April 7, 2013
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Reflections on TEDxUM 2013
Reflections on TEDxUM 2013
JDN 2456390 EDT 16:06.
Two days ago (JDN 2456388, Friday 5 Apr 2013) was TEDxUM 2013, the fourth annual installment of the University of Michigan’s chapter of TED. In case you didn’t know (where have you been?), TED is a global conference series, originally “Technology, Entertainment, and Design”, but now an eclectic memetic beast dedicated to all things innovative. If you haven’t watched any TED videos, you must do so; but be sure you have some time to spare, for you will find you can’t watch just one.
TED itself is marvelous; it is also horrifically expensive. TEDx is a far smaller, cheaper event, a sort of bite-size TED.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and I suppose I did get some good things out of it (not least, I networked with someone who sounds like he may offer me a job); but it certainly wasn’t nearly as impressive as the real TED.
There were 20 speakers, each for about 15 minutes; yes, that’s 5 hours of lecturing. Another few hours were taken by lunch, musical interludes (mostly awful, especially the first one) and brief breaks, and then there was a dinner reception; so overall I arrived at 9 AM and did not leave until 9 PM. The speakers were quite a mixed bag; some good, a few even excellent, most mediocre, and some quite disappointing.
The first speaker, Robert Quinn, was one of the worst; apparently he is a professor of management, and his talk was based on his experience of managing companies and training others to do so. As a result, he used examples that had no resonance with anything else, to make arguments that probably apply least to the field in which he was applying them. He was trying to argue that a sense of purpose makes you happier and more productive, but his examples did nothing to show that. He did a ridiculous demonstration that involved the crowd jumping up and down in unison, and he had a saccharine feel-good philosophy that is useless to anyone who actually has real struggles. His entire talk would have been better if it were replaced by just the following parable:
Three men are lifting rocks and carrying them from one place to another. A traveler asks them, “What are you doing?” The first sighs and says, “Whatever the boss tells me to do.” The second shrugs and says, “We’re lifting some rocks and carrying them somewhere.” The third smiles and says, “I’m building a skyscraper.”
Fortunately, the second speaker, Kathryn Clark, was excellent; she has an illustrious career including several years at NASA, and her speech was dynamic and moving. The central message was one I’ve been trying to explain to people for years: “The most underappreciated benefit of space travel has been the generations of people inspired by it.” “What we really lose when we stop trying to reach for the stars… is the very idea that we can.”
Oliver Uberti was quite good as well; his experience is in graphic design, which is ironic because I felt that the least impressive aspect of his project was its graphic design. (The chart was very pretty, but its layout was confusing and not useful.) The project itself was quite compelling though; he had mapped out the lives of a hundred geniuses in various fields–art, music, science, literature–and compared their timelines. He found that contrary to popular imagination, the master works were not achieved in their precocious youths, but rather in the middle of their careers; some 2/3 of the achievements were between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. This pattern was quite consistent across fields. It also gave me personally a sense of renewed hope; for several years I’d had people telling me that scientists do their best work before they are 25, and then I turned 25 and still hadn’t published a scientific paper. Well, it turns out that’s simply not true; I still have another 20 years to do my master work.
The fourth presentation was a pair, Maria Castro and Pedro Lowenstein; they are neuroscientists working on a gene therapy for brain cancer. Their project is one I wholemindedly support; their lecture, on the other hand, was quite boring. It was all about the technical details, not the broader implications. It would be suitable for a presentation to a medical conference or a funding committee, I’m sure; but it did not belong at TED.
Dan Morse’s presentation was annoying. The basic concept was sound: an entrepreneur tried to caution us against excessive hero worship and rugged individualism, pointing out how flawed and mutually dependent we all are. But along the way he insisted upon coining (and using, over and over again) ridiculous, awkward portmanteaus like “heropreneurship”. I was glad to see it end.
Sterling Speirn’s presentation was quite good; he is the CEO of the Kellogg Foundation, and his lecture was about how we can balance social responsibility and financial returns–we don’t have to sacrifice our principles to protect our budgets. He was talking specifically about charitable foundations, but we can extend the reasoning much more broadly; businesses and individuals need to learn to think this way as well.
John Bacon’s presentation was all right; his central point is that we write and read history the wrong way, making it sound like an inevitable logical progression when it was in reality anything but. Individual choices and random events have an enormous, far-reaching impact. “History was never inevitable.” He credits Jackie Robinson almost single-handedly for the civil rights movement; I wouldn’t go that far, but it did convince me that individual moments can be hugely important.
The last lecture before lunch, by Sharon Pomerantz, was extremely boring. She went through a long story about her life as an entry-level journalist, and really had nothing compelling to say. I guess somewhere in there was a message of perseverance, a reminder to keep trying amidst rejection; but the lecture was disorganized and didn’t convey this message clearly.
After lunch session 2 began with Mike Barwis, an athletic trainer who works with paralysis victims. It was much like the neuroscience lecture earlier; while I strongly support the work he does, the talk itself really didn’t have much to say.
Next came the strangest presentation, a piece of “spoken word art” (roughly, slam poetry) presented by Gina Ulysse that then segued rather arbitrarily into the story of her life and a rant against the depiction of Haiti in Western media. She was angry that Haiti is usually depicted as victims, of poverty, of natural disasters; never as a vibrant community with much to contribute. I guess I can appreciate this critique, but then again… Haiti is a horrible place to live. No, really, by any objective metric, you do not want to live there. Famine, disease, and disaster surround you there. So portraying them as victims is… pretty accurate, frankly. It really felt like a sort of ethnic inferiority complex, where a sense of “national pride” becomes so elevated that you are unwilling to accept the fact that the nation of your birth is a place of truly horrible conditions. It’s a little unseemly, frankly; it reminds me of “America: Love It or Leave It” people who refuse to listen to facts about economic inequality, poverty, and incarceration in the US.
Julie Steiner gave a pretty good presentation; it started out slow, but eventually culminated in an argument millions of people need to hear: Social welfare policy isn’t just good, it’s also cost-effective. She compared the costs of schools versus prisons, homes versus homeless shelters, preventative care versus emergency rooms; in virtually every case, the more compassionate policy was also the more economical one. I wish she had brought up foreign aid versus military spending, but that’s a minor omission. This is what the world needs to understand; helping people doesn’t waste resources, in fact, it saves them.
Michael Williams went beyond mediocre to become outright bad; he had a similar ethnic inferiority complex, this time applied to Detroit. He was trying to convince us that Detroit is due for a massive revival and a golden age, which I can frankly call nothing less than fantasy. Detroit is corrupt, impoverished, and degraded. Yes, it has a few good parts, and maybe it will get better eventually. But you must not let your sense of pride overwhelm basic facts about the problem you’re facing. By the way, Williams has no particular qualifications; he’s just a student interested in social justice. Thus concluded session 2.
The final session began with Merry Michelle Walker, whose presentation was basically an advertisement for her organization, Vort Port International. They talked about various development programs they have done in the Third World, many of which sound like very good ideas; but there was no real message to the talk, nothing for us to take home and spread. She wasn’t even asking for donations!
The next mediocrity was James Robert’s presentation. He is a high school teacher in Ann Arbor, much like my father; except that apparently he has clout with the school administration, because he was able to get permission to run a Socratic dialogue philosophy course that my father would certainly have done if he weren’t repeatedly forced into teaching the semi-literate sweathogs that no other teachers want. I don’t know, maybe this sense of bitterness has clouded my judgment; but I really got the sense that his lecture was all about how amazing his own teaching methods are, and had little in the way of broader applications and no consideration at all of the obstacles that other teachers would face in implementing these methods. Get rid of standardized tests! Engage in mutual dialogue! That sounds great; now how did you talk the principal into that? How would we talk the state legislature into it?
The next presentation was a little better. Evelyn Alsultany came to tell us about the depiction of Arabs in Western media. I had expected her to simply rant against the unfair stereotypes, but she actually took a quite nuanced approach, pointing out positive depictions as well as negative ones; also her recommendation was emphatically not censorship, but rather a flourishing of new and diverse perspectives. She also talked about something that might not otherwise be obvious: Many of the positive depictions are of Arabs as counter-terrorists, which still reinforces the association between Arabs and terrorism.
The presentation after that—the sixteenth in the series—had such potential, but squandered it. Mary Heinen came before us to talk about mass incarceration, which is surely one of the worst and most underappreciated problems facing America today. Heinen railed passionately against this problem, but failed to acknowledge what I think any advocate of de-incarceration must: Some criminals deserve to be imprisoned. There are violent psychopaths in the world, who must be deterred when possible and incapacitated when not. Heinen made no distinction between different types of crime or different types of criminal, and so she came across as saying that we should set all the murderers and rapists free. I assume that this is not really what she meant; she probably intended to be talking about our massive numbers of incarcerated drug addicts and mentally-ill homeless people. But she didn’t specify that; she didn’t come across as making any distinction between different types of prisoner at all. Anyone who wasn’t already convinced that mass incarceration is a problem would not have become convinced by her presentation; in fact, those on the fence might well have been turned the other way. A far better source to read is When Brute Force Fails, which is a rigorous and nuanced pragmatic approach to the problems of crime and imprisonment.
Zafar Razzacki’s presentation was all right; from his background in chemistry he made an analogy between collaboration and catalysts; collaborators “lower the activation energy” for difficult tasks. It was really sort of a banal point, but he was a very dynamic and humorous speaker.
David Chesney’s presentation was fairly good; though his background is in computer science, his presentation had virtually nothing to do with that. Instead, it was about the courses of our lives, how choices and events shape them. He compared two kinds of events, “shouts”, like weddings and graduations, which we recognize as turning points at the time; and “whispers”, like people we meet and ideas we have, which seem unimportant at the time but can grow to change our lives just as radically. The talk was deeply personal, as he relayed some of the shouts and whispers in his own life.
Melissa Gross’s presentation was also quite good; she is a kinesiologist and also a dancer, and she talked about how we can combine arts and sciences to create a new generation of scientists who are also creative. I wish she had gotten more into the importance of creativity in science, but maybe she simply took it for granted.
The final presentation was even more personal. Chris Armstrong, the first openly-gay president of the University of Michigan student government, spoke about his experiences with an event so bizarre no one would believe it in a work of fiction. The assistant attorney general of the State of Michigan stalked and harassed him for several months, writing a blog that compared him to Hitler and Stalin, denouncing his “radical homosexual anti-Christian agenda”, and even accusing him and his friends of participating in gay orgies. Armstrong contextualized this story in terms of the bullying and hatred that LGBT people face around the world, and while he didn’t have any particular solutions to offer, his speech was a moving call to do something to take action against this injustice. It was the only presentation that brought me to the verge of tears.
Overall, I guess it was worthwhile; but it’s not quite the true TED.
