6 ms·
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 ta
by junon 5y ago
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.
- vaylian 5y agoI understand your frustration. But finding one bad apple does not mean all apples are bad. And this problem is not limited to TED/x.
- junon 5y agoOf 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.
- Doxin 5y ago"One bad apple spoils the bunch"
- pessimizer 5y agoThe most bizarre transformation of a saying in history. "One bad apple" now means the same thing as "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater."
- tdeck 5y agoSure, 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.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoIf 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.
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoI generally pick up a bag of apples without checking if any of them are bad, and then just discard the bad ones as I come across them later.
- mayankkaizen 5y agoI 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.
- andi999 5y agoSo he is more of a 'big picture guy'?
- danrocks 5y agoMore of a C-level executive
- rgoulter 5y agoReminds me of the "company hierarchy" as discussed e.g.: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoPresidential.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- crdrost 5y agoIt's just more touch and go. 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.
- np1810 5y agoI 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... :) [0]: https://youtube.com/c/lexfridman https://youtube.com/c/lexfridman
- bee_rider 5y agoHuh, I wonder if podcasts ate TED and TEDx talks' lunch. They can cover anything TED would, plus you get recurring hosts with fun personalities.
- hocuspocus 5y agoTo 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.
- np1810 5y ago> It's much harder to bullshit your way through a 1-2 hour long podcast conducted by a knowledgeable host. A great take, in one line... ;)
- smnrchrds 5y agoWhile 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.
- junon 5y agoWell 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.
- camillomiller 5y agoI 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.
- smnrchrds 5y agoYou 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.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoWait, is that supposed to be uplifting? The Silicon Valley version of the future has turned out to be a dystopian nightmare.
- 5y ago
- lkrubner 5y agoMy 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg 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: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
- hycaria 5y agoWhat a strange and salty message
- guiriduro 5y agoAnd 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.
- hycaria 5y agoThat is part of the strange
- bobiny 5y agoTed talk was fun though
- dmix 5y agoLooks like they got a book deal out of it and that saltiness is heavily refined and packaged for public consumption.
- agumonkey 5y agoIsn'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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- haasted 5y agoI 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.
- fortran77 5y agoI 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.
- P_I_Staker 5y agoThe 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)