Ian Bogost is fed up with TED talks—the techno-utopian Chautauqua retread—and spent fifteen minutes writing a strangely convincing parody:
I’m here to talk to you about the biggest challenge facing upper-class Western society: ideas, and how to understand them. What is an idea? What do ideas do? Scientists have shown that hearing words makes you hear ideas. And ideas are what make us human—we’ve learned so much from neuroscience, and we’re learning more all the time. That’s why I’ve devoted the last twenty years to paid ideation, and why I couldn’t go any longer without sharing these important ideas with all of you.
Imagine an idea. Where does it live? Not in your head, but in my pocket. In my bank account. My bank account likes ideas. It’s a sponge for ideas, much like the human brain. A bank account is really just a human brain. In other words, banks are a kind of cognition, and banking is a kind of neuroscience.
When we begin to see the world like this, thought as a kind of banking, so much makes sense. Ideas can “have currency.” Ideas can “circulate.” See what I mean? Thought is just nature’s way of banking. It just took us humans to come along and establish the formal structures we call “banks” to help increase the flow of ideas, to help them circulate. What is money, after all, but latent ideas?
Conference attendees pay thousands ($7500 is the base) to hear these speeches. This constitutes a sort of luxury market for ideas, in which participants pay for status-conferring “insights.” One doesn’t pray or study to gain wisdom and find truth, one simply buys the most up-to-date insight. As though it were a Rolex or Rolls.
The fruits of technology and science will shows us the way forward, these folks believe, and so the imperative is to be as tuned-in as possible rather than to reflect on first things. TED, then, is a kind of tax on the particular stupidity of scientistic progressivism. In which I take some perhaps less than Christian pleasure.
August 22nd, 2012 | 5:14 pm
With all its flaws TED does manage to host some remarkable talks, like this one by Elyn Saks. Nothing I have ever read about schizophrenia was as enlightening or as harrowing as Dr. Saks’s description of her own experiences. I think there are rules against notes and podiums, but they obviously relaxed them in this case.
August 22nd, 2012 | 7:01 pm
i’ve heard one TED talk and that was one too many. maybe there are some gems out there but no thanks for now…. in the meantime, TED devotees can go ahead and wait for technology to solve violent crime, end poverty, and make us live for 500 years. i’m not holding my breath.
August 23rd, 2012 | 12:16 am
So, what does TED stand for and how can I get in on this gig? I have several ideas I could offer up for sale and I’m constantly coming up with new ones.
August 23rd, 2012 | 12:20 am
@ David Nickol
Thanks for the tip on Elyn Saks’ talk – that was remarkable.
August 23rd, 2012 | 7:43 am
I also thank David Nickol for the tip on Elyn Saks’ talk. Remarkable and chilling. When you think of how many ways she could have wound up talking to herself in the gutter and screaming at passers by or worse …
There’s a book titled “The Perfect Machine” which is about George Ellery Hale, who crowned his career and his life by building the 200 inch telescope at Palomar.
Hale was born to wealth, educated at MIT and Harvard, invented the spectroheliograph and was an accomplished pioneer solar astronomer. He founded the Yerkes observatory, the Mount Wilson observatory and the Palomar observatory. He helped the careers of Harlow Shapley and Edwin Hubble. He was also schizophrenic.
When he was exhausted, which was most of his life as he worked desperately to raise the enormous amounts of money to fund his observatories, a little man would enter his room. The man was utterly clear and looked absolutely as real as could be. He would ceaselessly berate Hale and tell him how utterly worthless he was. Hale knew the man wasn’t real, but he could do absolutely nothing to make him go away.
Dr. Saks’ talk reminds us of what his fate could have been. I wonder how many George Ellery Hales are in the LA jail right now? Or strapped to metal tables in hospitals around the country?
I thank the people behind the TED talks.
August 23rd, 2012 | 7:46 am
@ Andrew
In the meantime, Christians and other believers can go ahead and wait another 2000 years for their religions to solve violent crime, end poverty, and make us live for 500 years. i’m not holding my breath.
August 23rd, 2012 | 8:51 am
There are some very good TED talks, and I enjoy how TED brings good lecturers and ideas to the general public.
They do mean well. Yet, I agree there is a good deal of truth in this parody.
August 23rd, 2012 | 9:12 am
andrew – The trends are looking pretty good, actually. For the crime and poverty bits, anyway..
August 23rd, 2012 | 10:00 am
The tone of many TED talks made them ripe for parody–it was only a matter of time. However, I have seen several that are worth viewing.
August 23rd, 2012 | 11:23 am
The moderator apparently didn’t like my last attempt to make this point – but saying that TED talks are “a tax on the particular stupidity of scientistic progressivism” is just as invalid as saying the ‘prosperity gospel’ is ‘a tax on the particular stupidity of Christianity’.
August 23rd, 2012 | 12:25 pm
I have found some TED talks to be quite good and those that weren’t cost me nothing but a few lost minutes and the energy to click out of the program with which I was watching. There is nothing wrong with being a collateral beneficiary of these talks via the miracle of the internet.
But I wouldn’t pay $7,500. (But maybe I’m just bitter, since I haven’t given a TED talk – then people would be getting there money’s worth. Or they can talk to me for free: 1.555.867.5309; $7.50 per minute – local rates may apply)
August 23rd, 2012 | 1:54 pm
ray ingles,
pinker wants to believe that despite all the genocides, the 20th century wasn’t all that violent considering the number of crimes (numerator) in relation to the total world population (denominator).
but surely that’s because the total world population (denominator) has increased dramatically thanks to better medicine, inter alia? this is “fuzzy math” the last time i checked.
dave mullenix,
which has a better chance at combating crime and injustice: self-sacrificial love or gene therapy? virtue or the khan academy? wisdom or “abundance?” as if the billions of dollars floating on wall street were not “abundance” enough….
August 23rd, 2012 | 3:33 pm
Andrew – Goalpost shifting. “Violent crime” and “genocide” denote different things.
And, additionally – why is it the only options are “self-sacrificial love or gene therapy”? (Heck, even just considering those two, are they mutually exclusive?)
August 23rd, 2012 | 6:40 pm
ray,
i’m confused. you’re the one who brought up pinker, who discusses genocide. why am i to blame? and please address his fuzzy math.
as for “two options,” i guess you can ask dave mullenix. that was his point, to which i replied.
August 24th, 2012 | 3:58 am
Andrew, unless some messages are missing, you’re the one who brought up Pinker – twice.
But since you’re talking about him, I’ve read his book and also his Edge article (which seems to be based on a TED talk) at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html which covered the same topics.
Let me translate his “fuzzy math” for you. No, on second thought, I’ll just quote from the above article: “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”
Here’s another quote: “The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.” In round numbers, we’d have 50 times more murders today than we actually have.
Here’s one last quote: “In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, ‘[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.’ ” Michael Vick would have been lionized back then, today he got a jail term.
Of course, that’s France. Google Elizabethan tortures to see what God’s own Englishmen used to do to humans.
Pinker’s book is “The Better Angels of our Nature”. It would be to your advantage to read the article and the book.
August 24th, 2012 | 4:48 am
Andrew, answering your question to me, we’ve had self-sacrifical love longer than we’ve had humans. And not even limited to humans. Just in the last week or two, there was a story in the news about a dog who entered a burning building to rescue some puppies. I remember a news story a year or two ago about a mother cat who repeatedly entered a burning building, coming out with a kitten in her mouth every time.
That cat did some big-time self sacrificing too. Most of her ears were burned off, along with most of the hair on her face. I think she may have lost an eye too. I couldn’t see the rest of her body in the picture, but I’m betting it was in bad shape too. And that’s just a cat! Imagine what some human mothers went through to save their children!
We’ve also had virtue and wisdom of a sort, but they didn’t seem to stop murder and war to any noticeable degree.
What’s your theory for the steady reduction in crime and war we’re enjoying? Is it just a coincidence that that reduction has paralleled the reduction in religious influence on human society?
Is it just a coincidence that the most horridly violent places on the face of the earth are also the most religious?
Where would you rather live? Mostly atheistic and post-religious Scandinavia or the totally religously dominated states like Iran or Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Afghanistan?
Were the people who hijacked airliners and flew them and their passengers into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon atheists or religious zealots?
Would you care to compare the murder rates between atheist Sweden and heavily Christian America?
Maybe it has nothing to do with religion or the lack of it. Maybe it’s because the average human, at least in the industrialized world, typically travels more than 30 miles from his place of birth during his lifetime, learns about the world and how the people in it live in school and hears about different people and how they live through the news and entertainment.
Maybe it’s because most of us read now and learn from the words written by the brightest and most knowledgeable people throughout the world and recorded history instead of getting most of our knowledge through localized word of mouth.
One thing is beyond doubt: religion in the industrialized world has only a tiny fraction of the power over society it once had and things are a LOT better today. Life and death better.
Got any theories about why?
August 24th, 2012 | 8:43 am
Andrew – Pinker discusses more than genocide. He also discusses ‘violent crime’, as distinct from war.
For example: “It’s best illustrated by looking at homicide statistics, which go back in many parts of Europe to the 13th century. The historical criminologist Manual Eisner has assembled every estimate that he could find of homicide rates from records in England going back to about 1200… So a contemporary Englishman has about a 50-fold less chance of being murdered than his compatriot in the Middle Ages… This is a phenomenon that is not restricted to England. It is true of every European country for which statistics are available.”
(I don’t think many people claim that England, or even Europe, is more religious now than in the 13th Century. Quite the opposite, in fact…)
August 24th, 2012 | 2:37 pm
ray and dave,
i’d live among the amish in a heartbeat if low crime were my only consideration. the last time i checked, they were a relatively peaceful lot, and quite religious.
to be clear once and for all: it was ray who introduced pinker into the discussion with his link to pinker’s talk. i then read pinker’s talk and noted the fuzzy math regarding deaths in the 20th century as a proportion of world population. ray still hasn’t responded to the fuzzy math challenge.
funny thing is even pinker admits “you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on your choice of the denominator.” see this excerpt from RAY’s link to PINKER’s talk:
“The denominator here is the world population, not the population size of countries involved in each war. There are arguments for doing it either way. The problem is that you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on the choice of the denominator, whether you choose the country that initiated the war, the collateral damage in other countries, the neighboring countries, and so on. So in all cases I’ve plotted deaths as a proportion of world population.”
August 24th, 2012 | 6:39 pm
Andrew – And Pinker doesn’t justify that selection?
August 25th, 2012 | 9:16 am
Andrew, sorry, I didn’t realize Ray’s ” The trends are looking pretty good, actually. For the crime and poverty bits, anyway..” was a link until I moved my mouse over it.
I honestly don’t understand the tizzy Pinker has thrown the right-wing religious commentators into. He doesn’t really present anything new, I’d heard of most of his main points long before he’d published. He just brings a rather enormous number of facts to bear in one book and, in my opinion, makes a pretty air-tight case that we’re WAY more moral than we used to be.
After all, when’s the last time you heard of a King or Queen enjoying a good old fashioned cat burning? We don’t let even NFL football heros get away with that any more. Are you all upset that a major reduction in violence has taken place as religious influence has waned?
August 25th, 2012 | 11:48 pm
i’d live among the amish in a heartbeat if low crime were my only consideration. the last time i checked, they were a relatively peaceful lot, and quite religious.
Yes, humanists not only have failed in their grand promises re: “ending” poverty and crime – they also tend to live in places that (coincidentally, no doubt) have the highest crime rates, and you’ll find their residential preferences also coincide with the lowest average life-spans (while the longest-lived people live in remote parts of places like China and India).
Ending poverty is easy, if you simply make all the citizens dependent on a ruler who benevolently taxes the citizenry and then generously redistributes the grain. Obama has rediscovered the secret of the Old Testament monarchs’ leadership model.
But I have seen some TED talks that were worthwhile. I’ve also seen some that were stupid. If people want to pay thousands of dollars to think they’re participating in some imaginary monopoly on great ideas, why not? The idea of being smarter than everyone else is worth cash, and someone who really is figured out how to make big bucks selling the illusion. Good on him.
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