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