When you look at TED in context it's a lot harder to poke fun at it. It's a vast improvement on most pop infotainment out there, if only because you usually get

When you look at TED in context it's a lot harder to poke fun at it. It's a vast improvement on most pop infotainment out there, if only because you usually get to hear a brief survey of a subject right from the source. Most TED talks amount to hearing somebody knowledgeable in a subject articulate what makes them excited about their field. For the average person, there's a lot of value in that. On the spectrum of visual media with reality television at one end, and Online MIT lectures at the other, TED provides something great: it's entertaining, engaging, and more often then not you do learn one or two things that you want to look into at a deeper level. Nobody is pretending TED is a replacement for a true college level lecture on a subject, are we really so cynical that we think it's somehow wrong to want to get excited about some random corner of the sciences once in a while?