7 ms·

TED talks are lying

148 points by Libertatea 13y ago

raverbashing 13y ago
And the phrase that sums it all: "Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. " The problem is not being more creative, the problem is having the space to use it. Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century.
- girvo 13y ago
  > Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century. Quite true, but then, the most successful ones I've come across are those who embrace actual "creativity" and risk-taking (which are somewhat intertwined in the space we are discussing here). I don't know whether it's something that can be distilled down into a 10-minute TED talk or a pop-psychology novel, though; it seems to often be a personality trait that some have, and some don't (not quite as binary, of course, more a range). Kind of like creativity itself.
chatman 13y ago
Sensational title, lesser in substance.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
Am I the only one wondering where the meat of the argument went? There seemed to be some vague resentment at the pop-business-marketing-solution-in-a-book industry and some desire to link it back to the professional middle class To me the argument should run differently: - technical innovation has never been higher, both in absolute terms and in the products being brought to market. - yes many innovations are tiny evolutions on existing products, but blame consumer surplus capture rather than a conspiracy. - If we want more forward leaps in science and technology we should lobby our governments to double the STEM spending at least. It's hard to bring a product to market if it's core has not been invented. - And really, TED talks, and all the other pop-insight industry, is not lying - they may be repeating some basic ideas (learn how to solve a problem, use that method in a new area, monitor the results) and we should not get upset if people try to hype up their life's work. No just accept that there are 7 billion people, and we need that many to see the next ground shaking concept invented in time. One other point - I suspect the reason the author is hearing the same points raised time and again is a sign of an a creation of agreement over the accepted new paradigm for society to use. once upon a time slavery was an acceptable paradigm, so was anti-gay prejudice and so was religion and superstition. What we see is the new modes of thought getting tried out like clothes in a shop. One day we will all quote Maslow.
- brownbat 13y ago
  > Am I the only one wondering where the meat of the argument went? I didn't read an argument so much as just a sneer against professionals who admire scientists and inventors. But hey, sneering for sneering's sake is sometimes fun. The last paragraph has a little more structure than the essay as a whole, and is mercifully much shorter. Maybe the best revision wouldn't be repairing the argument so much as reducing the whole thing to a tweet. > the professional-managerial audience['s] members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    sneer smeared smoothly - have a point
- AJ007 13y ago
  How do you measure innovation? Stating that the rate of innovation is dropping seems about as ambiguous as saying that morality is decaying. What the hell does it mean? The cost to performance ratio of computing is increasing at an exponential rate, e.g. the human genome project. We have DNA printing that likely is going the same way too. There is software for compiling DNA (Genome Compiler.) I find this both extraordinarily innovative as well as increasing in at an exponential rate. Humans like to copy each other. So, rock and roll in 1965 may have seemed wonderfully innovative. If you had listened to it from 1965 until 2013, it may not seem as much anymore. You've "heard it all." Perhaps the same could be said of network TV dramas. Some things appear to innovate in spurts. Take for example the Oculus Rift. Virtual reality headsets, for consumers, were stagnant since the mid 1990s. If you bought one in 2011 it would have been more or less the same as one you bought in 1996. Seems like a huge lack of innovation! Well, now we have the Oculus Rift. It turns out all of this development with mobile phones is directly useful for making virtual reality headsets fast, light, and high resolution. Who would have thought Angry Birds contributed to progress in virtual reality? I think we will see the same thing happen with other industries and products, where for 2 decades nothing interesting happened and then in a matter of months a company produces a game changer using advances in mobile technology, genetics, databases, etc. Now, perhaps someone who looks at the Oculus Rift says, that's not innovative, the concept existed 25 years ago. If that is how we are measuring innovation, it seems both shallow and dismissive of the incredible amounts of labor and creative genius involved. In 1953 Tintin went to the moon in a vertically landing rocket. I would be extremely embarrassed to call Elon Musk not innovative for having a working version of this rocket today. We measure things in such short time spans. Many of the things done have yet to manifest themselves as recognizable solutions for humans. If we look at human history in periods of hundreds of years or thousands of years, the amount of innovation we have seen over the past decade is phenomenal. Should the government be helping? Perhaps. Our larger concern should be innovation that doesn't do irreversible damage to the environment and consequently humans. Often government backed innovation is really about building very destructive weapons, which there is no private market for. If innovation is a little slower in exchange for not ending up with the next nuclear bomb, I won't be complaining.
Swizec 13y ago
> the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl And yet I keep a really really advanced slab of glass in my pocket at all times on which I can talk instantly to anyone in the world, check stats about myself and my environment, and can access the whole of human knowledge since recorded history. I can use an inexpensive device that not only protects me from unwanted pregnancy, but solves most other sexual hazards. I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out. I have algorithms at my disposal (for free) that often know what I'm looking for better than I do myself. People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease. If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version. Many can be replaced with artificial versions, sometimes printed to my exact specifications. Humans without legs can compete at the Olympic level against humans with healthy legs. Quadriplegics not only survive, but can have a surprising level of autonomy. We have a veritable space race among private companies. A feat so far reserved only for the wealthiest of nation states. I don't know about you, but progress is right here. Happening right fucking now. And it is amazing! When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years" Stop lamenting the lack of progress and look around. The world is completely different than it was even five years ago. PS: I almost forgot -> humans have had a constant presence in space since 1998, and before that from 1986 to 1996. That's pretty awesome too.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  Your points, all of them, are valid. I suspect however, given the tone of that article, that it's more of a statement of cynicism and disillusionment than one of irrefutable fact. In that context I found it amusing, if a little wordy.
  - Swizec 13y ago
    I know it's a statement of cynicism and disillusionment. I'm saying there's no need for cynicism. It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it. There was a good essay about this phenomenon on HN a few years ago but I can't find it anymore. Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that.
hawkharris 13y ago
TED Talks say very little, very eloquently.
- VLM 13y ago
  Nothing wrong with that, in theory. In practice they're the "demo tape" concept from performing arts but lacking the follow thru that comes with performing arts demo tapes. If you watch a voiceover announcer or actor's demo tape and want more, there is a whole infrastructure revolving around hiring them and contracts and paying scale or whatever. With a TED talk if you hear an interesting talk, you might get, at most, some self promotion or promote an org's website? "If you'd like to hear more, follow me on twitter" isn't worth including. The other problem varies extremely widely from presenter to presenter, but an example is "here's three graphs, now listen to me spend 18 minutes making the obvious analysis you just did in 15 or so seconds each, as I steal 17:15 of your lifespan". Its the old documentary regret disease; would I have been better served, quicker, by replacing the video monologue (or documentary) with a simple wikipedia URL or a quarter page abstract of a paper? I still watch them anyway. If 90% of most "stuff" is junk, maybe TED is excellent because its only 80% junk and the good stuff is really good. Best thing out there, can still be mostly junk.
wyclif 13y ago
"What inspires me is teaching African refugees how to program Javascript." http://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0 http://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0
weddpros 13y ago
Not TED's fault if people must hear things 1000 times before taking action...
ehmuidifici 13y ago
This title resembles me in a TED talk in which Eduardo Paes explains more about a mobility project that will be made in Rio for Fifa World Cup and Olympic Games. That project is a very big lie. It will never happen. In a best case scenario, Rio's inhabitants - and tourists - will have 1/3 of that with a huge overbilling. So, if you are intending to come to Rio to see WC and Olympics, expect heavy traffic jams and a lot of headache.
ott2 13y ago
TL;DR: the "creativity" label has been grabbed by the ruling classes to justify their own social position, and has little to do with what used to be called creativity. (This may be an interesting insight, but I'm not sure this argument is well supported by the article.)
- VLM 13y ago
  There's at least three poles pulling against each other WRT stealing the creativity label, you've got one, two other poles are masquerading technical incompetence as creativity, and the other (related?) is masquerading a fundamental lack of good style taste as creativity. There probably are people/situations trying to do more than one at the same time.
- mratzloff 13y ago
  There are a number of points in the article. Another is that books about creativity are simply another kind of management self-help "power of positive thinking" tripe.
noir_lord 13y ago
"People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds." - Lord Vetinari. You get a similar thing in many fields, people don't want to hear the reality they want the myth to be "be a creative thinker, solve the problem make millions" when the reality was (for the post it here), a scientist who'd spent years in his field learning the state of the art in adhesives accidentally invented the glue used on post-it's which then languished for 5 years before someone else used it to stick a bookmark.
snorkel 13y ago
Creativity coaching is every bit a huckster cottage industry as insight porn, and TED is their promotional stage. Honest creativity books would focus on failures more than hits. Before famous musicians made their big hit they made a lot of songs that sucked, and Apple also made Newton.
charlieflowers 13y ago
TL,DR -- TED talks are just one part of a wider field called "creativity literature", and creativity literature is not really about teaching you to be creative. It is about blowing smoke up your ass about people who lived happily ever after, and thus triggering the same kind of response in you that insight porn does.
- pelario 13y ago
  What really bother me is that is only a subset of TED talks. What about science and art divulgation? At least two great talks come inmediately to my mind: Those by Benjamin Zander and by Richard Dawkins
libovness 13y ago
Am I reading a different article than everyone else? This article isn't about the pace of innovation or what truly defines creativity, but rather that a dubiously "enlightened" creative class likes to consume books and videos that endorse their way of life. (Which is not different from any other class of people.)
- BrooklynHipster 13y ago
  This is exactly what i took away from it. The rest is a bit of hyperbole to help drive the point home.
  - libovness 13y ago
    That's remarkably clear thinking on your part...for a "Brooklyn Hipster"
bhaumik 13y ago
Big fan of TED Talks but Reggie Watts (vocalist, comedian, beatboxer) does a phenomenal parody of one: http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way.html http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...
dboyd 13y ago
That article would make a great TED talk. Has pretty much the exact right levels of focus, clarity and eloquence.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Pop creativity is midlife crisis creativity of established people. It requires no sacrifice, no travel into uncomfortable places. Instead, it's rooted in the worldview that an upper-middle-class "BoBo" can achieve true creativity just by being more of what he or she is. Just be the same thing, with more energy, more self-esteem, and that creativity you had in college and lost (a little each day) paying dues and climbing the corporate ladder can come back-- and, what's more, without any concessions on income, social status, or the ability to get ones' children into elite schools. That never happens. Use it or lose it. If you keep growing that creativity, day by day, you'll be at your peak in your 40s and 50s. (You might be obscure and poor, but you'll be creative.) If you let it go in early adulthood, though, you never get it back. That's just how it works. The dark side of pop creativity is that it allows these deflated, managerial sorts to believe otherwise-- that creativity can come without sacrifice and opposition, that they can "have it all". It allows them to ignore the truth of their lives, which is that they made a trade they can't reverse. If you want to accomplish anything creatively, you have to have an extreme tolerance of social disapproval that less than 1% of people have, and you have that when you're young and before you're established. For people to continue to grow creatively, their 40s to 60s are their prime; but for the ones who lose that spark, 45+ (after two decades of long work hours and social climbing) is too late to get it back.
- ZenoArrow 13y ago
  You make some good points, but I'd disagree that it's too late when you're 45+ to regain your creative spark. Regaining your creative spark requires being honest with yourself, tolerating the frustration that comes from your output not living up to your vision, and being willing to try new things to see what sticks. The social disapproval aspect you pick up on is secondary, creativity doesn't have to be shared and even if it does it's unnecessary for your audience to know who you are, if you choose to release your output without disclosing your identity. It really annoys me when I see people trying to limit what others can do based on the number of times someone has been around the sun. If you are physically and mentally able, then it's all just time and effort.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
luikore 13y ago
Usually I don't care about the content of TED talks. I watch the series only to learn presentation skills...
ryandrake 13y ago
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I've watched several TED videos and always found them to be full of platitudes and truisms, and the speakers banal and unoriginal. Everything--from the sophisticated-looking audiences to the eclectic-yet-still-appetizing-to-the-masses speaker list chosen by some (no-doubt) "elite" committee--reeks of style over substance. Put another way, TED is: people who think they're smart, watching people who think they're interesting, chosen to speak by people who think they're important.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  I've started to watch couple of TED talks and felt similarly. Overrated and boring. Also, some TED talks have a weird and creepy cult-ish vibe. I love learning but I think text is a much better medium than video.
  - nnq 13y ago
    When you communicate in text you can just sell the idea you're talking about. When you do public speaking you have to sell yourself AND the idea (in this order, because nobody will pay attention to the idea if they are not alresdy paying attention to you). So good public speaking will always have a "cult-ish vibe". And unfortunately, with current declining attention spans and younger generations preference for video over text we'll have to get used to this annoying media and its side effects. Even people learning programming want "video tutorials" and "code-casts" nowadays...
riffraff 13y ago
I haven't even read the article, I just want to say that two days ago my wife had me watch a TED talk on creativity that had at least 3 very large errors (false etymology for spanish "olé", and what "daemon" in greek and "genius" in latin mean). Really, it bothered me too much, I had to share this. (The talk was still enjoyable, and probably "insightful" at some level)
spinlock 13y ago
<off topic> That is the worst web site I've ever tried to read on my phone. It took forever to render and then would only show in minuscule or huge fonts. I couldn't just pinch it to the size I wanted. </off topic>
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  It's even worse on a tablet ... It apparently treats tablets as phones, with the same number of words per line, so the fonts end up being gigantic, with no apparent adjustability. Horrible and barely readable. It's like a mockery of responsive design...
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clarebear 13y ago
What is the most glamourous aspect of being "poor"? Well, by necessity, they (we) are creative. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s now appear anomalous in their move toward a more equitable distribution of wealth; such that people in the top, say, 10%, might have had a chance at a share in meaningful power and wealth. The creativity and happiness books, TED talks, and their ilk are trying to make the (middle-)managerial class not notice this for a while longer, or feel better about their place in the distribution that is shifting away from them. The professional middle class spends a lot of time right now differentiating themselves from the lower classes, when in fact if your non-home wealth is less than some number (apparently about $400k in 2004[1]), you have a lot more in common financially with them than with the billionaire giving the TED talk. This is what the Ocuppy movement was trying to tell people. [1]http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_502.pdf http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_502.pdf
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nnq 13y ago
We all seem to deliberately ignore an obvious part of all this creativity "science": Creativity is the product of *well rested* minds! We all know this, but we do our best over-work ourselves and other, over-train/educate ourselves and others and "fill up" any free time we have in the sake of "efficiency" and "not falling behind". And I don't even agree with the OP's assumptions that innovation is "slowed to a crawl", it's probably faster than ever before, but nothing nears as fast as it should be with all the new communication and connectivity enhancements (imho they act like a wonder-drug that is so good it unfortunately masks the symptoms of a serious illness - like a really good antiinflammatory + painkiller that can mask the symptoms of one's cancer until it's too late). As a few examples: - in medical research we've built complicated regulations, approval and funding processes and uber-complicated career paths that basically suck away 90% of the time and energy of medical-researchers and doctors, and we wonder why progress is so slow and so many grave errors committed - in software we've gone so deep down the "worse is better" hole that we have all sorts of tools and programming languages that create more problems than they solve, and whole industries dedicated to solving tooling problems that should be trivial if OSs and languages were design with just a bit more hindsight (that we know is possible: take ta re-re-...-re-invention of Lisp and Smalltalk features), and have more time and energy for building cool software that actually does interesting things - in hardware we have over-engineered designs and tools and concepts that are only understandable by a few very smart, well trained, but over worked professionals - when it comes to our children we are so afraid that they will not be "good enough" or that they will be left behind that we try to fill all their time with "useful" activities, as schools fill it with homework ...we basically generate so much needless complexity in everything that we do that most of can never have "well rested minds". And this complexity grows like a freakin cancer and it will also be inherited by our children and their children and will keep their minds busy and tired for all their lives too.
- krmboya 13y ago
  Very insightful comment, thank you. An uncluttered mind is, I guess, necessary for creativity.
raintrees 13y ago
> Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” So how does da Vinci fit in? Maybe genius, rather than creative? He seemed to be churning out ideas long before a consensus was taken about his merits of creativity... Or is this just again future bias?
pelario 13y ago
Am I the only one pissed off by disqualifying TED only because of a subset of it? Yes, there is a lot of trash in TED (as well as in any place that become popular), we already know about scams, e.g. the dude of the vortex mathematics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRnhrOf0r0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRnhrOf0r0 Without thinking that much, two talks that had nothing to do with this "pop insight porn" come to my mind: Richard Dawkins on "Militant atheism" http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism... and Benjamin Zander on "The transformative power of classical music". http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...
moron4hire 13y ago
I think humans judge time based on passages of emotional state. There are cycles that are linked to the rising and setting of the sun and that gives us the sense of days. There are passages that are linked to the waxing and waning of the moon and that gives us the sense of the months. There are similarly seasons that suggest years. But we have gotten very good at media and riling people into heightened emotional states, to attempt political change. And that ability to tap into emotion short-circuits our understanding of time. So where we would usually go through--to throw out a number--5 emotional upheavals very closely linked to time between each technological innovation, now there are several artificially induced emotional responses that are completely unlinked from time, and we have no true sense of the amount of time that technological upheaval now takes. It is not possible that technology is progressing slower now than before. The more we innovate, the more innovation becomes possible. What can only be true is the changing in our perception of the amount of time between innovations.

148 points by Libertatea 13y ago

And the phrase that sums it all: "Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. " The problem is not being more creative, the problem is having the space to use it. Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century.

girvo 13y ago
> Bosses will hear the latest fads but when it's time to "put the money where your mouth is", it's back to the 19th century. Quite true, but then, the most successful ones I've come across are those who embrace actual "creativity" and risk-taking (which are somewhat intertwined in the space we are discussing here). I don't know whether it's something that can be distilled down into a 10-minute TED talk or a pop-psychology novel, though; it seems to often be a personality trait that some have, and some don't (not quite as binary, of course, more a range). Kind of like creativity itself.

chatman 13y ago

Sensational title, lesser in substance.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

Am I the only one wondering where the meat of the argument went? There seemed to be some vague resentment at the pop-business-marketing-solution-in-a-book industry and some desire to link it back to the professional middle class To me the argument should run differently: - technical innovation has never been higher, both in absolute terms and in the products being brought to market. - yes many innovations are tiny evolutions on existing products, but blame consumer surplus capture rather than a conspiracy. - If we want more forward leaps in science and technology we should lobby our governments to double the STEM spending at least. It's hard to bring a product to market if it's core has not been invented. - And really, TED talks, and all the other pop-insight industry, is not lying - they may be repeating some basic ideas (learn how to solve a problem, use that method in a new area, monitor the results) and we should not get upset if people try to hype up their life's work. No just accept that there are 7 billion people, and we need that many to see the next ground shaking concept invented in time. One other point - I suspect the reason the author is hearing the same points raised time and again is a sign of an a creation of agreement over the accepted new paradigm for society to use. once upon a time slavery was an acceptable paradigm, so was anti-gay prejudice and so was religion and superstition. What we see is the new modes of thought getting tried out like clothes in a shop. One day we will all quote Maslow.

brownbat 13y ago
> Am I the only one wondering where the meat of the argument went? I didn't read an argument so much as just a sneer against professionals who admire scientists and inventors. But hey, sneering for sneering's sake is sometimes fun. The last paragraph has a little more structure than the essay as a whole, and is mercifully much shorter. Maybe the best revision wouldn't be repairing the argument so much as reducing the whole thing to a tweet. > the professional-managerial audience['s] members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  sneer smeared smoothly - have a point
AJ007 13y ago
How do you measure innovation? Stating that the rate of innovation is dropping seems about as ambiguous as saying that morality is decaying. What the hell does it mean? The cost to performance ratio of computing is increasing at an exponential rate, e.g. the human genome project. We have DNA printing that likely is going the same way too. There is software for compiling DNA (Genome Compiler.) I find this both extraordinarily innovative as well as increasing in at an exponential rate. Humans like to copy each other. So, rock and roll in 1965 may have seemed wonderfully innovative. If you had listened to it from 1965 until 2013, it may not seem as much anymore. You've "heard it all." Perhaps the same could be said of network TV dramas. Some things appear to innovate in spurts. Take for example the Oculus Rift. Virtual reality headsets, for consumers, were stagnant since the mid 1990s. If you bought one in 2011 it would have been more or less the same as one you bought in 1996. Seems like a huge lack of innovation! Well, now we have the Oculus Rift. It turns out all of this development with mobile phones is directly useful for making virtual reality headsets fast, light, and high resolution. Who would have thought Angry Birds contributed to progress in virtual reality? I think we will see the same thing happen with other industries and products, where for 2 decades nothing interesting happened and then in a matter of months a company produces a game changer using advances in mobile technology, genetics, databases, etc. Now, perhaps someone who looks at the Oculus Rift says, that's not innovative, the concept existed 25 years ago. If that is how we are measuring innovation, it seems both shallow and dismissive of the incredible amounts of labor and creative genius involved. In 1953 Tintin went to the moon in a vertically landing rocket. I would be extremely embarrassed to call Elon Musk not innovative for having a working version of this rocket today. We measure things in such short time spans. Many of the things done have yet to manifest themselves as recognizable solutions for humans. If we look at human history in periods of hundreds of years or thousands of years, the amount of innovation we have seen over the past decade is phenomenal. Should the government be helping? Perhaps. Our larger concern should be innovation that doesn't do irreversible damage to the environment and consequently humans. Often government backed innovation is really about building very destructive weapons, which there is no private market for. If innovation is a little slower in exchange for not ending up with the next nuclear bomb, I won't be complaining.

Swizec 13y ago

> the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl And yet I keep a really really advanced slab of glass in my pocket at all times on which I can talk instantly to anyone in the world, check stats about myself and my environment, and can access the whole of human knowledge since recorded history. I can use an inexpensive device that not only protects me from unwanted pregnancy, but solves most other sexual hazards. I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out. I have algorithms at my disposal (for free) that often know what I'm looking for better than I do myself. People are using binary logic to program bacteria to kill disease. If any organ in my body has a problem it can be replaced with a donor version. Many can be replaced with artificial versions, sometimes printed to my exact specifications. Humans without legs can compete at the Olympic level against humans with healthy legs. Quadriplegics not only survive, but can have a surprising level of autonomy. We have a veritable space race among private companies. A feat so far reserved only for the wealthiest of nation states. I don't know about you, but progress is right here. Happening right fucking now. And it is amazing! When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years" Stop lamenting the lack of progress and look around. The world is completely different than it was even five years ago. PS: I almost forgot -> humans have had a constant presence in space since 1998, and before that from 1986 to 1996. That's pretty awesome too.

Spearchucker 13y ago
Your points, all of them, are valid. I suspect however, given the tone of that article, that it's more of a statement of cynicism and disillusionment than one of irrefutable fact. In that context I found it amusing, if a little wordy.
- Swizec 13y ago
  I know it's a statement of cynicism and disillusionment. I'm saying there's no need for cynicism. It's also important to note that you can only really appreciate the pace of progress in retrospect. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate how quickly things are developing when you are in the thick of it. There was a good essay about this phenomenon on HN a few years ago but I can't find it anymore. Something about experiencing time in the rear view mirror or something like that.

hawkharris 13y ago

TED Talks say very little, very eloquently.

VLM 13y ago
Nothing wrong with that, in theory. In practice they're the "demo tape" concept from performing arts but lacking the follow thru that comes with performing arts demo tapes. If you watch a voiceover announcer or actor's demo tape and want more, there is a whole infrastructure revolving around hiring them and contracts and paying scale or whatever. With a TED talk if you hear an interesting talk, you might get, at most, some self promotion or promote an org's website? "If you'd like to hear more, follow me on twitter" isn't worth including. The other problem varies extremely widely from presenter to presenter, but an example is "here's three graphs, now listen to me spend 18 minutes making the obvious analysis you just did in 15 or so seconds each, as I steal 17:15 of your lifespan". Its the old documentary regret disease; would I have been better served, quicker, by replacing the video monologue (or documentary) with a simple wikipedia URL or a quarter page abstract of a paper? I still watch them anyway. If 90% of most "stuff" is junk, maybe TED is excellent because its only 80% junk and the good stuff is really good. Best thing out there, can still be mostly junk.

wyclif 13y ago

"What inspires me is teaching African refugees how to program Javascript." http://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0 http://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0

weddpros 13y ago

Not TED's fault if people must hear things 1000 times before taking action...

ehmuidifici 13y ago

This title resembles me in a TED talk in which Eduardo Paes explains more about a mobility project that will be made in Rio for Fifa World Cup and Olympic Games. That project is a very big lie. It will never happen. In a best case scenario, Rio's inhabitants - and tourists - will have 1/3 of that with a huge overbilling. So, if you are intending to come to Rio to see WC and Olympics, expect heavy traffic jams and a lot of headache.

ott2 13y ago

TL;DR: the "creativity" label has been grabbed by the ruling classes to justify their own social position, and has little to do with what used to be called creativity. (This may be an interesting insight, but I'm not sure this argument is well supported by the article.)

VLM 13y ago
There's at least three poles pulling against each other WRT stealing the creativity label, you've got one, two other poles are masquerading technical incompetence as creativity, and the other (related?) is masquerading a fundamental lack of good style taste as creativity. There probably are people/situations trying to do more than one at the same time.
mratzloff 13y ago
There are a number of points in the article. Another is that books about creativity are simply another kind of management self-help "power of positive thinking" tripe.

noir_lord 13y ago

"People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds." - Lord Vetinari. You get a similar thing in many fields, people don't want to hear the reality they want the myth to be "be a creative thinker, solve the problem make millions" when the reality was (for the post it here), a scientist who'd spent years in his field learning the state of the art in adhesives accidentally invented the glue used on post-it's which then languished for 5 years before someone else used it to stick a bookmark.

snorkel 13y ago

Creativity coaching is every bit a huckster cottage industry as insight porn, and TED is their promotional stage. Honest creativity books would focus on failures more than hits. Before famous musicians made their big hit they made a lot of songs that sucked, and Apple also made Newton.

charlieflowers 13y ago

TL,DR -- TED talks are just one part of a wider field called "creativity literature", and creativity literature is not really about teaching you to be creative. It is about blowing smoke up your ass about people who lived happily ever after, and thus triggering the same kind of response in you that insight porn does.

pelario 13y ago
What really bother me is that is only a subset of TED talks. What about science and art divulgation? At least two great talks come inmediately to my mind: Those by Benjamin Zander and by Richard Dawkins

libovness 13y ago

Am I reading a different article than everyone else? This article isn't about the pace of innovation or what truly defines creativity, but rather that a dubiously "enlightened" creative class likes to consume books and videos that endorse their way of life. (Which is not different from any other class of people.)

BrooklynHipster 13y ago
This is exactly what i took away from it. The rest is a bit of hyperbole to help drive the point home.
- libovness 13y ago
  That's remarkably clear thinking on your part...for a "Brooklyn Hipster"

bhaumik 13y ago

Big fan of TED Talks but Reggie Watts (vocalist, comedian, beatboxer) does a phenomenal parody of one: http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way.html http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...

dboyd 13y ago

That article would make a great TED talk. Has pretty much the exact right levels of focus, clarity and eloquence.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Pop creativity is midlife crisis creativity of established people. It requires no sacrifice, no travel into uncomfortable places. Instead, it's rooted in the worldview that an upper-middle-class "BoBo" can achieve true creativity just by being more of what he or she is. Just be the same thing, with more energy, more self-esteem, and that creativity you had in college and lost (a little each day) paying dues and climbing the corporate ladder can come back-- and, what's more, without any concessions on income, social status, or the ability to get ones' children into elite schools. That never happens. Use it or lose it. If you keep growing that creativity, day by day, you'll be at your peak in your 40s and 50s. (You might be obscure and poor, but you'll be creative.) If you let it go in early adulthood, though, you never get it back. That's just how it works. The dark side of pop creativity is that it allows these deflated, managerial sorts to believe otherwise-- that creativity can come without sacrifice and opposition, that they can "have it all". It allows them to ignore the truth of their lives, which is that they made a trade they can't reverse. If you want to accomplish anything creatively, you have to have an extreme tolerance of social disapproval that less than 1% of people have, and you have that when you're young and before you're established. For people to continue to grow creatively, their 40s to 60s are their prime; but for the ones who lose that spark, 45+ (after two decades of long work hours and social climbing) is too late to get it back.

ZenoArrow 13y ago
You make some good points, but I'd disagree that it's too late when you're 45+ to regain your creative spark. Regaining your creative spark requires being honest with yourself, tolerating the frustration that comes from your output not living up to your vision, and being willing to try new things to see what sticks. The social disapproval aspect you pick up on is secondary, creativity doesn't have to be shared and even if it does it's unnecessary for your audience to know who you are, if you choose to release your output without disclosing your identity. It really annoys me when I see people trying to limit what others can do based on the number of times someone has been around the sun. If you are physically and mentally able, then it's all just time and effort.
- michaelochurch 13y ago

luikore 13y ago

Usually I don't care about the content of TED talks. I watch the series only to learn presentation skills...

ryandrake 13y ago

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I've watched several TED videos and always found them to be full of platitudes and truisms, and the speakers banal and unoriginal. Everything--from the sophisticated-looking audiences to the eclectic-yet-still-appetizing-to-the-masses speaker list chosen by some (no-doubt) "elite" committee--reeks of style over substance. Put another way, TED is: people who think they're smart, watching people who think they're interesting, chosen to speak by people who think they're important.

RivieraKid 13y ago
I've started to watch couple of TED talks and felt similarly. Overrated and boring. Also, some TED talks have a weird and creepy cult-ish vibe. I love learning but I think text is a much better medium than video.
- nnq 13y ago
  When you communicate in text you can just sell the idea you're talking about. When you do public speaking you have to sell yourself AND the idea (in this order, because nobody will pay attention to the idea if they are not alresdy paying attention to you). So good public speaking will always have a "cult-ish vibe". And unfortunately, with current declining attention spans and younger generations preference for video over text we'll have to get used to this annoying media and its side effects. Even people learning programming want "video tutorials" and "code-casts" nowadays...

riffraff 13y ago

I haven't even read the article, I just want to say that two days ago my wife had me watch a TED talk on creativity that had at least 3 very large errors (false etymology for spanish "olé", and what "daemon" in greek and "genius" in latin mean). Really, it bothered me too much, I had to share this. (The talk was still enjoyable, and probably "insightful" at some level)

spinlock 13y ago

<off topic> That is the worst web site I've ever tried to read on my phone. It took forever to render and then would only show in minuscule or huge fonts. I couldn't just pinch it to the size I wanted. </off topic>

snogglethorpe 13y ago
It's even worse on a tablet ... It apparently treats tablets as phones, with the same number of words per line, so the fonts end up being gigantic, with no apparent adjustability. Horrible and barely readable. It's like a mockery of responsive design...

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clarebear 13y ago

What is the most glamourous aspect of being "poor"? Well, by necessity, they (we) are creative. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s now appear anomalous in their move toward a more equitable distribution of wealth; such that people in the top, say, 10%, might have had a chance at a share in meaningful power and wealth. The creativity and happiness books, TED talks, and their ilk are trying to make the (middle-)managerial class not notice this for a while longer, or feel better about their place in the distribution that is shifting away from them. The professional middle class spends a lot of time right now differentiating themselves from the lower classes, when in fact if your non-home wealth is less than some number (apparently about $400k in 2004[1]), you have a lot more in common financially with them than with the billionaire giving the TED talk. This is what the Ocuppy movement was trying to tell people. [1]http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_502.pdf http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_502.pdf

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nnq 13y ago

We all seem to deliberately ignore an obvious part of all this creativity "science": Creativity is the product of *well rested* minds! We all know this, but we do our best over-work ourselves and other, over-train/educate ourselves and others and "fill up" any free time we have in the sake of "efficiency" and "not falling behind". And I don't even agree with the OP's assumptions that innovation is "slowed to a crawl", it's probably faster than ever before, but nothing nears as fast as it should be with all the new communication and connectivity enhancements (imho they act like a wonder-drug that is so good it unfortunately masks the symptoms of a serious illness - like a really good antiinflammatory + painkiller that can mask the symptoms of one's cancer until it's too late). As a few examples: - in medical research we've built complicated regulations, approval and funding processes and uber-complicated career paths that basically suck away 90% of the time and energy of medical-researchers and doctors, and we wonder why progress is so slow and so many grave errors committed - in software we've gone so deep down the "worse is better" hole that we have all sorts of tools and programming languages that create more problems than they solve, and whole industries dedicated to solving tooling problems that should be trivial if OSs and languages were design with just a bit more hindsight (that we know is possible: take ta re-re-...-re-invention of Lisp and Smalltalk features), and have more time and energy for building cool software that actually does interesting things - in hardware we have over-engineered designs and tools and concepts that are only understandable by a few very smart, well trained, but over worked professionals - when it comes to our children we are so afraid that they will not be "good enough" or that they will be left behind that we try to fill all their time with "useful" activities, as schools fill it with homework ...we basically generate so much needless complexity in everything that we do that most of can never have "well rested minds". And this complexity grows like a freakin cancer and it will also be inherited by our children and their children and will keep their minds busy and tired for all their lives too.

krmboya 13y ago
Very insightful comment, thank you. An uncluttered mind is, I guess, necessary for creativity.

raintrees 13y ago

> Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” So how does da Vinci fit in? Maybe genius, rather than creative? He seemed to be churning out ideas long before a consensus was taken about his merits of creativity... Or is this just again future bias?

pelario 13y ago

Am I the only one pissed off by disqualifying TED only because of a subset of it? Yes, there is a lot of trash in TED (as well as in any place that become popular), we already know about scams, e.g. the dude of the vortex mathematics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRnhrOf0r0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oRnhrOf0r0 Without thinking that much, two talks that had nothing to do with this "pop insight porn" come to my mind: Richard Dawkins on "Militant atheism" http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism... and Benjamin Zander on "The transformative power of classical music". http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...

moron4hire 13y ago

I think humans judge time based on passages of emotional state. There are cycles that are linked to the rising and setting of the sun and that gives us the sense of days. There are passages that are linked to the waxing and waning of the moon and that gives us the sense of the months. There are similarly seasons that suggest years. But we have gotten very good at media and riling people into heightened emotional states, to attempt political change. And that ability to tap into emotion short-circuits our understanding of time. So where we would usually go through--to throw out a number--5 emotional upheavals very closely linked to time between each technological innovation, now there are several artificially induced emotional responses that are completely unlinked from time, and we have no true sense of the amount of time that technological upheaval now takes. It is not possible that technology is progressing slower now than before. The more we innovate, the more innovation becomes possible. What can only be true is the changing in our perception of the amount of time between innovations.