So TED talks were hip, then it was hip to hate on TED talks, and now it's hip to hate on TED talk haters?
This is making me dizzy.
It's still OK for me to dislike TED talks despite never having listened to one, right?
To be fair, that essay was originally a TED talk, so what can you expect, really.
(The "entertainment" in TED actually refers to the entertainment industry, I think, as opposed to TED talks being per se an entertainment product. Anyhoo!)
It's ok to hate TED talks! But not disproportionately to what they are, which is pop academics with pretty widespread appeal. It's kind of like hating Oprah's Book Club. She's getting lots of people to read and chat and enjoy themselves! It's okay!
4: that's not what he's saying, though, is it? He's saying that TED talks are pernicious, because they make people (especially people who could potentially fund science) think that all science is (or should be) like TED talks.
Which... I dunno, he kind of has a point. The degree to which funding levels and the ability to give a good, peppy, general-interest talk are correlated seems like it might be pretty high, and that might be bad for getting money to researchers who actually know what they're doing.
I mean speaking personally I feel pretty good about this situation, since I think my ability to give a good, peppy general-interest talk is likely to outstrip my ability to be a single-mindedly obsessed researcher. But societally, you understand.
5: He's saying that TED talks are a recipe for the end of civilization. Because he's trying to be so saucy and contrarian that he can't just say "massive cuts in arts and sciences are responsible for massive cuts in arts and sciences."
I mean yes, TED talks are terrible fundraisers for science...because it's idiotic to have a system that requires shaking down dumb rich people to fund science.
I'm not very sympathetic to the argument that trying to be interesting is an offense against those who can not be interesting. It would require hating on Carl Sagan for interesting books while admiring the script for the unwatchable movie Contact.
7: well, sure. And TED talks are merely a symptom of that. But... that's still kind of terrible! And it would be good if the kind of people who liked TED talks knew that it was terrible! I do think there's something to the idea that the sort of panglossian optimism of the TED house style can blind people to the fact that doing actual research in this country is hard and has recently gotten a lot harder.
TED has the exact same implicit ideology as National Geographic. It's a combination of pop science and feel-good imperialism.
Like any middle-brow enterprise, it is easy to hate on. But you have to remember, pop science and feel good imperialism is a big step up for a lot of people, who live in a world of religious superstition and imperialism that doesn't even try to treat colonized people with any humanity.
I show TED talks to my students all the time. If I can get them to accept some cartoon version of evolution and practice moderate, self-congratulating altruism, I have actually done some educating.
8: the whole Babylonian Sex Tourist Theme Park subplot in the book was pretty damn strange, though. I don't blame them for excising it.
Yeah, I've seen this linked by all sorts of people who typically criticize techno-futurists and pie-in-the-sky TED dreamers. But, um, the criticism here is that TED is not futurist and dreamy enough.
11: I was thinking of his nonfiction books when I was talking of the good stuff. But really, what was his TV show but a proto-TED.
I admit, reading that entire essay, the dude's actual ideas per se sound pretty stupid ("We need a deeper conversation about the difference between digital cosmopolitanism and cloud feudalism (and toward that, a queer history of computer science and Alan Turing's birthday as holiday!" what). But the criticism of TED in the first few paragraphs doesn't bug me.
13: I dunno, one thing about his TV show is that it was thirteen hours, as opposed to five minutes, long.
Actually, I quite like speakers who convey science to a popular audience. Or did when I was younger. I've not seen an actual TED talk except the one on tying shoe laces.
Every fun, innocuous thing is secretly pernicious. Everybody knows that.
15: Back then, I had more free time and far fewer other choices for viewing.
If anybody wants to give me a TED talk to show me up for being a hypocrite I'm down.
I've watched two TED talks, but they were both just guys beatboxing so I don't have anything informative to say about the medium.
TED talks range from the completely shitty to the moderately great. There's nothing wrong with middlebrow media. If anything it's the highbrow stuff that's a steaming pile of dingo shit. Deliberately obscure, pretentious, self-absorbed, arrogant crap. Give me a good dose of plain old Carl Sagan over Some "challenging" highbrow POS any day.
A few years ago people started organizing "science cafe" events where someone would give a popular talk about his or her research at a local coffee shop or pub.
I think those worked out pretty well (I'm not sure if they still go on).
The TED phenomenon has an odor of glib techno-libertarianism about it that the science cafes didn't (at least for me). I tend to think of TED enthusiasts as the sort of people who would have enthusiasts for Wired magazine in the late 90s.
22: would have = would have been
I'm not sure how "____ is entertainment" provides the absolution that we poor sinners are seeking, but it's nice that something does.
22.1: this (now national, I think?) event fits that sort of description. I might sign up for one because I think they pay you in beer.
Everything sucks and humanity is deservedly doomed. There's no compelling reason to differentiate between TED, literature, situation comedies and Japanese movies. They are all just ways of marking time until the inevitable apocalypse.
There is now a TED hour on NPR, which combines the glib optimism of the talks with the gimmickry of Radiolab and throws in an announcer who makes his voice all squeaky whenever he asks a rhetorical question, which is quite often. It's the worst thing ever.
I will totally go to the mat to defend Wired in the '90s because they were clever enough to publish stories about/pictures of lots of my friends.
5.2: I think I'm not bad at giving a pretty good peppy, general-interest talk, and yet I can't get funding. Hmm.
it's idiotic to have a system that requires shaking down dumb rich people to fund science.
True, but funding science by dumb rich people is both traditional (e.g. "MOST SERENE PRINCE, I consider it my greatest good fortune that You allow me to adorn this work of mine with YOUR most honourable name.") and the fall-back plan for rampant libertarianism. It's good to keep the begging skills fresh.
30: Sure, but it still doesn't make sense to blame TED talks for any of that.
It's off-topic, but I'm annoyed by the NSF's totally internally inconsistent funding decisions. My program director actually called me and apologized for not funding my proposal, saying it would easily have been funded if my outreach proposal (participating in a well-established Boston-area outreach thing in high schools) was more "creative" and "original". Then I found out the guy down the hall from me was just awarded a grant, and he used exactly the same outreach component I applied with.
Do you have any theorems you can name after billionaires?
Sure. TED Talks can be annoying but surely aren't All That Is Wrong With Science.
The Slim/Gates/Abramovich Twin Prime Theorem?
I will totally go to the mat to defend Wired in the '90s because they were clever enough to publish stories about/pictures of lots of my friends.
I did specify the late 90s, if that helps.
I can't pin down the exact moment at which Wired went from "sort of fun" to "sort of annoying", but I think it was somewhere during that period.
32: they liked it because it was tried and true and a guaranteed winner.
I remember earnest discussions on the occasion of Wired's first issue about how they were kind of painfully corporate in a lot of ways but on the other hand Mondo 2000's strategy of not paying their authors was not going to work out long term.
Defend Wired all you like, I suppose, but let Mondo 2000 sink into history's dustbin as it deserves.
but let Mondo 2000 sink into history's dustbin as it deserves.
Along with those hilarious "virtual reality" tour buses that were visiting college campuses around that time...
I fucking loved that one Virtuality game (googling) "Dactyl Nightmare"! Not, as you might expect, about poetic meter.
Mondo 2000 was awesome. So was Omni. You people just weren't doing the right drugs.
27: The TED Radio Hour came on after another program on my local NPR's stream, and I did entertain staying tuned in ... for about 30 seconds of the Hour. I couldn't even make it past the theme music.
I will grant that the sound designer wins points for relevance; the grating music was at least as peppy and technophile as the TED house style.
As for:
I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.
Are there any actual examples of TED talks somehow leading to research being funded? It's not as if TED is paying postdoc salaries or anything.
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Ttam's reservations about solo jazz guitar will surely not apply to this "Summertime" or this "When Your Lover Has Gone".
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44: That got me thinking, so I checked Kickstarter -- they don't even have a category for physics. What's wrong with you scientists? It's good enough for Spike Lee and Zach Braff, but it's not good enough for you?
46: One of the stretch goals could be "get an equation named after you."
46: this what you're looking for?
48: It is! And that even has a physics category!
Doesn't everybody work on projects funded by multi-year government grants?
The Slim/Gates/Abramovich Twin Prime Theorem?
The Winklevoss Twin Prime Theorem, surely?
That got me thinking, so I checked Kickstarter -- they don't even have a category for physics. What's wrong with you scientists?
Kickstarter is at least supposed to be about creative projects, even if a lot of it is pretty damn commercial. I think explicitly scientific research oriented projects wouldn't be eligible. They don't overtly ban it, but they say something must be produced at the end of the project (I guess a paper counts?) and everything must fit into one of their categories, of which only technology comes close.
I suppose you could classify some astronomical research as photography.
because it's idiotic to have a system that requires shaking down dumb rich people to fund science.
I was going to gesture to essear and the question of what to wear as a proof, but after reading about his NSF experience it doesn't feel as light. Sorry to hear that the inconsistent rules, & the people who create them, screwed you on your proposal.
I agree that science funding is a problem as it stands, but even in a theoretical government funded science utopia, people still have to sell their project, either to higher-ups or to reviewers. I think (like rob says in 10) that pretty much anything that sells science to the public is a good thing - they should feel like it's a worthwhile expenditure. The thing that drives me totally nuts is how oversold a lot of stuff is (Personalized medicine! Nanotechnology! Translational research!) and how the caveats or difficulties get elided in order to better sell the project or idea to nonspecialists.
56.last: I agree entirely, especially with TED's reliance on narrative that encourages its speakers to sand away the inconsistencies and problems that year-to-year scientific progress is about.
48: Huh. I would have thought it would be hard to get universities to go along with that, given their "no overhead" rule.
58: I have no idea how well (or if) it actually works.
56.last and 57 remind me that I should ask a question of those of you who have actually seen TED talks. I haven't watched any; I've let nearly all viral videos pass me by - even types I would probably find unobjectionable if I weren't being a curmudgeon about the medium.
One of the things I've grumped about, in my ignorance, is that TED talkers seem too credulous about their theses or evidence. It makes seeming sense to blame this impression I have on the self-promoting elements in 56.last, the pre-production incentives in 57, and post-production marketing,* but does the content of TED talks (or a prominent subset of them) also reflect an over-credulous attitude?
*And on my general inclination to judge certain people in my life for being over-credulous.
I've only seen a few TED talks -- a couple by artists (fine) and a couple by people whose research I'm actually assigning to my students to read; that's nice because they get the details in the reading, the researcher is usually someone I respect, and the students can get a better sense of what the stimuli and participant responses actually look/sound like.
60.2: it depends on the talk.
The biggest problem with TED talks (now that I am not taking the side of the dude in the OP) is lack of quality control.
We had the students in our class this semester watch (part of) a TEDx talk. It was a quite good five minute overview of fairly complicated research that can't really quite be done justice in five minutes. But it was pretty good.
On the other hand there's this.
62.1 is presumably the only practical answer to what wasn't necessarily a well-framed question on my part, and from listening to more grounded complaints than mine I believe 62.2.
I do still wonder if there's a pattern - if, say, the set of more-problematic talks includes more over-credulous presenters than over-skeptical ones - but really I'm not in any position to find it.
The one non-negotiable requirement of a TED talk is to make the audience feel good about themselves by the end of the talk. I don't mind that when it's a science talk, because the presenter is sharing more science information than I'm likely to get without the talk and so I might as well get flattered into self congratulation -- "Wow, this result is neat and I understand it a little." It's worse when the talk is about some political or social issue and the solution proposed (TED talks always propose solutions when there's a problem) is inadequate or unrealistic. It's not bad in small doses, where there's a genuinely inspiring narrative of either personal or social progress.
57. As we all know, scientific progress goes "boink!"
I prefer this piece of TED-bashing, just for the viciousness.
66: A shame that it doesn't go "BAM!" or some other such nonsense.
The one non-negotiable requirement of a TED talk is to make the audience feel good about themselves by the end of the talk.
Hmmm, that makes me think that I've seen more TEDx talks than TED talks (and haven't watched that many of either) because that definitely isn't true all the time.
69: I think you need to read through the complete Calvin and Hobbes.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html
I dunno I kind of agree with the OP.
The distinction the Morazov attack in 68 makes is kind of useful - what the heck is going on in the room? Of course because it is Morazov he can't help then descending into a frenzy of rhetorical bloodlust.
I mean the talks themselves can be fine, I've quite liked some if them, they appeal to my inner middlebrow techno positivist I guess. And that's pretty innocuous or nice for the mass audience on YouTube. But what the heck is the audience thinking? Are they sort of half tuned in like listening to BBC4 while driving? - or do they think they are changing the world with this very expensive ticket? - or?
Because if it's the latter I thought it wasn't such a bad reset of the TED agenda. Which, sure, is the wired agenda plus 20 years .. I suspect there a lot of people around TED who think it is more than a glorified discovery channel even if that's what it is. Where else would you try to get the interest of that audience?
I haven't watched any [TED talks]...
One of the things I've grumped about, in my ignorance, is that TED talkers seem too credulous about their theses or evidence.
Try not to trip on your predispositions. Of course you wouldn't, because savvy.
68: gosh, Morozov really isn't very bright, is he.
77: Eh. I know the contradiction is there. I wasn't defensive enough about it, I guess, but I was aware that my breezy "hypothesis" came only from such scattered and vague impressions as I could get while shrugging off the whole phenomenon for other reasons entirely.
(Notably, those reasons include my belief that I would not be very savvy about catching substantive errors embedded in a popularizing video made by accomplished performers and editors.)