the least (downvotes don't really mean anything when you get them for nothing) but it's worth pointing out. Yes, the world absolutely needs people to express distaste and disgust. We need to stop accepting the monstrous waste of resources and peoples' finite attention when something like Snapchat gets funded and some Joffrey gets to play boy-king. That said, it often leads to some pain for the courageous individual. You don't always make friends being right.
Or maybe your attitude is clouding any articulate argument that you may be presenting. The reason TED works is because how you present your message is a large part of how successful your message is. If you are receiving that many downvotes, it is probably due to a combination of your self-righteous message and the arrogant way you are presenting it.
I totally agree. Dissenters/malcontents don't have an easy life, and they have to be absolutely freaking amazing (genius, good communication skills) to have any impact at all (or they are just written off as cranky, crackpots, or worse). Much easier to just join the echo chamber and go with the flow.
Fair enough, but the ones that do have the ability to use language well (HL Mencken, David Simon, Carl Sandberg, Martin Luther King, et al) are some of the most valuable members of society, and I am certainly glad that such people exist.
Even that top 1% that manages to break through gets written off as cranks and "crackpots" by most, at least early on. It's the fact that an elite and discerning few, whose opinions are the only ones that matter to us, can recognize our talents that keeps us going.
Eh, to be fair, it is often very difficult to tell who is a crackpot or just being cranky, and who is a legit dissident/free thinker. We (ya, I include myself) can develop behind a wall of understanding and support, but eventually we want to change the world, which means...somehow appealing to the broader community.
There's definitely a "silent majority" (and not always that silent) of good people here. If you stick to the technical posts especially, there's a good crowd.
I got most of my karma before my account was "moderated", which is California Passive Aggressive for having your posts downplaced into obscurity (also called "rankban" by some) and guaranteeing that you never have the top post, no matter how many upvotes you get (and you won't get many, often, given that your posts are insta-buried). I also deal with a slowban (5-second load times when logged in) and will often get 4-5 downvotes within minutes of each other, for which I don't know who to blame, but it's annoying.
I've kept posting out of a sense of resistance more than anything else. I refuse to be run off the board. The passive-aggressive "moderation" to my account actually backfired and kept me on the board, even as my increasingly justified sense of indignation grew.
Great points, and fits my observations of this post-technology culture. Distaste and disgust are systematically being moderated out of this community, along with creativity and risk.
To the Church of YC congregation, Sam Altman worshippers, VC plantation hands, and michaelochurch haters... why didn't you kill yourself already when your parents slammed you for getting your first A-? The majority of you are only here because you want to fit in, so props to michaelochurch for always bringing the realness.
Someone in HN linked this in a previous discussion about TED, but especially with that quote in the piece it's even more a dead-on satire home run from the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s Part of a series though my impression was that it's the same basic joke over and over... still, for at least one iteration, it's dead-on, and this is probably the most pure illustration of just the form in that series, with no content, for the author's point.