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Megan Hustad writes in the NYT that while it’s not exactly fair to say that the TED conference series and web video function like an organized church, understanding the parallel structures is useful for conversations about faith, how susceptible we humans remain to the cadences of missionary zeal, and how the TED style with its promise of progress, is as manipulative as the orthodoxies it is intended to upset. According to Hustad, a great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon, a gathering of the curious and the hungry. "A persistent human problem is introduced, one that, as the speaker gently explains, has deeper roots and wider implications than most listeners are prepared to admit," says Hustad. "Once everyone has been confronted with this evidence of entropy, contemplated life’s fragility and the elusiveness of inner peace, a decision is called for: Will you remain complacent, or change?" TED talks routinely present problems of huge scale and scope — we imprison too many people; the rain forest is dying; look at all this garbage; we’re unhappy; we have Big Data and aren’t sure what to do with it — then wrap up tidily and tinily. Do this. Stop doing that. Buy an app that will help you do this other thing. "I never imagined that the Baptists I knew in my youth would come to seem mellow, almost slackers by comparison," concludes Hustad. "Of course they promoted Jesus as a once-and-done, plug-and-play solver of problems — another questionable approach."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 17 2015, @07:52PM
1. The world is complicated. Too complicated to explain the real solution to any real problem in 20 minutes. So instead of actually solving a problem, the speaker must instead present something that sounds like a solution to the uninformed ears of their audience, ideally in a really inspirational way so that it sounds like it would actually work, but must completely oversimplify it or ignore any problems that might be implied by their proposed solutions.
2. The audience for TED are people with a lot of spare time and money, and that means that they have certain values and believe they are some of the smartest people in existence. That means that speakers must tailor their presentation to match those values and beliefs. Specific ideas that must not be challenged include: (a) Human potential is maximized through technological progress and business. (b) Richer people are smarter than poorer people. (c) There is nothing wasteful about traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to hear a speech. (d) Everyone has a smartphone.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2015, @07:58PM
> (b) Richer people are smarter than poorer people
Puhleaze. It took me 10 seconds with google to come up with one counter-example:
microfinance [ted.com] - the idea of making tiny loans to poor people because they are best able to determine how to spend it for maximum improvement in quality of life
I am pretty confident that if I actually tried, I'd find a ton more examples of TED topics that advocate for letting the non-rich make important decisions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Tuesday March 17 2015, @10:01PM
Puhleaze. It took me 10 seconds with google to come up with one counter-example:
A counter-example doesn't refute a generalization.
microfinance - the idea of making tiny loans to poor people because they are best able to determine how to spend it for maximum improvement in quality of life
The microfinance movement is simply the process of making tiny loans period. Loans so small the usual administrative overhead rendered them non-viable. It doesn't service as evidence of intelligence either way; except perhaps to highlight that people are only best able to manage loans proportionate to their income / net worth; but that's hardly new or insightful.
That said, the argument that the rich are smarter than the poor doesn't hold a lot of water. However there is some validity to the observation that stupid people who manage their own money will generally end up poor. And that smart people who manage their own money will end up wealthier. The disconnect between that and reality though is that lots of rich people don't manage their own money (perhaps their smartest move); and that lots of intelligent poor people don't have sufficient money to get ahead in the first place. So you can have plenty of dumb rich people and smart poor people despite the previous observation.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2015, @10:14PM
To be entirely accurate there is evidence that poor people really are less intelligent than rich people, for a very specific measure of intelligence. Poor people have more stress, less options, worse food, and an overall lower quality of life. This can be reflected in standardized tests as a statistically lower score in the same way that stressed people of similar socioeconomic status would score lower. These findings are of limited meaning as all that has been found is a well-known secondary effect that explains a correlation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @12:24AM
[citation needed]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @12:56AM
Either way, there is a level of intelligence waaaay beyond that where one can't have wealth. To live with wealth you basically have to limit your world to a tiny circle jerk of rich friends. This while empathy and intellect comes from salving hard problems in the face of death. Rich people never leave the comfort zone. If they stick their head outside ever so briefly it makes them scream like little girls. This is why TED talks have to comfort the viewer that the problem is going to be fixed without their involvement.
It is why it is called Entertainment.
They're in the boredom killing business!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmdHIVrDBVQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:45AM
I still feel like there is something missing, like, i dunno...maybe an actual citation? Or, are you just going to make this bald assertion and expect that the rest of us won't notice while you strike a self-confident pose? You could redeem yourself by providing actual evidence for your claim, but I'm guessing you have none. Go ahead, prove me wrong. I dare you!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @04:25AM
I'm a different AC, but there is a TON of literature on the theory. [google.com]
Here's one: The Cognitive Burden of Poverty [thepsychreport.com]
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday March 18 2015, @11:57AM
None of that indicates that poor people are less intelligent — it indicates that humans perform more weakly on standardized tests when they're sick, stressed, or otherwise highly distracted, which is completely different. One is a matter of the actual individual having reduced intellectual capacity, while the other is just a universal side-effect.
That's all assuming that there really is an overarching "intelligence" that can predict performance in endeavors outside the academic/white-collar professional realm it was originally designed to measure, which is questionable at best. (Even within the academic/professional realm, the presence of conditions like dyslexia, dyscalculia, attention-deficit disorder, etc. altering the person's pattern of abilities suggests that "IQ" isn't remotely as useful as was believed in a simpler age.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @06:07AM
A counter-example doesn't refute a generalization.
It does refute a generalization without even a single example to back it up.
1 > 0
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday March 17 2015, @10:13PM
The point of the parent is comment is not invalidated by your example. The target audience of the Microfinance talk is NOT the recipients of microloans. It is the feel-good "this is how finance capitalism really saves the world, and acquires a heart of compassion" BULLSHIT aimed at the intelligent but time-strapped young professional. Those who might actually have ethical qualms about corporate capitalism and how they are living well, at the expense of an invisible swath of humanity.
Fortunately, TED performs its cathartic, mega-church function - reassuring the Betas that microfinance will scale capital finance to the needs of everyone on earth - from Warren Buffet to anonymous South-Asian child-brides.
But? Microfinance has been a complete failure - and grown a protection/extortion racket of exploitation in the rural areas it was purported to benefit.
Shockingly, micro-loans aren't all that they've cracked up to be. After years of observation and multiple studies, it turns out that the people benefiting most from micro-loans are the big global financial players: hedge funds, banks and the usual Wall Street hucksters. Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s micro-debtors are either no better off or have been sucked into a morass of crippling debt and even deeper poverty, which offers no escape but death.
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/ [nsfwcorp.com]
TED - like a mega-church -is just another way to make the sheep docile, as they are led from the pen to the abattoir.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @12:47AM
Have you got another (more reputable) citation than nsfwcorp.com? McAfee's URL filter database is blocking this one.
The question isn't who is benefiting the most from the micro-loan programs but whether micro-debtors are benefiting substantially (or, at all) from these micro-loan programs. You obviously think they are not. Which leads me to ask, what would you suggest instead? I am genuinely curious to know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @04:22AM
He's right in that there are plenty of examples of indiscriminately managed microfinance programs that have caused great harm - one of the more common problems happens when people "borrow from peter to pay paul" going from one lender to pay off the previous lender. The basic lesson is that while good management doesn't guarantee success, bad management guarantees failure. The big finance corps essentially guarantee bad management because their goal is self-enrichment, not community enrichment. Operating under the "greed is good" premise they maximize the greed part, not the good part.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 18 2015, @02:38AM
The world is complicated. Too complicated to explain the real solution to any real problem in 20 minutes.
TED provides counterexamples [ted.com]. TL;DR version is that the world is collectively moving to greater wealth per capita (along with many features associated with greater wealth), better education, more democracy, fewer population problems, etc contrary to popular belief. What is traditionally perceived as problems, aren't in the long run. End result is a variety of perceived unsolvable global problems get moved by the lecturer, Hans Rosling to the already solved pile in about 19 minutes.
This also reminds me of relationship advice. A lot of times, the "relationship experts" can find out quickly what's wrong with a relationship, sometimes within a minute or two and give good advice. The problem is that generally this advice is not what the asker wants to hear and thus, that makes it likely that the advice will get ignored. And that's really what's wrong with the twenty minute solution to the complex problem. Sure, you can come up with a solution that readily fixes the issues involved and present them in twenty minutes, but that's not going to result in people embracing the solution, especially if they really don't want to solve the problem.