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TED Talks have been all the rage for a while now. Literally millions of people watch and listen to these lectures on a wide range of subjects and they’re very influential.
But apparently, not everyone is convinced that all TED Talks are helpful or accurate. AskReddit users chimed in and dished on the TED Talks they thought were total BS.
1. Cancer
“Anita Moorjani.
She talked about how she was dying from stage 4 lymphoma, and had fluid in her lungs and tumors the size of lemons all over her body and was living out her last moments…
She then said that she saw heaven and saw “why I got cancer” and “how to cure it” so when she woke up, she said her tumors had shrunk 70% in four days, and by the time she left the hospital a week later, she was completely cancer free.
There was a doctor that treated her that later came out and said that she was refusing chemotherapy for a year and a half, and once she started chemo she began making her full recovery.
Edit: According to Wikipedia, it was someone that got access to her medical files with her permission and came out and talked about it.”
2. Not a good performance
“Not sure who it was, but in one there was a girl who said how her violin teacher said it’d be impossible for her to play a piece, and she went on to learn it in a week out of defiance.
She then plays it for the audience.
Badly.
Almost every note is botched, and I can’t help but agree with the teacher. The comment section has the same mindset.”
3. BS
“Elizabeth Holmes giving a TedMed about Theranos.
Even before finding out all the data was fabricated, none of the talk really went anywhere, just claiming how they were going to revolutionize healthcare. She also has a really weird and patronizing style of talking and the whole Steve Jobs turtleneck thing.”
4. Not buying it
“This woman talking about how technology was causing kids to respect their parents less.”
5. The lawyer
“A lot of Ted talks are on subjects which are a matter of opinion, (behaviour, motivation etc) and can’t be proven right or wrong
However there was a TED talk (not TEDeX) about how a lawyer was working with someone on death row. He gave a compelling speech about how his clients past was awful, that he’d been abandoned by his parents and lived on his own at the age of 14. He fell into a gang and committed his first murder, landing him on death row.
He spends 5-10 minutes talking about the appeal system and how it can be better in the American death row system. Stating that his client should have gotten more help than he got, and that youth education systems would prevent crimes like this happening
Anyway, it turns out his client didn’t have a bad, parent-less, or gang ridden childhood. (He was raised by two loving parents in a semi-wealthy family)
Lied for 20 minutes straight about how his client had such a hard life. When actually his life (up until the murder) was the easiest life imaginable.”
6. You sure he was a scientist?
“There’s one with a scientist who didn’t know the Holographic Principal already exists and then explained it very badly.
It’s a hypothesis that the universe is a projection of information on a 2D plane.
He give a rambling analogy about a computer, and trying to figure out how it works by using a microscope to look at the pixel elements on the screen, and that’s how science works or something.”
7. Sounds like it…
“One about education and “grit”. Is was vague and unoriginal.”
8. That doesn’t sound right…
“I think the most bs, legit ted talk i’ve seen was that guy who talked about curing aging. he gave no specifics or anything he just made claims about how you could start with extending life span and eventually cure aging and that if you’re 35 or under thanks to extending life spans you could be immortal too.
it was the most vacuous ted talk i’d ever seen. it was entirely devoid of any facts or useful information.
edit: found it https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en “
9. Brilliant!
“TEDx.
Rethinking Stairs.
According to this guy we should descend stairs backwards.”
10. Female leaders
“Sheryl Sandberg’s TED Talk on why we have too few female leaders. She later used much of the same material for “Lean In”.
After the success of “Lean In”, Sandberg’s husband died. Once Sandberg became a single parent (albeit a wealthy and extremely well resourced one), she realized how utterly useless her advice was to the vast majority of working women. To her credit, she owned her mistake (at least temporarily).”
