Yostivanich

Short intro: It’s good to be back and blog­ging, sorry about the delay, but hey it took a long time to get stuff work­ing again. So no more excuses onto the busi­ness of the day.

Umair Haque, today wrote a blog post about TED. TED (Tech­nol­ogy, Enter­tain­ment, Design) for those of you who haven’t heard of it is a con­fer­ence orga­nized around the idea of bring­ing together some of the world’s smartest peo­ple to solve gen­er­ally global issues and prob­lems. The con­fer­ence is orga­nized around a series of lec­tures in which peo­ple are invited to speak upon their idea that more often than not seeks to change the world. So the con­fer­ence is pretty ambi­tious in both scope and goal.

Umair argues in his piece that TED is intel­lec­tu­ally bank­rupt. His main argu­ment is that the con­fer­ence is sim­ply that a bunch of talk with no real action occurring.

The prob­lem is sim­ple. The under­ly­ing assump­tion is that we can help solve the world’s big prob­lems by putting a bunch of inter­est­ing peo­ple in a room and talk­ing about stuff. … In fact, exactly the oppo­site is true. The way we can solve the world’s prob­lems by involv­ing the peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing as an essen­tial part of a liv­ing, evolv­ing solution.

Per­son­ally this argu­ment does make a lot of sense and on the one hand I do find myself being swayed by what Umair is say­ing, that num­ber one no action is occur­ring and that the con­fer­ence is sim­ply an intel­lec­tual exercise.

Unfor­tu­nately I don’t think Umair is view­ing the con­fer­ence in it’s full light. While it is cer­tainly true that no direct actions may occur because of TED. TED is a spring­board for a lot of intel­li­gent and good ideas to solve a host of dif­fi­cult prob­lems. The con­fer­ence pro­vides a plat­form for these peo­ple to present their ideas to a wide range of peo­ple who may never hear them oth­er­wise. This includes a great many peo­ple who do have the influ­ence to cre­ate actions based on these ideas. Action needs ideas, undi­rected, unthink­ing action doesn’t do any good to anybody.

Also, I would argue while you do have to involve those peo­ple who will be effected by any changes at the same time it can be dif­fcult for peo­ple who are directly involved in what­ever the prob­lem is to be able to first cre­ate a plan to solve the prob­lem and to see which plan is the most log­i­cal to solve the problem

TED also isn’t just pie in the sky ideas, it includes a realm of talks that dis­cuss break­throughs occur­ing in research labs around the world that will change the world and results from the real world that have changed some aspect of the world.

P.S. TED 2008 is cur­rently going on, and I highly rec­om­mend every­one go and watch some of the videos on their site and real­ize just how smart some of these peo­ple are.