What do you think of TED talks?

I absolutely LOVE TED talks. I’ll come across one and then suddenly realize its 3 hours later and I’ve been watching various talks for the past couple hours.

That is not to say that all TED talks are good, there are some really bad speakers that while talking about a good topic bore you to death but TED talks also feature some of the best speeches I’ve ever seen.

For the most part, I like them. However I do have my own criticism. They don’t seem to be as good as they used to be, they let a lot of propaganda and bullshit on there some times, as it seems anyone with enough money to pay the fees can have their say.

At times, they will have almost life changing concepts in there. Sam Harris speculating about science being able to have a say on subjective morality was a very interesting, but then you could maybe get someone talking for half hour about what shape a steak will be once we clone all our meat, that only really have novelty value, and then you get others who should just not be on there at all.

Universally I can’t say anything as varied as Tedtalks is uniformily good.

I have my favorites. Susan Cain is one that comes easily to mind. Even so though I have heard some Tedtalks I didn’t agree with or thought bad or boring they did still make me think about why they were “bad” ore what would have made them better.

So since I had to do some of my own thinking and in some cases it led to me look up different thinking one could say I took away more from those lectures then the ones I agreed with. Even the ones I recognized as instinctively and innuitively true even though I have never heard it spelled out so clearly.

It depends on the speaker and the topic, like school classes. Some I’ve watched are boring (at least to me), and some, like the one a close friend of mine did in Dallas, are great. I know this guy and the topic he talked about well, but nonetheless I learned a lot from what he had to say.

Like most things in life, some are shit and some are good, a few are great.

I’ve heard some great ones. The one by Philip Zimbardo about good and evil and the making of heroes is particularly inspiring.

I love a lot of them. They can’t all be winners, though.

Tent revival for the literati.

I enjoy it for the most part. Some are great…and others are not. As time goes on, it can sometimes be harder to find the great ones. I hope they don’t continue on the current track. I think only the best of the best should be given the stage.

I have the TED app on my iPad, I only listen to talks I think I would find interesting, like physics, the universe, atheism, biology, technology and maybe a bit of chemistry.

If I had to listen to one on the radio that was as equally shit sounding as the one you listened to, like being a vegan or something, then I’d just drive my car into the nearest living thing and hope for a kill.

Thanks for the link in your question, @Crumpet. Excellent OP/ED.

When they began, and were rather infrequent, they were excellent. Good, important speakers with things to say.

But they have become FAR too common and they are digging further down to the bottom of the barrel. Not everyone has something to say. They are far less selective than before, and it shows.

I don’t bother listening to the talks on topics that don’t interest me.

As far as the topic visited in the question, here, I haven’t seen that talk, but I do agree that automating things does free us up to do better, more interesting things. For example, when was the last time that any woman on Fluther had to wake up in the morning, catch up on her spinning, teach her children to spin, work on weaving fabric on a loom, dye some yarn, and start hand-stitching our kids’ clothing?

Thank you, machines, for letting me spend 5 minutes picking out a t-shirt on a shopping trip instead of 15 hours to make one myself from raw cotton.