What’s the matter with TED?

I enjoy many TED talks. I especially enjoy them because I only watch them when someone else recommends one to me — I’ve got filters in place. The one time I tried to sit down and go through a couple of random TED talks, I was terribly disappointed.

Carl Zimmer explains the problem with TED.

The problem, I think, lies in TED's basic format. In effect, you're meant to feel as if you're receiving a revelation. TED speakers tend to open up their talks like sales pitches, trying to arouse your interest in what they are about to say. They are promising to rock your world, even if they're only talking about mushrooms.

So the talks have to feel new, and they have to sound as if they have huge implications. A speaker can achieve these goals in the 18 minutes afforded by TED, but there isn't much time left over to actually make a case–to present a coherent argument, to offer persuasive evidence, to address the questions that any skeptical audience should ask. In the best TED talks, it just so happens that the speaker is the sort of person you can trust to deliver a talk that comports with the actual science. But the system can easily be gamed.

In some cases, people get invited to talk about science thanks to their sudden appearance in the news, accompanied by flashy headlines. Exhibit A, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who claimed in late 2010 to have discovered bacteria that could live on arsenic and promised that the discovery would change textbooks forever. When challenged by scientific critics, she announced to reporters like myself that she would only discuss her work in peer reviewed journals. Three months later, she was talking at TED.

The problem can get even more serious in TED's new franchise, TEDx, which is popping up in cities around the world. Again, some TEDx talks are great. Caltech physicist (and DtU editor) Sean Carroll talking about cosmology? Whatever you've got, I'll take. But some guy ranting about his grand unified theory that he promises will be a source of  unlimited energy to fuel the planet? Well, just see how far you can get through this TEDx talk before you get loaded into an amublance with an aneurysm.

So there’s the problem: audiences pay a shocking amount of money to attend a TED session, and what they expect is an epiphany delivered every 20 minutes. That’s not how science works. You know that every excellent talk at TED is backed by 10 or 20 years of incremental work, distilled down to just the conclusion. Most of the bad talks at TED are people trying to distort the methodical approach of science into a flash of genius, and failing. Some of the bad talks are simply cranks babbling; the example Zimmer gives is a perfect illustration of that. Cranks are really good at making grandiose claims, and in a setting in which no data has to be shown and no questions can be asked, pseudoscience shines (and by the way, what is it with kooks and swirling donuts?)

Another odd connection: I wonder if this tendency to inflate the baby steps of science into grand world-changing leaps contributes to or is fueled by Kurzweilian transhumanism and an exaggerated sense of progress in science?

The HuffPo has a weddings section?

How much mindless fluff infests the HuffPo? I don’t know and don’t want to find out. But I was provoked when someone sent me a link to the article on “Why you aren’t married” — it doesn’t apply to me at all, but I was aghast at what awful advice was being dispensed. It consists of 9 insults: this is an agony aunt who looks at miserable lonely people and tells them how wretched they are. I presume that happy unmarried people don’t exist in her universe.

But it’s the capper, reason #10, that annoyed me most.

10. You’re Godless. Remember how I said that marriage is a spiritual path? Well, we’re there. The point where I suggest something totally radical and punk-rock as a way of transforming whatever it is you have going on (or don’t have going on) in the area of relationships. And here it is: I want you to get a god. Wait, come back! It’s not necessarily what you think. What do I mean by god? Well, I don’t mean a bearded dude in the sky who is going to give you a Mercedes and a husband if you’re good and punish you if you’re bad. That would be Santa Claus. I mean I want you to cultivate a sense of SPIRIT in your life, a relationship with the intangible, the unseen — the power behind the oceans, gravity, chocolate and the Beatles. You know, the thing you experience in life where the hair stands up on your arms? The Big Something. You could just call it Love. Whatever you name it — it’s the game changer. Because when you mix the idea of spirit into your relationships, it no longer matters how many men are, techincally, out there. No more demographics, no more short guys and tall guys or chicks with cankles or ten extra pounds. There are no more lists of things you think you have to have in a mate. There are only two people on a spiritual assignment: TO LOVE EACH OTHER.

Given the other 9, I suppose that was intended to be an insult, too, but it’s just so stupid it bounced off me and stuck to her instead. Love isn’t spiritual. It’s something real. If you start loading up your relationships with entirely imaginary delusions, you’re either going to blind yourself to real problems, or you’re going to be living in a fantasy relationship.

And you know what we call love with a fantasy: masturbation. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you really don’t need to find a partner for it.

Of course, what you then learn is that this person sneering at everyone for not being married is…not married. But she’s been divorced three times!

Why I am an atheist – Nikolaos Mavrantzas

I do not remember all the steps I took on my way to becoming an atheist, but I am an atheist right now because I accepted, at some point, the fact that the universe does not care. I also liked the freedom from all the madness that was imposed on me, having spent two decades of my life trying to fit the loving god / uncaring universe paradox in my head. And then, I noticed that apart from within the edifice of lies erected by the church, there was no indication that a god existed at all.

Nikolaos Mavrantzas
Greece

Absolute certainty, absolute ignorance

Jerry Coyne seems to have just discovered World Net Daily — at least, he’s surprised that a conservative publication would go after evolution. Think again; WND is notoriously demented. It’s full of birthers and other crazies, and they insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and fully accept the argument from Ussher’s chronology.

So he finds an article by a creationist apologist, Carl Gallups, and now I’m surprised: he discovers an original argument for creationism. In addition to insisting that no transitional fossils have other been found, he has a “creative” explanation for molecular similarities between species: it’s so they can eat each other.

When we ingest other living things, the DNA of those living things (fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats, etc.) just happens to be compatible with our DNA so that cellular respiration can take place. If it were not for the fact that our DNA is so akin to all other living things, we could not eat. If we could not eat, we would die.

Is the process of eating and cellular respiration the result of a mere fluke of evolution? Alternatively, could it be that a common Designer made certain that the process of eating and cellular respiration would function in such a precise and perfect manner? Which answer appears to be the most probable to you?

If the supposed cosmic and random happenstance of evolution was the real reason that all living things exist, why, when, and how did this happenstance mechanism decide that living things needed to eat anything in the first place? Would it not be odd that evolution should come up with the idea of food and energy creation through cellular respiration?

Cellular respiration is an astoundingly complex, energy-expending system. Yet in order for life to be sustained, living things must have other living things to ingest. What an odd thing for a mere cosmic coincidence to develop, by random generation. Is it not a strange convenience for evolution that all living things have such unimaginable DNA similarity that cellular respiration is possible?

It’s an impressive example of the difference between certainty and knowledge. Gallups is absolutely certain that he’s correct, but what he reveals in his writings is an absolute absence of knowledge about the subject he’s talking about.

Digestion does not require DNA template matching. DNA is a tiny fraction of the content of our food; we’re mostly after proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. When I eat a banana, I don’t rely on sequence matching at all: the masticated banana gets dumped into an acid bath with enzymes (my stomach) that breaks it down chemically, and then moves on to my small intestine where further enzymes demolish the structure of the polymers in the banana. For instance, nucleases dismantle the DNA strands, breaking them down into individual nucleotides, and those are then absorbed into my intestinal walls and used as an energy source and recycled into building my DNA and RNA.

I’m always dismayed at the way these bozos can rant on about metabolism and use fancy words like “cellular respiration”, declaring that they disprove evolution, yet they don’t understand one single thing, not even the most basic concepts, about the process. It’s rather dishonest.