Talks like this one are going to be a real problem for TED if they don't start curating the various TEDx events. The TED brand is basically a trademark representing high quality talks. If this continues, they'll lose all their credebility. At $4000+ per ticket, we're talking about a lot of money.
I think that's why they're carefully branded as TEDx rather than TED. I think you're mostly right, but I also wonder if it'll lead to more people thinking 'screw it, I wanna go to the real TED and not these TEDx things anymore'.
It's actually quite useful to have talks like this spreading across the Net. They act like chemical tracers, flowing through the memetic channels of crackpottery -- once a blog picks one up, you know immediately who you can ignore.
"We've had the capacity to create ternary computers for a long time - there's just no reason to. We have built decimal computers."
Actually, there was a ternary computer built [1]. And there is sort of a reason to, just not a great one, but one that may come back once we hit the frontier of miniaturization [2].
I know some intelligent people who fall for this. The thing is, if you tell them the arguments in this article (which I have, though doubtless less adeptly), they just find a way to insist that it's intentional. Of course the sequence is simple! That's the power of it!
Trying to kind of figure out the features of this sort of thing.
1. Talks quickly.
2. Fairly good mastery of appropriate buzz words.
3. Very much focused on the narrative "and then this was discovered and then this" rather actual analysis of any given topic.
4. Never particularly makes any claims other than the broadest generalities.
Has the guy ever read mainstream scientific analysis?
It's kind of like timecube, where the guy just repeats over and over amazing claims without really saying anything else. It's a very weird phenomena, but kind of makes me wonder what the exact difference between this and "real" science is. It's not really the truth/falsity of the claims being made, since the claims are so general or otherwise incoherent I'm not sure they have a truth/falsity.
There's a related effect called the Dr Fox Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect .. it's not exactly what you're describing, but looks at the correspondance between speaker expressiveness and the likelihood of the audience to believe what they're saying, even if it's nonsense.
The artist Reggie Watts gave a great performance at TED where he talks a lot but makes no sense. It's pretty entertaining as a spoof of these kind of fake-intellectual lectures. http://laughingsquid.com/reggie-watts-talk-at-ted/
Amazing to me that there was enthusiastic applause in that room. wtf.
Say what you will about TED and TEDx being elitist and uppity, but I think it's fair to assume that was an educated audience. How was that not perceived as complete absurdity in the moment by the crowd?
That's not how it works. The way crackpottery thrives is exactly because the people most qualified to debunk it refuse to do so because it is boring and beneath them. So it never gets debunked, and those who are less critical spread the bullshit around. This is how global warming skepticism gets spread around- Climate scientists just declare it so stupid they never bother to take the time to analyse point for point the bogus claims of skeptics and point out evidence for why the skepticism is wrong. I mean- it happens, just not often enough.
