“It is often forgotten that the millennial generation’s collective consciousness was awakened with 9/11. This was then followed by the Iraq War and the Great Recession. It is difficult for members of other generations to grasp, much less empathize with, the feelings and world view that develop when you live through the rough equivalents of Pearl Harbor, Vietnam and the Great Depression all before you graduate college.”

We did not know to call it Day One at the time. Only later, working our way backwards, we saw this was the day when it began. We were huddled inside. We’d purchased all the prepackaged naan bread at the deli. The expensive deli, not the cheap one. We had milk, coffee, books. Winter had been something of a joke so far.

The Internet still worked back then and Weather Dot Com named the coming storm “Anus” for some reason. Most people laughed and went to work.

Most of them wouldn’t make it home again. A curtain of frozen dust began to fall from the sky, fine enough to be almost invisible, like dots of static lined up in columns. Here it came. By the time it stopped, everything was already changed.

by James S. Murphy

In November, Knopf bought a 900-page debut novel by Garth Risk Hallberg for almost $2 million. It’s a tremendous gamble, regardless of the book’s quality, if one that many publishers were happy to make: more than 10 houses bid more than $1 million, according to the Times. Predicting a novel’s fate in the commercial or critical marketplace is a fool’s gambit, as indicated both by works like the first Harry Potter novel, which was repeatedly rejected before becoming, well, Harry Potter, and by expensive flops like Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons. The novelist Curtis Sittenfeld said, “People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”

But what if publishers could recognize a bestseller or a prizewinner when they saw it? A recent paper by three computer scientists at Stony Brook University suggested that one day they might. After publication, their work provoked over-the-top headlines like “Key to hit books discovered,” “Want to write a best-seller? Scientists claim this algorithm will tell you how” and “Computer Algorithm Can Tell If Your Lousy Book Will Sell or Not.”

Are any of those true? The quick answer, at least with respect to this flawed paper, is no. But that does not mean that one day they won’t come true.

In “Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels” (PDF), Yejin Choi, Vikas Ashok, and Song Feng employ computer models based on stylometric analysis to identify the features of novels that have been commercially or critically successful, with an eye, their title suggests, to predicting future successes. Stylometry — the statistical analysis of linguistic variations in literary works in order to identify the characteristic features of a text’s style — occasionally makes the headlines for revealing the authors of anonymous or pseudonymous works, as when it helped identify J. K. Rowling as the author of a detective novel she had published under a pen name. The power of the method lies in its analysis of the most ordinary aspects of language, such as the length of words and sentences, the distribution of various punctuation marks, and the relative frequency of common words like “the,” “of,” and “and.” A novel about crime will likely have all kinds of specialized words, but the way to tell a J. K. Rowling from a P. D. James lies more in the degree to which one might use “for” where the other would use “because.” By quantifying these elements, stylometry can identify a writer’s DNA.

What is bold about the Stony Brook study is its use of stylometry to identify not so much a novel’s DNA as its fitness. The authors examined 100 texts in each of eight genres, including, inexplicably, poetry. These 800 texts were taken from Project Gutenberg, a site that makes available over 42,000 free e-books, all of which have passed out of copyright, meaning they were published before 1922. The success of a book was determined, Choi reported in an email, by the number of times it had been downloaded over 30 days in October and November 2012. In each group, they identified 50 books that had been downloaded enough to be considered successful and 50 unsuccessful ones that had been downloaded typically fewer than ten times. The metadata that Song Feng makes available reveal that the number of downloads considered large enough to identify a work as a success ranged from 10,605 downloads to a fairly meager 94.

Choi and her collaborators found that “there exist distinct linguistic patterns shared among successful literature, at least within the same genre, making it possible to build a model with surprisingly high accuracy in predicting the success of a novel.” Successful novels, the paper asserts, use connectives (e. g., “and” “ since”), prepositions, and thinking verbs (e. g., “recognized” “remembered”) more frequently, while less successful books rely more heavily on action verbs, words for body parts, and negative words (e.g., “worse” “bruised”).

Does this model predict publishing or critical success? Once again, no, but before discussing the significant problems with using the Stony Brook findings to forecast a book’s future, I want to acknowledge the methodology and ambition of this study, as well as its challenge to the contemporary orthodoxy that taste is utterly relative and that both commercial and critical success are the pure products of external forces, including advertising, critical consecration, and fashion. It is a good thing that publishers, writers, critics, and readers might have their taste challenged, but as for predicting bestsellers, there is nothing to worry about yet. There is little reason to doubt that the stylistic patterns they found in their texts exist, but there are good reasons to doubt that predictive potential of these patterns.

Despite the claims from people covering the study, Choi and her colleagues did not study hit books, best-sellers, or book sales. As Matthew Jockers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska, points out, what the Stony Brook group “really studied was [the] classic,” not the best-seller. Jockers, whose own work uses computational text analysis to discover large-scale patterns among tens of thousands of books rather than hundreds, admires the Stony Brook paper but questions its model of success and the claim that the model can predict success among contemporary novels, because it is based on a corpus too dissimilar to today’s literary marketplace.

Choi and her colleagues almost certainly used Project Gutenberg because it is a large and free corpus of texts. I suspect that their interest lay more in computer science problems and what is called Natural Language Processing than in solving the problem of predicting literary success. As a result of choosing Project Gutenberg, however, they selected a corpus that has already been largely sorted in ways that shaped the popularity of its books. Jockers suggests that the distinction the Stony Brook study found is not between bestsellers and flops but between “the classic” and “pulp.” “What it might be,” he said, “is that they’ve detected the style of books that tend to get assigned on English literature syllabi.”

Other kinds of external influences can significantly affect download numbers. In the case of the most downloaded book in the Stony Brook corpus — Les Miserables — the number reflects the popularity of the film that was being heavily advertised in 2012. Even the download counts themselves likely influence future downloads.

Counting downloads actually confuses what counts as success instead of clarifying this thorny problem. Consider Moby Dick, which was the sixteenth most popular eBook of the past month at Project Gutenberg. Moby Dick was a massive flop at the time of its publication and struggled for decades to find an audience. Conversely, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, perhaps the best-selling British novel of the entire nineteenth century, was downloaded only 135 times in the past month. Do we trust 1895 or 2013 in gauging a novel a success?

Jodie Archer, a graduate student at Stanford University, whose research uses computer models to identify the intrinsic qualities that determine which contemporary novels become best-sellers, argues that classics are probably exactly the wrong model for predicting today’s commercial successes. In her dissertation, “Sex Does Not Sell: A Digital Analysis of the Contemporary Bestseller,” Archer used data derived from the 38,000 in-print novels provided by BookLamp, a technology-based book analysis platform that is for books what Pandora is for music, to train a computer to predict whether a novel was likely to be a New York Times bestseller today. When she compared classics to contemporary bestselling fiction, the computer model achieved 96% accuracy in determining which novels were which. “The novel the computer model thought would be least likely (99.6% ‘sure’) to be a bestseller today,” Archer said, “was Jane Austen’s Emma, followed closely by most of Henry James.” If Archer’s findings are correct, the patterns the Stony Brook group identified among their successful novels would almost certainly fail to identify a bestseller today.

In addition to incorporating many more books and employing a more rigorous definition of success (such as appearance on the Times bestseller list), Archer’s study of the intrinsic qualities that might determine what makes a novel a hit is more promising than the Stony Brook study because it does not limit itself to matters of style. A former editor at Penguin, Archer is well aware that a host of external factors significantly affect a book’s sales figures, including marketing, social media — even being on the bestseller list itself. She undertook her doctoral research because wanted to know whether there were intrinsic qualities shared by Times bestsellers in fiction. After training a computer model to identify 685 possibilities in novelistic theme and style, and using this model to quantify the difference between roughly 3,000 bestsellers and random samplings from 10,000 novels that sold less impressively, she has concluded that there are.

Archer is confident that her model can not only identify the tiny percentage of books that are likely to make the Times list but also pick out the even smaller group of books that hit number one on it. In an email, she wrote that the model achieved “a class average prediction of 87% at picking number ones,” and “was most sure about Danielle Steel. It picked her novels out repeatedly, with the odds that her texts would be number one on the list at 99.9% surety.”

Her model also proved capable of predicting whether a novel would sell a million copies, becoming what she refers to as a phenomenon. This kind of book, Archer wrote, is “not favorable toward sex, lust and passion, bodies described, marital relationships or remote natural settings. It also doesn’t like emotional expression. What it does like are middlebrow thematics. Education, law, travel, money, cities, technology, childhood relationships, history and dining out” are all wise subjects to cover “if you’re penning a future bestseller.”

What does this mean for the future of writing and publishing? Will aspiring novelists test their work with bestseller software? Could the agents and editors who identify work with potential soon become obsolete, as publishers simply run their slush piles through computer models? Or, if we really let our dystopian vision go, what about a future in which authors disappear altogether, replaced by novel-writing robots producing nothing but Scandinavian crime stories and Jennifer Weiner novels? Perhaps, but we are a way away from even the first possibility. Archer does hope that her research will prove of value to writers, agents, and editors, who can use it as a tool to challenge or confirm their intuitions. Those intuitions — the author’s, the agent’s, and the editor’s — will continue to matter because it is out of them that innovation happens, even among bestsellers,. “The maverick editor that wants to do something new, to start a new trend,” Archer said, “that’s not going to happen using technology. If you want to keep creating what [are already] bestsellers,” however, the computer models will “actually be very good” at selecting it.

What makes this work worth considering at this stage is not yet another round of debates over man versus machine, as some media coverage has suggested, but what it tells us about the increasing prominence of technology in art and aesthetics and the way it frames questions of taste. There are two basic kinds of techno-aestheticists at work in this field right now. On the one side, we have the sociologists, on the other side the formalists. The sociologists include social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, which allow individuals to advertise their taste and expand it by tracking the endorsements of others, as well as more sophisticated sites like Netflix and Amazon, which employ algorithms that leverage social data in order to guide their users’ viewing and purchasing. The formalists include companies like Pandora and Booklamp, which analyze the intrinsic aspects of thousands or even millions of works in order to make recommendations based on a user’s taste and behavior, and companies like Music Xray and Epagogix, which advertise algorithms that supposedly allow them to predict whether songs and screenplays, respectively, will be hits.

What all these companies share is a belief that each of them knows what consumers want better than consumers know themselves, thanks to the power of hard quantitative analysis. They split on the question of whether to find that data outside or inside the work of art. In doing so, they reenact an old debate, if not the original debate, in the field of aesthetics. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder and subject to — even wholly comprised of — external pressures exerted by critics, schools, fashion, and the desire to fit in with or distinguish oneself from one’s peers? Or is beauty a thing in the world, a version of truth, waiting to be discovered once the blinders have been removed, every bit as undeniably there as a stone in a bowl of beans? Relativism, especially when paired with a sociological perspective, has ruled the day in academic and critical circles for decades now, which is why it is revitalizing to see research like Archer’s and sites like Pandora. While they might not be looking so much for the lovely as for the loved, in their very commitment to the notion that our desire is stoked by the object itself rather than by social forces, this is technology that is not a threat to humanism but rather one of its last bastions.

James S. Murphy is a freelance writer working on a book entitled The Way We Like Now: Aesthetics in the Age of the Internet. Follow him on Twitter @magmods.

★★★ The usually alert preschooler overslept in the sunless morning, and without his crowing, so did the more ostensibly responsible parties. Despite the haste and panic indoors, the outside remained tranquil gray — routine winter gray, if there had been any such routine in these recent weeks. More than a dozen concrete trucks were lined up, down the avenue and along the cross street, spinning their drums.The gray persisted, rainless and constant, gray, gray, gray, till the gray turned slightly purple with sunset, then dirty orange at night. Now the light bouncing off the clouds after bedtime made it hard to get to sleep.

Here’s a little dictionary of Twitter abbreviations that also functions as an illustration of how we are getting stupider in real time.

I can’t figure out where I left my goddamn keys, but plants can both learn and remember, so which one of us is the idiot? Me, clearly.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Storm We Call Progress

Strum and concept, drum and bitterness, the dog
of history keeps being blown into the present — 
her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming
the bowels’ dissolving memory in a heap before her.
A child pats her back and drones there-there
while under her lifted skirt is a perfect today
where a cult of ghost-lovers predicts a rapture
but instead remains to inherit varicose veins,
rubber knickers, douches with bulbs, douches with bags,
girdles in a choice of pink, red or white,
and in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters, oils
balms, and other Benjamin etceteras burrowing
like scabies into the brain’s ear as it listens to the click
of the next second coming to an end.

Throughout,
the senseless waste of reaching up to pull down
a machine-made device from the rafters, a beatific
mythical magical deity. Sturm und drang, storm
and stress, turbulence and urge, turmoil and ferment.
A revolution goes right, then wrong. The right falls
in love with an icon. They force the landscape into a box.
They lock the box with the key inside. The aristocracy
is an improbable agent of change. Whispering
is no longer saying out loud, the all-seeing god a brother
grown bigger by another name.
Adv. sadly
He stared sadly at the ruins of his house. traurig
Er starrte traurig auf die Ruinen seines Hauses. Sadly

Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno

recently appeared in paperback. Her seventh collection of poems, The Last Two Seconds, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

If you are not familiar with this part of New Jersey I cannot quite convey to you the level of sadness involved in masturbating along Route 10. But oh my God it is SO MUCH SADNESS. It hurts just to think about.

“The generation of ‘pioneers’ who moved into the declining area a little more than a decade ago complain now that the Slope is changing. Their friends who rent are being forced out by rising prices and co-op conversions. Laundromats and grocery stores have been displaced by boutiques. Parking spaces are suddenly hard to find and families with children are moving in less frequently. The buzz word for the latest arrivals is ‘lawyers from Manhattan.’ ‘We face a cold, hard, inhuman world created by Citibank and its ilk,’ announced the neighborhood bakery…” [Via, via]

by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones

The long knives have been out for TED Talks for some time. Benjamin Bratton called them “middlebrow megachurch infotainment.” Evegny Morozov called the TED publishing arm the “insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering.” The gist of these arguments is that TED Talks are vapid, culty mass-selfies that fetishize technology for every solution. It is “placebo science” meant to make its audience feel good about learning and themselves, where ideas can hang out and do whatever, man — just turn the safety off on your brain-gun.

If not read in the voice of a perpetual techno-cynic, these might not be such terrible things. Is middlebrow entertainment bad? If cynics want to complain about shallow, self-indulgent infotainment there’s a whole world of sitcoms, reality television, and History channel documentaries on alien-Nazi collaborations for their critical ire. If touchy-feely talks about cultural norms and where ideas come from are so bad, then wait until they get a load of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for the past twenty years.

There have certainly been great TED Talks — I highly recommend Ben Goldacre’s talk on shoddy science and clinical trials for pharmaceuticals or Molly Crockett’s monologue on the bollocks of current neuroscience research. These have helped give a voice to the underserved while highlighting potential innovations that truly could improve the world. Fantastic and informative talks by very respected scientists, bringing attention to projects that would otherwise be destined for the back pages of Scientific American.

But then there are also TED Talks that are blatant pseudoscientific garbage. These aren’t nebulous meanderings on where ideas come from or the contentious talks on new age and quantum energy seen at the smaller TEDx events (kookiness that the organizers have already tried to clamp down on). These are the main stage talks on subjects with wide social implications. These are the TED Talks that simply repackage right-wing talking points for the stoned California tech elite with a gloss of technological innovation and a contrarian interpretation of how the world actually works. In Bratton’s words, there’s a reason many of them have not come to fruition.

TED’s lack of substantial peer review and its emphasis on what is new, what isn’t divisive, and what is entertaining rather than accurate or well-researched means that horrendous nonsense can get a wide audience of the rich and powerful. TED’s lack of rigor in filtering out candidates and its emphasis on performance and inspiration has allowed the scientific equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to give speeches at Woodstock. The problem is not that technology is evil or that nothing should be touchy-feely. It’s that TED — which operates under the Sapling Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Chris Anderson — let down its guard and the inmates took over the asylum. These are ideas that are not worth spreading. They are, in fact, bad ideas and TED should feel bad for having spread them.

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame seems to think that child car seats are just a placebo. People just like to think that something bigger equates to safer. Lap belts do almost as well. To back up his argument, he has a handful of tests, statistics, and quizzical anecdotes about when his father, a doctor, used to give out larger pills to make people feel better.

Levitt seems to imply that there is a giant conspiracy of car seat manufacturers that are ostensibly testing and improving their devices to be as safe as possible, but in reality they are just there to bilk us all of our hard-earned money with unnecessary, bulky automotive gadgets we don’t need.

He tried to get his results published in numerous medical journals but they were all rejected. He dismissed that result as part of how “academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other” and that “they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was.” (It was later published in an economics journal; he and his co-author also took it to the Times.)

Levitt’s initial analysis was done on a single set of data from a testing facility that remained anonymous, and it completely ignored injuries in car accidents, focusing solely on deaths. Other studies have come to different conclusions when analyzing data from crashes, revealing that car seats led to a “28% reduction in risk for death” in accidents and that child seats have and continue to be necessary for child safety. People still seem to be using child seats, and his vision of an integrated lap belt for children seems to have not gotten very far.

Holistic grazing sounds like what happens at the midpoint in a spirit quest, but it could also be a reimagining of how we can actually solve the problems of desertification. Environmentalists have constantly pointed to cattle overgrazing as a significantly destructive force against grasslands. Cattle eat up all of the vegetation and leave nothing behind. The landscape dies and nothing is left to grow, which also exacerbates climate change.

But maybe the problem isn’t that cattle are grazing too much, but that they’re not grazing enough? Allan Savory has a TED Talk that posits just that, and he has some interesting results to prove it. We could be allowing cattle to graze without limit, and it might even prevent climate change and save our planet! But Savory’s numbers are misleading and inconsistent. His research has never been repeated. A Slate story by James McWilliams ran through all of the flaws and inconsistencies in Savory’s work, noting that:

In 1990, Savory admitted that attempts to reproduce his methods had led to “15 years of frustrating and eratic [sic] results.” But he refused to accept the possibility that his hypothesis was flawed. Instead, Savory said those erratic results “were not attributable to the basic concept being wrong but were always due to management.” In a favorable interview with Range magazine in 2000, Savory seemed unconcerned with the failure of his method in scientific trials: “You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries.”

Climate change is a reality and if we don’t do something quick, our planet may be doomed. So why not inject our atmosphere with clouds of sulfuric gas? Why, it’s just crazy enough to work.

In fact, David Keith’s idea of injecting sulfuric aerosols into the upper atmosphere to create a gaseous shield has been properly modeled and is based in some sound science. But whether it prevents global warming almost comes secondary as to whether it turns the planet into a toxic gas bubble of death in the process.

It’s hard to imagine that something an archvillain would threaten the U.N. with would actually save the planet. But who knows! People are lazy, and nobody seems to care if the planet dies a crippling, toxic death, so we may be hearing about this idea in the future when David Keith takes over the world using his Doomsday Device.

Ever wanted to push an old lady into the street but decided against it? What made you hold back?

Paul Zak has a theory that the chemical oxytocin that lives in our brain controls those decisions. It is our moral and trust center. In this telling, oxytocin is also the love drug that makes us realize our worth and could also cure autism.

Besides the wealth of contradictory science about what oxytocin does, there’s no evidence that it cures autism or has any connection to morality. From Ed Yong:

Because the hype around oxytocin hurts and exploits vulnerable people. The hormone’s reputed ability to fix social ills has drawn the attention of parents whose children have autism, depression, or other conditions characterised by social problems. Many groups are looking to use oxytocin to ease those conditions, but always with great caution. Heinrichs, for example, is running a trial to see if oxytocin can help people with borderline personality disorder, when used alongside normal therapy. “If you sit at home with a social phobia and a prescribed nasal spray, the only effect you’d get would be a dripping nose,” he told me last year when I spoke to him for a New Scientist story.

Assuming a connection between brain chemicals and moral understanding, rather than education or personal experience controlling morality, is just about half a step away from being a modern version of eugenics, with low oxytocin levels being the current equivalent to a low-browed troglodytic thug from a hundred years ago.

Activist and fundraiser Dan Palotta thinks our approach to charity is wrong. It’s a puritanical mindset, he believes, to think that philanthropical nonprofits should scrimp and save on things like advertising, fundraising, and CEO pay if they want to accomplish anything. You gotta spend money to make money, baby.

Nonprofit workers should be rewarded for their merit in solving problems like hunger and homelessness. Otherwise, the best minds of our generation will go into more financially rewarding fields, like banking. The nonprofit world just gets left with the second-rate, willing to work for substandard wages. The organizations that employ them won’t be able to raise money and innovate.

Because that’s the problem with the nonprofit world: not enough innovation.

Nonprofits can easily just pay themselves and get nothing done; that happens. In the process, whatever problem they were trying to solve barely gets addressed because the nonprofit is spending so much money on administration. This is why nonprofits are almost always measured by their funding percentages, based on their annual reports and tax filings. If advertising and fundraising did lead to more money for cancer research by scale, it would be readily evident in the yearly numbers.

Palotta’s solution is that nonprofit fundraising should be a for-profit enterprise. This idea of keeping nonprofits lean stems from Puritanism, he’s written.

Palotta’s consultant work, running events as for-profit fundraising campaigns for causes like AIDS research and cancer awareness, had problems when only a small percentage of the proceeds being raised were actually going to direct services. In one incidence, rather than a promised 60% of proceeds going to charity, the fundraising, advertising, and event costs cut into expectations so far that only 19% made it in the end. When too much money was being spent on marketing materials and large salaries for employees like Palotta, many of the larger fundraisers took offense and left to form a more formal tax exempt non-profit that ran similar events and paid their staff less overall.

Sugata Mitra is obsessed with the concept that children can teach themselves. He discovered that, when left alone with a computer, children in New Delhi could figure out how to browse the internet without being able to read the language that was written on the screen. For him this was a realization that computers could revolutionize education. In places of extreme poverty where good teachers won’t go, computers could serve as improvised learning centers. They provide something called “outdoctrination,” rather than indoctrination, where students can find information as they want it.

His vision eventually begins to sound a lot like just letting kids browse the internet. Yes, children can teach themselves how to use appliances, but his vision of a teacherless education system is a drastic oversimplification of what is involved in education. His vision of a technology-based education system sounds eerily like strapping kids to an Ipad potty training seat and calling it a day.

Computers definitely have an important role to play in education, but his ideas become contentious once you realize the current battle that is taking place in the U.S. over public education. Public, charter, and private school systems are entering into million dollar contracts with technology firms while laying off teachers by the thousands. MOOCs are being heralded as the future of learning, but the percentages of students who complete coursework through online classes is staggeringly low. And really, if kids could teach themselves coursework, then it would only be matter of sending cheap textbooks in lieu of computers to third world countries.

“Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk on Ragu’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce is the ultimate in TED’s inspirational contrarianism. There isn’t just one type of spaghetti sauce; there are hundreds. What you think you know about the most mundane thing isn’t really true; it’s the complete opposite. And the reality will amaze you.

His ability to spin that yarn is quite fascinating once you realize that this talk is really just about how there are different types of spaghetti sauce, something anybody with the most basic familiarity with Italian cooking might comprehend. It’s not about how marketing companies desperately try to pander to consumers in any way they can because they have no understanding of what connotes a good product. It’s about how Ragu uses horizontal segmentation to underscore how adept the marketing world is at grasping these concepts and then turning them into products like Ragu Zesty. Pure genius.

Gladwell’s marketing mysticism may not be on the same diabolical level as injecting massive amounts of sulfuric gas into the sky, but his prophetic insight into the nature of condiments particularly irks me because I vividly remember reading his New Yorker story on mustard, spaghetti sauce and ketchup that this talk was based on. In it, he details how Heinz perfected their recipe to the point that no other brand can compete. Their recipe of high fructose corn syrup and tomato paste is the best possible ketchup. Somehow tomato sauce can have an infinite spectrum of flavor but ketchup, which is pretty much just tomato sauce, has a platonic ideal. How can this be?

There’s many more. If you’re not an Appalachian dirt farmer or living in sub-poverty conditions in the inner city, you might be interested to hear Niall Ferguson talk about the 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity like consumerism and a positive work ethic that have led to America’s demonstrable wealth. Barbara Fredrickson’s theory of a positivity tipping point might help those struggling with depression by encouraging them to just be happy enough that they achieve wealth and fame. Roger Stein thinks we should create investment markets for experimental drugs because the unregulated market of the pharmaceutical industry really needs less regulation and a market system that is dependent on profitability to make life-saving drugs.

TED is not completely to blame for the proliferation of these ideas. The books, projects, and visions were popular beforehand. Allowing these speakers the chance at a TED Talk just gave their malformed ideas even more publicity.

These contrarian insights wouldn’t make it very far if the whole concept of public intellectualism hadn’t already been corrupted. Whether or not somebody has an Earth-shattering idea with a flimsy study that goes against decades of scientific research and common sense has little to do with that idea’s potential for success. It’s a ripe atmosphere for anybody with a good stage performance and a quirky idea to sell whatever it is they are thinking about.

Awkward intellectuals with a critical opinion and without something to sell don’t make it very far. Insecure, unkempt, stammering scientists who obsess over details and believe in staid-sounding ideas can’t really cut the morning talk show circuit either. It’s unlikely that many of them will take to the stage to inspire thousands with grandiose visions about how everything was already working relatively well and also let’s not try to disrupt the construction industry or reinvent how we approach heart surgery.

Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and programmer whose work appears in The Atlantic Cities, The LA Review of Books and The Morning News.