Liminal Worlds

When I first discovered the TED talks, I thought I’d found a great source of cutting edge, innovative intellectual stimulation. But the more of them I watch, the more I’m starting to think that it tends to represent a rather narrow and conventional view. I really started to wonder where they are coming from when they showed a rather trivial presentation by professional debunker Amazing Randi.

This video shows what happened when TED invited controversial comic Sarah Silverman to speak. Predictably enough, she offended many people, including the organizer of the conference. How smart can these people really be if they were surprised when Sarah Silverman said something politically incorrect?

What’s especially annoying is that I could not even find the original talk given by Sarah, while TED routinely posts all of their talks on their website. The video below is an interview by Bill Maher about the TED incident.

While I’m sure there are still some positive things about TED –with all of the hundreds of talks they organize every year some of it has to be good!– my overall estimation of them is steadily declining.

belief systems sarah silverman, TED

I found the following video at the Ted.com site. TED is an annual conference in California (where else?) that highlights innovative thinking in many fields. Each talk is relatively short, which makes it possible to fit in many speakers. It also forces each speaker to be concise.

This talk is by James Surowwiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) and talks about how the tsunami of 2005 was a turning point in the way social media, blogs in particular, became a crucial way to spread information. He discusses how the blogosphere is a way for decentralized “bottom up” kind of information to reach many people. He sees this as a form of collective intelligence. As his book (which I haven’t read, but which he refers to in the talk) goes into, a group or crowd often mysteriously has better knowledge than the individuals that it is composed of.

He also talks about the possible danger of people being hooked into networks and losing the power to think independently.

Media blogosphere, TED