• Une vraie critique des conférences #TED ! Kent Sepkowitz
      TED Conferences Drag Down Intellectuals, Glorify Smart-Style People - The Daily Beast http://seenthis.net/messages/59520

      Nowadays, though, TED spells trouble for several reasons. First, it doesn’t celebrate a love of smart people, really; it celebrates a love of smart-style people. Just as kosher-style food looks and kinda acts like the real thing, but isn’t, so too are the diplomats of TED U kinda full of it. TED provides the Cliffs Notes versions of the talks right there online (TED quotes), little gnomic cyber-samplers (“If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average” and “I share, therefore I am”) you can sprinkle around without really understanding a drop of the work that stands behind the claim.

      As such, TED is a direct descendant of another American favorite: the get-better-quick scheme, that never-resolved adolescent fantasy once conducted on the back page of comic books, where Norman Rockwell taught us how to draw in five weeks, Charles Atlas built our pecs in 30 days, we learned fluent French overnight, and a chinchilla farm gave us our first cool million. The secret, of course, was not acquisition of mastery, but acquisition of the shortcut: let all the other knuckleheads sweat it out—I got a free ticket to Easy Street!