I Love TED

You may have noticed that in the list of blogs to which I link, there is a new one called "TED". TED is an awesome website, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

TED is a conference, or rather a series of annual conferences held around the world. Its name stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and the conferences are unique in that there are no breakout groups or special-interest sessions. Every lecture is given to every attendee, and that's a beautiful thing. Interdisciplinary idea exchanges are, in my opinion, the key to innovation, even if not to progress.

About 150 lectures have been posted on the TED site so far, ranging from 3 minutes to 30. I've watched about 20 of them so far - I'm up to the Fs as of this posting. It's addicting.

Imagine, you can find a tirade by Richard Dawkins on the same website as the creator of the Vagina monologues. The chief designer for BMW is a click away from the Oxford physicist. Richard Branson is just a few speakers before Bill Clinton. Where else can you get such a high density of intelligence, of success and genius and experience?

It's not perfect. Some of the lectures are absolute crap, where nothing actually gets said, or where the speaker spends more time stroking his ego than explaining his work. There is this common theme, a strange fascination with indigenous cultures, as if they've been elevated by their exoticness and romanticism. Here's a thought: which is more important, the preservation of a subculture or the end of female circumcision? Not that it's a 1:1 tradeoff like that, but something about glamorizing lives of squalor just rubs me the wrong way.

In this way, the haughty concept of a facilitated idea exchange is somewhat like the era of garage bands. Free from the constraints of "normality", you get brilliance like The Ramones... but this ushers in a generation of atonal eardrum-shredding also-rans. I think that sometimes the TED conference organizers get so excited that they've booked The Ramones that they also book Jim and the Septic Tanks.

I'll confess, though, that I need to listen to the E and the D more than the T, no matter how interested in the latter I find myself. It is to my chagrin that the Vagina Monologues don't speak to me, and this communication gap isn't just because I lack the aforementioned equipment. Rather it's the use of language like "living in the body" and "my vagina needed a context". What does that even mean?! Still, if my Cognitive Science class has taught me anything, it's that there is a whole other version of the English language that I don't understand, and lectures like these are like Hooked on Phonics for the Engineering Grad.

Here are three videos that I think you should watch. They aren't the most informative of the bunch that I've seen, nor are they the most eloquent nor the funniest. What sets them apart is that they actually moved me, in a profound intellectual sense that is neither emotional nor scientific.

David Deutsch - What is Our Place in the Cosmos
Anna Deavere Smith - Four American Characters
Dan Dennett - Ants, Terrorism, and the Awesome Power of Memes

My favorite bit from the Dennett lecture is one slide that pretty well burned itself into my memory. While musing about how ideas are like viruses, in that they survive only by compelling their host to spread them to new hosts, he put up a slide that said simply the following:

the secret of happiness:
find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it