On TED

I really don't like TED and am deeply conflicted about it. I love the premise: really smart people (the best in their respective fields) giving short lectures that can be distributed electronically and introduce literally millions of people to people and topics they had no idea were so interesting.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out precisely what it is about this that bugs me. At first I thought it was the duration of the talks. If you look for Noam Chomsky on Youtube you'll see posts featuring him are rarely shorter than an hour. He will sometimes make television appearances where he has about half an hour but less time than that is insufficient for him to do anything more than spout aphorisms and build his personality cult.

Chomsky is a wonderful and rare figure who has built a personality cult by doing all the things you are not supposed to do and none of the things you are. I love that grumpy old man. Anyway...

I am currently reading Jaron Lanier's books and one thing he makes abundantly clear - and would be in a position to know - is the internet tends inexorably towards monopolies. This makes intuitive sense. Most of the internet is massively complex and this complexity is daunting. For people like me (and I think that is a large demographic) both time and a fundamental inability to evaluate for myself are factors. When I want an app that does a particular task I don't set about evaluating them for myself, I ask people which is the best (or the simplest). And the most popular answer is the one I go with. This is especially relevant in those apps that involve sharing (as most do). If my app can't communicate with yours it isn't much good to me. Even in apps and sites that don't involve two way (or many way) sharing, once a site establishes a slight dominance it will generally progress into a massively dominant position. I think TED is at this threshold right now. I used to have several outlets that served a similar function - NPR, the Canadian equivalent of NPR, Big Ideas (a provincial TV program that broadcast on in internet), and others - but they have all either disappeared or radically changed their formats.

Most forms of academic expression have a system of peer review that has been carefully considered to maximize the quality of the expression. In the case of journals (the most popular form of expression) this is done through peer review. A potential article is submitted for review to a group of the author's peers. This is one case where anonymity is beneficial and typically preserved - the author does not know who the reviewers are. So politics, friendship, social pressures have no impact on the outcome. The work either meets the criteria for publication or it doesn't. The system was constructed to prevent natural, human flaws from colouring the outcomes. Now, because the reach of TED is orders of magnitude greater than the reach of peer-reviewed academic journals our intellectuals are being selected (curated might be a better word) based on a system that is opaque but depends, with something approaching certainty, on things like popularity, the ability to act like you aren't on camera, and the limitation of being able to reduce your work to between ten and twenty minutes.

My situation also reveals something about the current state of "learning" (and why it earned scare quotes). New ideas should be frightening. The bigger the idea, the more frightening it should be. We each have a constructed world that includes the amount of uncertainty we can handle; part of the reason for Universities and other forums for education is to shake your constructed world apart and force you to create a better one - one that is more faithful to the state of things. I recently wrote a couple posts on NTE (Near Term Extinction) but didn't delve into it because that idea is about as scary as ideas get. I have deliberately ignored the merits of the argument simply because it is too unpleasant to contemplate. This is a luxury education should not give us. The Civil Rights Movement scared the hell out of a whole lot of people because it was such a radical change. So it isn't just theories that scream "You are about to die!" that frighten people - anything sufficiently new and radical will do it. TED will not and cannot present these kinds of ideas. It is ultimately entertainment. And, for that reason, must confine itself to things people already know or want to believe.