14 ms·
We Are Now at Peak TED
- partisan 11y ago> We have reached Peak TED. > That’s TED. But we may not have hit the peak yet. We can have it both ways, it seems. Peak means there is a decline coming. The article closes on a note that suggests otherwise.
- tim333 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- minikites 11y agoThis banned TED talk is all you need to know about TED and where their motivations are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g Peak TED is actually this video on how to use one paper towel when washing your hands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc. You mean if you shake your hands and fling water all over the bathroom then you don't need as much paper to absorb the remaining water? How revolutionary.
- thomasahle 11y agoWhy was that talk banned? Doesn't seem very controversial?
- tdeck 11y agoScoff all you want, but in the years since I watched that I have dried my hands with one paper towel every time. One anecdote, sure, and I don't watch TED anymore. But this is hardly the worst TED talk. At least it provided some practical advice rather than vaguely asserting some breakthrough.
- myNXTact 11y agoIt is hands down the most influential Ted talk I've ever watched. It is very trivial, but I think it about it several times a day wherever I wash my hands in a public bathroom.
- brohee 11y agoI hope you saw the shoelace tying one. Maybe you're doing it wrong like I used to before seeing it.
- lucd 11y agoThe video on how to use one paper towel is not from TED conference. It's TEDx
- wrs 11y agoHowever, there was an audience member talk at TED itself on how to tie your shoes that I believe was very influential. :) Not sure if there's an online video of it.
- bobbygoodlatte 11y agoThe talk wasn't 'banned'. Many of the talks from TED never make it online. They only post one a day, and have a huge back-log of great talks to post. Nick's original talk just didn't make the cut. I genuinely believe that was an editorial decision, not a political one. To that point, he gave an improved version of the talk a few years later which TED gladly posted online here: http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocra...
- alexashka 11y agoIs there any actual content in this article? Other than how awesome TED is? Did they address a single concern or critique of TED in this article? No... Just that it's 'awesome'. Well ok then TED organizers... Thanks for reminding us that you think you're so great, you feel no need to listen to anyone.
- Others 11y agoI'm not sure it really is as pandering as you make it out to be. In some places I wasn't sure what the author thought of TED at all. For example, this sentence is particularly pointed: "Where an audience that gave a standing ovation to Ed Snowden a couple of years ago happily wears tracking devices on their badges that allows fellow attendees to know where in the facility they are within a few meters."
- wrs 11y agoAmusing on the surface, but of course that feature is for the benefit of the audience (and quite useful--the breaks are a bit of a zoo with 1000 people milling about), and they explained from the stage how to turn it off when desired, so he is reaching a little bit with that one.
- fabulist 11y agoThe implication wasn't meant to be that the organizers nefariously distributed these badges insisting that if participants had nothing to hide they had nothing to fear. It was that the participants will clap for whoever is onstage without thinking deeply about what they are saying or believing in what they are advocating. They'll cheer on Edward Snowden but they won't consider the implications of the technology they're using.
- nailer 11y agoIt also omits and response to the most obvious thing about TED: thanks to TEDx, it's brand has become associated with fake science, wishful thinking advocates, and other fraudsters.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoTED trivia: Chris Anderson, the founder, got his break in business by starting an 8-bit computer magazine called Amstrad Action. The magazine grew to become a computer publishing empire, Future plc, giving Anderson the funds and freedom to try TED. (Amstrad Action was a great magazine. I was its freelance tech ed in its last years - gave me my start in journalism.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_Action
- wpietri 11y agoChris Anderson was not TED's founder. That was Richard Saul Wurman. He sold it to Anderson in 2002: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/history-of-ted https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/history-of-ted
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ktRolster 11y agoA ticket to TED costs $8500. I didn't realize that.....I look at the audience at TED talks a whole different way now.
- malsun 11y agoThere's two things non-technology people don't seem to know about TED when they mention it to me. First that TEDx events have little to do with TED. Second the prices for proper events are in the elitist levels of society. It's no surprise when you start to notice the audience members are more famous than the speakers.
- alexashka 11y agoThere's a whole caste of people you will never interact with, they're the TED attendees. I'd venture a guess that as soon as TED became a little popular, it's value actually went down because a bunch of blow-hards would spend the 8500$ to try and give a sales pitch to the elite caste. When that happens, the elite move on. As an example - in Toronto there's a thing called 'Granite Club', which's just a big gym with tennis courts etc. The initiation fee is 53,000$ per couple. That's just to make sure people who actually work for a living can't afford it.
- vidoc 11y agoTED, or the perfect display of what public speaking is today: that is, getting some kind of Tony Robbins on stage, who wont be shy of using the same tricks they learnt at some toaster club, to inspire and wow a crowd that's actually more here to enjoy their charisma rather than their ideas. TED is the absolute evidence that the powerpointization of ideas is in its terminal stage.
- FlailFast 11y agoTrue that, which is sad, because charisma can legitimately lower the difficulty of understanding complex ideas; think of your best teachers/favorite professors. I wish TED was filled with more Richard Feynman (charisma * ideas) and less Tony Robbins (charisma % ideas).
- gsteinb88 11y agoI'm not sure that Feynman is the best example here. In fact, in my experience, he's actually more of an example of the problem than the solution. While Feynman does a great job of explaining concepts if you never need to use them, I always found his lectures to be of the "captivating until you try to use them" variety. This wasn't just my experience either -- after struggling with this as a physics undergrad for a while (after all, they're supposed to help!) I started asking around. My academic advisor, several other professors, and many students felt the same way. Feynman may get closer -- or may do more to bring common understanding to complex principles -- but his approach broke down for actually learning to /do physics/. But I'll agree that he's a major step in the right direction; I just want to caution against the hero worship. There's no magic formula, no one person, who can make learning complex concepts easier. Some things are hard, and trying to make them seem easier can easily make them more confusing in practice.
- bananaboy 11y agoThere was a post about that exact topic on math-blog recently http://math-blog.com/2016/02/01/was-richard-feynman-a-great-teacher/ http://math-blog.com/2016/02/01/was-richard-feynman-a-great-... Summary: he wasn't a great undergraduate teacher.
- awl130 11y agoTED is now a full-blown lifestyle company like GoPro or Whole Foods, except instead of one or two celebrity endorsements, they gain a new implicit endorsement every time they book a new speaker. franchising TEDx was a brilliant move; first, for the casual consumer, TED content (by people like Bill Gates) is confounded with TEDx content from some local idiot. from a valuation point of view this increases your average ad rates. line/brand extension, this is marketing 101. TED jumped the shark a long time ago when they started having poetry readings and shit.
- c06n 11y ago> TED is now a full-blown lifestyle company Hasn't it always been?
- jmorphy88 11y agoSam Hyde pulled off a brilliant troll of TEDx a few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJn_DBTnrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJn_DBTnrY
- vietnameselady1 11y agoI would like to see TED scale down and return to its simpler roots (pre 2007), possibly even go dark and spend a few years finding itself. The brilliance of the older TED formula was that it was chaotic and amusingly unpolished: The audio was bad. The lighting was crap. The emcee was awkward. But that TED limelight could bring out unexpected genius moments from humble unknowns, and elicit real humility from the odd celebrity who might give a talk. "Put interesting people together," the rule was, "let a few of them talk, and see what happens." Today TED is all polish and perfectionism and production value. The Academy Awards stage design and videography is planned months in advance. Speakers are carefully vetted, recalibrated, tweaked, and tuned among an upper tier committee. Corporate sponsors are courted by a large international sales team, and these accounts pay enormous sums for the chance to create branded "experiences" for the ticket holders. Speakers (those whose egos allow it) are coached relentlessly about storytelling, sincerity, posture... These efforts may have increased the average-overall quality of the talks, and made the talks more palatable to a wide audience. But that came at an expense of a certain kind of magic.
- wrs 11y agoThere has been a great deal of exactly that feedback from attendees (including me) and Chris Anderson is definitely hearing it -- he addressed it at length from the stage twice this year. However, he seems to think that is a necessary side effect of producing talks that will be viewed millions of times (I think he said ted.com has hit a billion views now). I'm not sure I agree, but in any case I enjoyed it more back in the day when you never knew if the next talk would be an epiphany or a train wreck!
- ryanobjc 11y agoTED just seems so neat, thought leaders talking about things no one else did. Except the depth is necessarily shallow. So I listened to a TED talk about how social media needs to change and it exacerbates problems. Except he's light on analysis and ideas. Which is fine I guess, but to me, hearing about how the problem exists without the follow up of ideas on how to fix, just seems incomplete. And yes, I know, I'm giving him a hard time, etc. But the problem is very real, and needs a very real fix. More videos about how the problem came about just isnt gonna fix it.
- Beltiras 11y agoSome problems need to be acknowledged long before you close in on a solution. Sometimes stating a problem in clearer terms will bring new thoughts on a solution. That can have value in and of itself.
- melted 11y agoSome of their speakers are just talking out of their ass. There was a woman on TED Radio Hour a few weeks back who was going on and on about how it's so bad that we bury the bodies when people die, and we should instead dress our dead in some mushroom spore infused garbs she's trying to sell. Having a brain of my own, I was like "Lady, do you realize that each of these bodies has produced an enormous mountain of waste in their lifetime? Several tons of shit alone, not to mention garbage, CO2, etc etc". Add to that the fact that those "pollution eating mushrooms" can't really do anything ordinary soil can't do. They can't convert heavy metals to unicorn tears, sorry folks. The stuff dead bodies will release when they decompose matters not one iota. And yet someone in TED approved her participation, and people paid $8K to see this inane drivel. WTF? Update: here's the talk https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee?language=en
- wpietri 11y agoWhat's your evidence that a person's decomposing body is particularly more toxic to the environment than, say, their bodily effluents? Going for natural decomposition doesn't seem much worse to me than cremation and ash-scattering, and it seems way better than pickling them and burying them in a coffin.
- patcon 11y agoI was going to respectfully disagree, assuming this speaker was instead referring to larger things about changing the culture of death. But then I actually skimmed the video, and she really is just saying that we shouldn't bury because our bodies house natural toxins. It's pretty silly. I would say that the organizers recognize her getting the stage was a mistake... :)
- mcphilip 11y agoThe Onion Talks series parodying TED talks has some real gems. My favorite: What is the Biggest Rock? http://youtu.be/aO0TUI9r-So http://youtu.be/aO0TUI9r-So
- jerf 11y agoMy favorite has to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOGJQD0WXkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOGJQD0WXkk , "Your Brain-Gun: Turn Off the Safety". Much darker.
- SpanishArch1 11y agoQuit Whining And Put On A Goddamn Coat is great too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeqwDLsZJn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeqwDLsZJn8
- shoo 11y agohttp://theamericanreader.com/the-sound-of-ted-a-case-for-distaste/ http://theamericanreader.com/the-sound-of-ted-a-case-for-dis... > What I ask myself when confronted with any TED talk is this: why do they all sound the same? ... > 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. It’s the fundraiser’s speech. You cannot sound needy—you should sound like there is a world out there waiting to buy your work, that you are here only out of a belief in the importance of spreading your idea. ... > For various reasons, I find myself forced to sit through a TED-talk now and then. I squirm in my seat—feeling humiliated for myself and the speaker. This is a distinctly un-adult feeling.
- mikesickler 11y agoAs a victim of its own success, the quality of presentations has to go down. TED reminds me of Inside the Actors Studio. Stick around long enough and eventually you're talking to Tim Allen about his "process."
- l33tbro 11y agoWas thinking only yesterday we must be at peak "peak". Has become a pretty commonplace descriptor these days for anything experiencing maximum popularity in its life cycle, which I think applies to its current status as a buzz-term.
- horsecaptin 11y agoOk, whats with all the hate? I like TED - the talks are awesome. I don't care if I never get invited. Some of the talks opened my mind to some of the coolest things that people are working on.
- smegel 11y agoWe were at peak TED before TED even came into existence, with the amount of "progressive" blabber in the world.
- Nickste 11y agoAdam Savage (of Mythbusters) did a hilarious fake TED Talk at the Amanda Palmer ninjaTED show the other day: https://huzza.io/amandapalmer/live-stream/amanda-palmer-ninjated/live/replay?seek=172:40 https://huzza.io/amandapalmer/live-stream/amanda-palmer-ninj... "What if we could use data, to build the perfect snowboard?" "In the average Silicon Valley tech company, 95% of time is wasted building tech products"
- noonespecial 11y agoI was watching TED talks about two years ago. My (then) 7 year-old paused in the midst of wandering by and watched for about 30 seconds then asked, "Is that like cartoons for big people?". Yes. Yes it is.
- perseusprime11 11y agoTo me, TED always felt like a stage for egomaniacs to talk about how great they are and how they are changing the world.
- dredmorbius 11y agoI took the opportunity to visit a local group simulcast of Thursday's TED presentations -- apparently much the same program Steven Levy viewed -- and took from it many of the same impressions. The "Inside TED" segment was actually fairly revealing and I thought useful. Chris Anderson gave some inside baseball insights, and voiced TED's goals of spreading knowledge (something I've written and mused on at length). The "chopped liver" comment, by the way, came from Stewart Brand. But the presentations -- the ones I managed to catch -- dragged. Boston prosecutor Adam Foss had a compelling story. Lidia Yuknavitch's talk wandered ... a lot ... though perhaps that was part of its point. Cerfs was ... interesting. And then because I live in the future, I left to video-chat for an hour and a half with someone an ocean away. That done, I decided it was more worth my time to tap into another set of experts -- curated books, at the library, where I could tap into 4 million years of collected wisdom (though granted, only about 8,000 of that is preserved in literary tradition). One of the most obvious characteristics of the TED livestream was an inability to bump up playback speed through slow bits, or to skip to a more interesting talk. TED also has a relevance problem -- really hitting on challenging problems. Part of which is an inherent conflict with exposure: some ideas really need to be developed and discussed within a safe space. The livestream/remote program was an interesting experiment, but I'd rather have had the option to catch several days at one location, and perhaps _somebody_ in a role as a moderator / facilitator. There was at least one local TEDster, but no clear organisation on top of physical support (video, seating). That, though, was good.