1000 TEDTalks 6 words Sebastian Wernicke

there’s currently over a thousand

TEDTalks on the Ted website and I guess

many of you here think that this is

quite fantastic except for me I don’t

agree with this I think we have a

situation here because if you think

about it 1,000 TED talks

that’s over 1000 ideas worth spreading

how on earth are you going to spread a

thousand ideas even if you just try to

get all of those ideas into your head by

watching all those thousand Ted videos

it would actually currently take you

over 250 hours to do so and I did a

little calculation of this the damage to

the economy for each one who does this

is around $15,000 so having seen this

danger to the economy I thought we need

to find a solution to this problem

here’s my approach to it all if you look

at the current situation you have a

thousand TEDTalks each of those TED

Talks has an average length of about two

thousand and three hundred words now

take this together and you end up with

2.3 million words of TED Talks which is

about three Bibles worth of content the

obvious question here is does a TED talk

really need two thousand and three

hundred words

isn’t there something shorter I mean if

you have an idea of spreading surely you

can put it into something shorter than

2,300 words the only question is how

short can you get what’s the minimum

amount of words you would need to do a

TED talk while I was pondering this

question I came across this urban legend

about Ernest Hemingway who allegedly

said that these six words here for sale

baby shoes never worn where the best

novel he had ever written and I also

encountered a project called six word

memoirs where people were even asked to

take your whole life and please sum this

up into six words such as this year

found true love married someone else or

living an existential vacuum it sucks we

like that one so if a novel can be put

into six words and a whole memoir can be

put into six words you don’t need more

than six words for a TED talk we could

have been done by lunch here

and if you did this for all thousand

TEDTalks he will get from 2.3 million

words down to six thousand so I thought

this was quite worthwhile so I started

asking all my friends please take your

favorite TED talk and put that into six

words so here are some of the results

that I received I think they’re quite

nice for example Dan Pink’s talk of

motivation which was pretty good if you

haven’t seen it drop carat drop stick

bring meaning it’s what he’s basically

talking about in those 18 and a half

minutes or some even included references

to the speakers such as Nathan Myhrvold

speaking style or the one of of Tim

Ferriss which might be considered a bit

strenuous at times the challenge here is

if I try to systematically do this I

would probably end up with a lot of

summaries but not with many friends in

the end so I had to find a different

method I had preferably involving total

strangers and luckily there’s a website

for that called Mechanical Turk which is

a website where you can post tasks that

you don’t want to do yourself such as

please summarize this text for me in six

words and I didn’t allow any low cost

countries to work on this but I found

out I could get a six word summary for

just ten cents which i think is a pretty

good price even then unfortunately it’s

not possible to summarize each TED talk

individually because if you do the math

you know you have a thousand TEDTalks

you pay 10 cents each you have to do

more than one summary for each of those

talks because some of them will probably

or are really bad so I would end up

paying hundreds of dollars so I thought

of a different way by thinking well the

talks revolve around certain themes so

what if I don’t let people summarize

individual TED Talks - six words but

give them ten TED talks at the same time

and say please do a six word summary for

that one I would cut my costs by 90% so

for $60 I could summarize a thousand

TEDTalks into just 600 summaries which

would actually be quite nice now some of

you might actually right now be thinking

it’s downright crazy to have 10 TED

talks summarized into just six words but

it’s actually not because there’s an

example by a statistics professor Hans

Rosling I guess many of you have seen

one or more of his talks he’s got eight

talks online and those eight talks can

basically be summed up into just four

words because that’s all he’s basically

showing us our intuition is really bad

always proves us wrong

so people on the internet some didn’t do

so well I mean when when I asked him to

summarize the tenth ethics at the same

time some took the easy route out you

know they just had some general comment

others and there were others and I found

this quite cheeky they used their six

words to talk back to me and asked me if

I’d been too much on Google lately and

finally also I did never understood this

you know some people really they came up

with their own wording of the truth I

mean I I don’t know any TED talk that

kind of contains this but oh well in the

end however and this is really amazing

for each of those ten tetra clusters

that I submitted I actually received

meaningful summaries here are some of my

favorites for example for all the TED

Talks around food someone summed this up

into food shaping body brains and

environment which i think is pretty good

or happiness driving toward happiness

moving toward unhappiness so here I was

I had started out with a thousand TED

talks and I had six hundred six word

summaries for those actually it sounded

nice in the beginning but when you look

at six hundred summary so it’s quite a

lot it’s a huge list so I thought you

know I probably have to take this one

step further here and kind of create

summaries of the summaries and this is

exactly what I did so I took the six

hundred summaries that I had put them

into nine groups according to the

ratings that the talks had originally

received on ted.com

and asked people to do summaries of

those again there were some

misunderstandings for example when I had

a cluster of all the beautiful talks

someone thought I was just trying to

find the ultimate pickup line here but

in the end amazingly again people were

able to do it for anxiety aesthetics

people dying or people suffering there

was also one with easy solutions around

or the recipe for the ultimate draw

dropping TED talk Flickr photos of

intergalactic classical composer I mean

that’s the essence of it all now

I had my nine groups but I mean it’s

already quite a reduction but of course

now once you’re that for it you’re not

really satisfied I mean I wanted to go

all the way all the way down the

Distillery you know starting out with a

thousand TEDTalks I wanted to have a

thousand TEDTalks summarized into just

six words which would be a 99.999 seven

percent reduction in content and I would

only pay ninety nine dollars and fifty

so stay even below a hundred dollars for

it

so add 50 overall summaries done this

time I paid 25 cents because I thought

the task was a bit harder and

unfortunately when I first received the

answers and here you see six of the

answers I was a bit disappointed because

I think you’ll agree they all summarized

some aspect of Ted by to me that kind of

felt felt a bit bland or they just had a

certain aspect of Ted in them so I was

almost ready to give up when one night I

played around with these sentences and

found out that there’s actually a

beautiful solution in here so here it is

a crowd-sourced

six word summary of a thousand TEDTalks

at the value of ninety nine dollars and

fifteen why the worry

I’d rather wonder thank you very much