You may have heard of TED talks. They are a really good platform for scientists and other specialists to put over their research, especially if it’s groundbreaking. It proved so popular that TED branched out to regional talks, put on around the world and hosted by local institutions, who were given the ability to book the best and brightest in their fields from their local area, under the banner of TEDx. This is where things started falling apart.
Once the vetting was out of the primary organizer’s hands, pseudoscience started creeping in, and it became so bad that people started complaining. I would love to give examples, but unfortunately, I live in the UK and our libel laws tend to beggar people, even if they’re proved right. The majority of the talks were still massively informative, such as Sir Roger Penrose’s cosmology talk (and this talk by my old boss) at TEDxWarwick, but the situation became so bad, that the people at TED have had to produce some new guidelines.
“Excellent!” I hear you cry, and I agreed until I got to this line, about things to watch out for: “The neuroscience of [fill in the blank]”, at which point I became filled with righteous indignation, being a neuroscience bod myself(albeit a mathematical one). Then I typed “The neuroscience of” into Google. By a few pages in, I found myself in complete agreement with the new guidelines. Neuroscience explains a lot of things about physiological responses, but the level of extrapolation required for some of those results, along with a truckload of cognitive dissonance, did wonders for worsening my migraine.
Hopefully this will bring a new era for TEDx talks that echoes the joy of discovery that came with the original launch of TED.
Thanks to Ben Goldacre’s Twitter feed for this news.
Land of Gregs 