The whole affair is reminding me of how Ivy League colleges (and Oxbridge) work. They used to be places where the privileged, moneyed elite could educate themselves in relative privacy, save for a few exceptional commoners allowed in on scholarship.
Nowadays, the proportion of talented commoners to moneyed elite is considerably greater than it was even 100 years ago, but the basic principle remains: foster connections among the elites, and give them first crack at any emerging talent. This way anyone with a potentially destabilizing talent becomes attached to the existing power structure at an impressionable age. Better to invite them in and dilute the pool a bit than risk them draining it later.
Any commoners who don't work out, they will drop without hesitation.
I'm not saying this is evil. If you were among the elite, you'd probably do the same thing. And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works. From their point of view, I'm quite sure they see this as noblesse oblige: they're just reaching out, "giving back" and trying to help useful and interesting people succeed. But it nevertheless has embedded in it the idea that the most important part of success is meeting people who already have power.
And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.
New blood from the commoners actually helps sustain the system in two ways.
(1) They usually don't dilute anything, but rather add talent and ambition. Remember -- they got their scholarship by being smart and hungry. If they adopt the norms of their new class and make a pile of bucks, why not let them marry your daughter and go to Nantucket with you.
(2) They add plausible deniability to the class structure -- we can say "look, this kid from a middle class family in West Virgina made it, there's no such thing as class structure." (Or "Clarence Thomas made it -- don't tell me about systemic racism".)
I'm the son of an immigrant, went to Harvard and have no idea what you're talking about concerning the Ivy League. Would you (or anyone who upvoted) care to explain?
Also son of an immigrant, went to Amherst, and upvoted the grandparent post.
The type of entrenched power base that I believe he's talking about works at a cultural level, which means it's mostly subconscious. I found the "elites" that I went to school with generally weren't overtly snobby - there were one or two douchebags, but in general they were looked down upon by the rest of the student body, and for the most part people could forget about who had money and who didn't.
But I came out of Amherst a different person than when I went in, and I've noticed that I think differently than HN or Reddit posters who didn't go to college or went to a state school. And I think that a lot of that is because I picked up the cultural values of going to an elite college, and now have a lot more skin in the game of preserving the existing system.
Assuming that you are like most HN contributors and want to become successful one day, how would you go about it? What does success mean to you? A good, high-paying job at a company that gives you a lot of freedom to work in what you want? A company that gets lots of users and nets you a few tens of millions when you sell it? A tenured professorship at a major research university?
Now step outside of your cultural values and consider all the other things that people might consider successful. A world where everybody's equal and nobody needs to worry about the basic necessities of life. Glory on the battlefield and domination over one's enemies. Physical strength and goods well built.
Why is it that we value money and knowledge, but not valor or compassion? Why did Athens win over Sparta, when historically Sparta won?
One of the neat things about studying sociology and anthropology is learning how to frame observed behavior from different viewpoints. People usually don't become powerful by winning on the battlefield; they become powerful by shifting the battlefield onto areas where they're naturally strong. So naturally, people who are wealthy and smart want to shift society's value system to reward money and knowledge. If another group was in power - say, the 8th grade bullies who used to beat me up - they would probably want a society that rewarded brawn and ruthlessness.
The university system is a way to effect that shift. It works by identifying youngsters who might otherwise challenge the status quo, and then giving them the means and the opportunity to succeed within the status quo. Once they get out of it, they have little incentive to tear down the system, because the system works for them. Why risk destroying a good thing?
1. How to greet, stand, dress, and speak in a way that reassures social elites that you are like them and can be trusted.
2. How to mingle with elites without being intimidated.
3. How elites' system of friendship and obligation works -- how to ask for favors, grant favors, and make friends and connections with the elite.
4. What elites value, i.e., how to make yourself useful to them so you can enter into reciprocal relationships with them.
5. How particular systems work that are dominated by the elite. For example, if you go to Harvard, you'll probably pick up a little bit about how the financial industry works, just because that knowledge is in the air there and is of interest to many Harvard students. If you go to Pretty Good State U, you'll get a lot less second-hand knowledge of the financial system and fewer classmates who have a serious or even casual interest in it. I had a girlfriend whose parents were social workers, so I learned a little about that just from listening to her talk. If her parents had been investment bankers or diplomats, I would have learned about that instead. (As it happens, any of those would have been irrelevant to my own interests, so no harm done.)
You won't just get those skills; you'll also get a head start on using them. You'll have the opportunity to meet people with valuable connections and people who will become extremely valuable connections in the future. It might be kind of minor league; you might just call someone up and say, "Hey, I'm looking for an internship in finance, but I don't know where or how to apply. Do you think your dad can tell me what kinds of places to apply to and what they like to hear from applicants?" That isn't exactly Instant Entry Into The Corridors of Power but if your classmate's dad is an executive at Citibank you'll get slightly better advice than you'd get from the career guidance counselor at Pretty Good State U.
Yes, the collective behavior of very complex game theoretic systems, where individuals act to maximize their own benefit, can sometimes seem to be controlled by a central decision structure, even where none exists.
Or-- people have a bias towards seeing massive, planned conspiracies.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy - such a system could arise simply through evolution and survivorship bias. Imagine you have two power structures. One of them has a rigidly entrenched core group, with no possibility for advancement. The other of them identifies people who might be threats, and then offers them the possibility of advancement within the system.
Over time, such revolutionaries will arise in both systems. In the first system, they eventually gain a critical mass of disaffected youth, and overthrow the government. That paves the way for another system, and eventually, someone will try something like system #2, and that won't be overthrown by restless revolutionaries.
History actually looks remarkably like this, with plenty of absolute monarchies being violently overthrown by smart & charismatic revolutionaries, until a system arose where those smart and charismatic people can achieve personal advancement without overthrowing the system.
... but I also believe in class conflict, which I see as different things. Our economic system is predicated on the existence of both a working class and an owning class -- it's no fun to be a general if you don't have a bunch a bunch of enlisted to boss around. And in the US, the myth is that the enlisted commoners deserve their lot from lack of smarts and ambition.
The owning class, and their educated lackeys like me, intuit that if we don't keep this division going, we lose our positions in the upper half of the pyramid, and adjust our day-to-day behavior accordingly without ever explicitly working it out in our minds. Also, we just plain feel more comfortable around people who share experience and cultural background.
These dynamics, plus a HUGE difference in access to educational know-how, are enough to sustain class divisions even while making it plausibly deniable that any systematic class oppression exists.
Also, there is a rhetorical technique called the "straw man" which the commenter is using: subtly re-characterize your opponents argument as something easily attacked, and then attack it. The commenter explicitly said there was no grand explicit conspiracy, but you attack him as if he did.
(One of the things I like about HN is that when issues like this come up there are smart people here on both sides -- libertarians and Marxists, united by a love of hacking!)
I have a little trouble conceiving of a completely classless society - at some point you have to acknowledge that, for example, some programmers are better than others, and that that's a positive thing. That acknowledgement alone creates a class. The important thing is upward mobility - we shouldn't define "better" as "knows the other people who are 'better'".
This cannot be argued. But many people conflate worth of skills and accomplishments with worth as a person. They over reduce the dimensionality of a superiority vector. And worse, assume transitivity of the elements composing said vector.
Often (though not always) the reason for differences in talent are directly traceable to personal background, and by allocating different resources to folks growing up is how we sustain our class system. Bourdieu.
> And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works.
His point is that the system of individuals acting to maximize their own benefit, because of the way that "benefit" is defined, favors entrenched players, even if it wasn't supposed to - no conspiracy necessary.
It is funny that you mention "game theory, maximize, benefit and central decision structure". Because I can draw a rough analogy from game theory and argue why a central decision structure likely exists at least implicitly.
What we have here in life is a positive sum game and if everyone is trying their best to play an optimal strategy then it is likely that they are at least at a correlated equilibrium. This in turn implies some central shared decision structure. I posit that in modern society this shared device is the status-quo, the media, status worship, fame chasing and celebrities. This correlating device evolves or rather is naturally selected by the top of a society wishing to keep it so. Things did not get this way by accident and our values are certainly not all set in stone or irrefutably valuable.
So long as everyone follows the signals given as optimal by this correlating device/trusted mediator we achieve correlated equilibrium. If anyone deviates then all bets are off. This then highlights why it is so key that the elite behave and indoctrinate as they do. And gibes well with what nostrademons had to say. If people are not acting in a way that "sensible" people should act to get and then stay ahead then we fall out of the comfy equilibrium and the stability of the status-quo is lost.
I don't think he means to focus so much on the historical anecdote about Ivy Leagues. His point is that the existing power structure (whether it's business, gov't, or education) is based on networking, not merit, and that by inviting some people who have merit to network, it only creates the illusion of meritocracy, because success is still founded on networking - which benefits the existing aristocracy, even if the intention was to move toward meritocracy.
> And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.
that was one of the things that struck me most forcibly about the article. i would have predicted (a touch optimistically, perhaps) that the "b-listers" would just find other interesting people to meet and socialise with during those few days - heck, ted is packed with them! perhaps i'm just spoilt by exposure to mainly hacker conferences (and unconferences), and science fiction conventions, in both of which celebrities are welcomed, but not especially lionised.
Before I make this comment, please understand that I've never been to a TED conference and am unlikely to go in the reasonably near future. Having said that what rational being would pay $6,000 to attend an event where he's treated like a second class citizen(I especially liked the "back of the bus" reference) and then next year reregisters for the same event?
I read the article and was struck more by the difference between me and someone who would pay $6,000 to go to a conference than about the difference between Group A and Group B.
GIve me $6,000 and I'm off on a round-the-world trip. I might take a few TED videos to watch on the way, though...
People tend to overestimate the likelihood of positive events. Being a member of Group B does give them a chance of getting a lucky meeting with some Group A luminary who can radically change their life. The problem is, there's a 0.1% chance of that, but they've thought about it enough and fantasized about it enough that they think their odds are considerably better - they think that by going to TED they've got a real shot at their dreams coming true.
If his story is true, he was sponsored by the donor the first time he attended. He applied to come back and was accepted on his own merits, and then he was blacklisted. I think it's newsworthy if TED, which is purportedly a forum for sharing ideas, lets donors blacklist attendees. The TED talks are just a highbrow facade for a get-together that is actually all about access. Access (and money) is how they lure the presenters that give some substance to the facade. Sarah Silverman showed that she did not understand the nature of the event; she did not appreciate the privilege of having access to rich and powerful people, and somebody took offense. Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.
Group A, (the people everyone would love to meet), and Group B (the people who want to meet those people.) The people in Group B spend the entire TED conference running around with business cards, hoping for, you know, five seconds of face time with Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Cameron Diaz, or the like.
This part makes Group B sound like a bunch of insufferable assholes (which may be partly true) but when you consider the nature of the event, Group A is almost literally asking for it.
Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.
You don't know what his relationship is. Maybe this donor thinks this person molested his daughter, but doesn't have enough proof to get a conviction. At the end of the day a donor has just as much right to pull or use any influence they have as this applicant has to attend a private conference.
I've quite possibly never seen a more worthless piece of writing or topic. Although I'd have to go through the TC archives to be sure.
And we have every right to draw conclusions about TED based on how they react to such pressure.
(On a meta note, rights are a pathetic red herring pulled out when people don't want to defend something on other grounds. Should we refrain from criticizing anything unless we want to ban it? Should we refrain from praising anything unless we want to make it compulsory? If you condemn all criticism as a slippery slope towards taking away people's rights, we don't have much left to talk about.)
There's a reason why people tend to discount anonymous sources, especially when there is no additional content or evidence.
In this case we have an anonymous source, giving one side of a story (this "reporter" doesn't even appear to attempt to validate this story with the "curator" or anyone else), and already comes from a publication that is generally known for sloppy work and biased reporting.
IOW, you have every right to draw conclusions even on the basis of zero information -- and that would be slightly better than what you've done here.
I acknowledged in my first post, which you replied to and therefore presumably read, that the story reported in the link may not be true. What's with the bitter tone?
The bitter tone? My apologies. It's just the writing from TC strikes a nerve in my at how bad and perverse it is. In any case I let that leak through in my response to you and others. Again, sorry about that.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that the original vouch from the donor didn't factor into the 2011 invite, and that he was accepted solely on his own merits.
Most likely, having attended a previous TED conf bumps you up on the invite list. The original invite came from a vouch by the donor. It's extremely possible that's the only reason this person got the 2011 invite.
Which makes the de-invite more like not getting that promotion because you slept with the boss's daughter. Politics to be sure, but hardly an attempt for the upper classes to squash the lower ones.
I agree there's a strong whiff of sour grapes to this post, but, not having paid much attention to TED itself, I was unaware how cliquish it was. You have to "apply" to pay $6,000 to attend?
This article is completely based on hearsay. I'd like to have seen the actual emails from TED, rather than just the authors translation/understanding of the responses.
At the same time, I think the authors comments about Group A and Group B is a huge opportunity for another conference.
He seems to think that all these 'group B' people are people who don't have anything interesting to say. How many people get up on stage at TED and make amazing presentations, and all of a sudden are then part of group A.
The Group B's should be searching for other Group B's who have amazing stories and knowledge to share. That is why everybody is supposed to be at the conference.
I've got a few friends who have an incredible nack for meeting ANYBODY and finding out something amazing about that person which adds to their understanding and appreciation about life.
The Group A's are just Group B's that you already have some knowledge about.
So I have no clue about being uninvited from TED, but if you want to sit up front, there's plenty of opportunity to do so. I'm hardly an 'A' lister and I had no problem joining the scrum (which is everyone) at the rope to trot to the front rows for those sessions that I wanted to see closer.
Mind you, I've only been to the one ted (2010) so maybe I'm not the big authority here, but I found 'A' people approachable and friendly and I'd say it was pretty
great.
I've been to many TEDs and can confirm: To sit in the first very few (3?) rows you have to be a Patron or whatever, but if you want to be in row 5 or so, you simply have to get in line 20 minutes early. (Kind of like the old Southwest Airlines system.) So I don't know what all that back-of-the-bus stuff was about.
Oh wait...people who insist on typing on their computers during the talks are relegated to the "blogger zone" in the balcony. Maybe that's it.
Was it like that last year ? I remember there were some speaker/reserved seats at stage right, but I wasn't actually aiming for the front row because that might introduce a crick in my neck :-) So I guess 'patron' rows would be possible.
The shunting of those who want to blog/surf to the balconies was pretty nice for those who don't want the typey typey glowing screen distraction.
That's definitely a bit creepy. It also goes a ways towards explaining the overall trend of the conference. When I found it in 2006, I absolutely loved TED. Nearly every talk was eye-opening and fascinating, from Ray Kurzweil to Juan Enriquez to Robert Wright to Hans Rosling, it was all awesome. Over time, I started seeing fewer eye-opening talks and more politically focused ones. Now, while I still regularly check TED, it's a very mixed bag.
For quite a while I had thought it was an issue of the low-hanging fruit already having been plucked, but recently I've become less sure. This piece only adds to those doubts. If donors are calling all the shots, no wonder it's become driven by populist political causes and steeped in PC overtones.
> Over time, I started seeing fewer eye-opening talks and more politically focused ones. Now, while I still regularly check TED, it's a very mixed bag.
Is that because eye-opening ideas and correspondingly talks don't come out as often as TED conferences are scheduled? Also, a lot of amazing insights only become insights years after the ideas are proposed and collectively understood by society.
I think rich and powerful will always find subtle and less subtle ways to signal their status and power. Creating special clubs, with invite-only lists, and then exercise their power and influence in applying modifications to that list is one way to do it.
- "Say John, how many people have you uninvited today?"
- "Well, only 10. What about you?"
- "Ha! I just booted 20 attendees whose haircuts I found deplorable. Then invited this one cousin of a friend who is a blogger and maybe he'll say something nice about me and TED to his online audience."
> If TED would just own up to being about making the wealthy, famous and powerful feel comfortable–like other high level affairs like Sun Valley or the World Economic Forum– I wouldn’t have an issue with it. Business conferences have good reasons to be elitist; deals are getting done and high-level conversations need to be private sometimes.
> But when credentials are revoked at the last minute based purely on the whim of a more important member of the TED community, the inner workings are just too much like a country club for an organization whose stellar content is all about pluralism and uplift.
I read this too, but I don't understand how anyone could mistake a $6,000 invitation-only event for anything other than incredibly exclusive. To me, the letter just reads like sour grapes.
Having a right and using it are two completely separate things. History is full of examples of people who had rights to do what they did (i.e. it was legal), but that they were aholes for actually doing it. Charlie Sheen has a right to speak his mind, for example.
I would really like to know what happened in the intervening year, but money does talk. It seems every group with any power has some perceptions that seem mean spirited or strange to the people they affect (ex. I got rejected from a summer internship because the high school I graduated from is in the same phone area code as the college I attended - like the rest of the state). Maybe the guy/girl did something wrong, or the patron thought they were acting out of their station by going without the patron's support.
Scoble had an article not too long back on how SXSW was too big and needed to be cut down. I presume to the point that he started showing up. I remember in my early days thinking Gen-Con was cool up until the damn card people started showing up :).
I think the really interesting thing is how to build a conference with better talks than TED, but not keep all the "commoners" out. Remember, Bill Gates wasn't "cool" many years ago. In a cynical moment, I wonder if it is possible to hold a conference that might inspire the next, unknown individuals or is it always going to slip into an "old boys" club patting themselves on the back.
I don't get it. The post seems to imply that donor X banned person Y from TED, but didn't donor X put person Y in TED in the first place? He just withdrew his invitation, no?
I don't get why people are upvoting this. Didn't anybody read the article? It clearly says that the donor made a call and requested that person Y be uninvited. It's also very clear that the donor was not involved in inviting the person to the 2011 conference.
I sent a personal email to Chris Anderson, TED’s ‘curator,’ asking for an explanation. I got it. Here it is: I was uninvited to this year’s TED conference because the major TED donor I’ve referenced above and with whom, for reasons unknown, I have now not spoken to for more than two years (TED’s leadership tells me that this is because this person and I have had a ‘falling out’ of some kind) had seen my picture in the TED 2011 ‘Facebook.’ This person had called the conference organizers to express that my presence at the conference might result in this person feeling some ‘stress’ and – perhaps – not enjoying the conference as much as this person otherwise might..
Edit: No, it clearly wasn't just a matter of withdrawing sponsorship. It's right there two paragraphs further down the article. Please, just RTFA!
The point is that TED’s leadership was unwilling to run the risk of one of their biggest donors feeling ‘stressed’ at TED
Yes, but the author is making it into an issue about censorship, i.e. any TED donor can ban anyone they like. As I understand it, the donor sent the author to TED in his place, and now he withdrew that offer, so it's a non-issue.
It's as if the TC author didn't even read the letter (or, gasp, has an agenda).
It doesn't say donors send people in their place. It says donors can designate an attendee. It looks almost certain that the donor who pays 100k also gets to go to the conference. If the donor didn't get to go, then the part in the article talking about the donor not having as good of a time if the attendee weren't booted makes little sense.
The article also makes it clear that unimportant attendees can be booted by donors... and apparently barred from coming back in future years as well.
I don't know if it's the "little people", but person Y knew that she was only going to TED because the donor had assigned a substitute. If the donor decided to go himself, or to send another substitute, why not? I don't see why person Y would assume the situation was permanent, when reading the one explanatory sentence person Y wrote immediately made me (an observer) understand otherwise.
No, there are three people involved. X & Z are major donors, Y is the author of the post. For the 2009 conference, X nominated Y, who paid $6k to go. For the 2011 conference, Y applied and was accepted, but Z got him blacklisted.
That isn't what I read. To me it sounded like person X put person Y in TED -- but then rich sponser Z saw person Y in a photo, told the organizers this was unacceptable, and now person Y is perma-banned.
Nowadays, the proportion of talented commoners to moneyed elite is considerably greater than it was even 100 years ago, but the basic principle remains: foster connections among the elites, and give them first crack at any emerging talent. This way anyone with a potentially destabilizing talent becomes attached to the existing power structure at an impressionable age. Better to invite them in and dilute the pool a bit than risk them draining it later.
Any commoners who don't work out, they will drop without hesitation.
I'm not saying this is evil. If you were among the elite, you'd probably do the same thing. And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works. From their point of view, I'm quite sure they see this as noblesse oblige: they're just reaching out, "giving back" and trying to help useful and interesting people succeed. But it nevertheless has embedded in it the idea that the most important part of success is meeting people who already have power.
And as the complainant in the letter writes, it sounds like all the hoi polloi ("Group B") at TED actually buy into this as well. Maybe he should be working on something amazing instead of hoping Bill or Steve or Sergey notices him.