The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99
Reviewed by Carl Zimmer
Tonight, I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames.
What is this crisis? It is a crisis of our brains. The brains of our fellow citizens are being digitally rewired. How? Here is how. Hundreds of millions of people are gazing at online videos, spending billions of aggregate hours slack-jawed in front of their monitors. These videos are sucking up all the time that these people would otherwise spend reading the great books that you and I grew up with. Remember those days back in the Reagan administration when we little tykes would page through Cicero and Racine? No more. Instead, we face an epidemic of short-term distraction. These videos last no more than 18 minutes, and often less. As soon as one video is over, we can choose from hundreds of others with the click of a mouse. Each one is different from the last, flooding our brains with an unnatural wealth of variety. Very soon, we even become addicted to that variety. Yes, that's right, addicted. It's an addiction no different from cocaine, heroin, vodka, bingo, Ben & Jerry's, Law & Order streamed on Netflix, or MySpace.
Wait, I meant Facebook. Nobody uses MySpace anymore, so that can't be addictive.
Right. Where was I?
These videos are so addictive that they are cracking the very foundation of human civilization. The endless barrage of these tiny films erodes the circuitry in our prefrontal cortex that normally enable us to focus for long periods of time and compose Petrarchan sonnets to our loved ones. These videos evade the true complexity of life. They provide us with easy resolutions. They flatter us, rather than forcing us to ask tough questions about ourselves or our political system. We become zombies as the reward centers of the brain explode like fireworks, leaving us helpless victims for mind-controlling masters. Is it any wonder that the rise of these videos to global domination correlates perfectly with the rise of Kim Kardashian? What else could possible account for this coincidence?
Therefore we must take immediate steps to ban TED talks.
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The phenomenon of TED is a mixed bag. Let's leave aside the matter of the many thousands of dollars it costs to actually go to a TED conference, and the dubious ingroup effect that the ticket price promotes. I've never met anyone who shelled out that cash, and, chances are, you haven't either. But many of us know someone who has watched a TED talk for free. Their online videos have staggeringly huge audiences, of which I am a member. So let's just consider the videos. And, since Download the Universe is dedicated to science ebooks, let's just consider the videos of talks by scientists.
There are many good things about these talks. For one thing, there are a lot of them. In the United States, you can watch cable news for five hours and see, on average, only one minute of science coverage. Science documentaries are degenerating into odious tales of mermaids. TED waters our antiscientific desert.
A number of the science talks on TED are excellent. In this video Princeton biologist Bonnie Bassler describes how bacteria talk to each other, and what that might mean for everything from glowing squid to antibiotics. The writer Joshua Foer gives a precis of his best-selling book, Moonwalking With Einstein, on becoming a memory champion. MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden discusses how he's engineering neurons in living brains so that they will turn on and off in response to light.
These talks are excellent for two reasons. One reason is that the science is substantive and fresh. The other reason is that the talks themselves are well executed. These are not academic lectures that people watch because their grade depends on it. These are talks that are intended for the curious public. To work, they demand a delicate touch–an understanding of what you can and cannot assume if your audience is made up of hundreds of thousands of people. They also demand all the graces of good oratory, such as the careful delivery of words, and strategically deployed rises and falls in cadence. There is no droning recitation of PowerPoint in the best of these talks. People often fixate on the high-end video quality of TED talks–the quick cuts between several camera angles, the crisp audio. But one of the most important reasons that TED talks are so distinctive has to do with the speakers themselves. They work very hard to compose and rehearse their talks.
And in crafting their presentations, these speakers are not selling out. Rather, they're continuing an old tradition in science. The technology of TED may be new, but scientists have been giving these talks for a long time. In the late 1800s, the English zoologist Thomas Huxley, lectured about evolution to throngs of working class Londoners. And even earlier, Michael Faraday waxed poetic about the flame of a candle (the subject of Deborah Blum's recent review here).
****
Unfortunately, some TED talks about science don't live up to Huxley's example. The problem, I think, lies in TED's basic format. In effect, you're meant to feel as if you're receiving a revelation. TED speakers tend to open up their talks like sales pitches, trying to arouse your interest in what they are about to say. They are promising to rock your world, even if they're only talking about mushrooms.
So the talks have to feel new, and they have to sound as if they have huge implications. A speaker can achieve these goals in the 18 minutes afforded by TED, but there isn't much time left over to actually make a case–to present a coherent argument, to offer persuasive evidence, to address the questions that any skeptical audience should ask. In the best TED talks, it just so happens that the speaker is the sort of person you can trust to deliver a talk that comports with the actual science. But the system can easily be gamed.
In some cases, people get invited to talk about science thanks to their sudden appearance in the news, accompanied by flashy headlines. Exhibit A, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who claimed in late 2010 to have discovered bacteria that could live on arsenic and promised that the discovery would change textbooks forever. When challenged by scientific critics, she announced to reporters like myself that she would only discuss her work in peer reviewed journals. Three months later, she was talking at TED.
The problem can get even more serious in TED's new franchise, TEDx, which is popping up in cities around the world. Again, some TEDx talks are great. Caltech physicist (and DtU editor) Sean Carroll talking about cosmology? Whatever you've got, I'll take. But some guy ranting about his grand unified theory that he promises will be a source of unlimited energy to fuel the planet? Well, just see how far you can get through this TEDx talk before you get loaded into an amublance with an aneurysm.
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The most vexing problem of all comes when a famous scientist gives a TED talk without feeling the need to hew to science or to deliver a coherent argument. And I can't offer a better case study than a five-minute talk that psychologist Phil Zimbardo gave last year on the troubles faced by boys and men today–or, as Zimbardo puts it in an annoyingly faux-cool way, "guys."
Before you watch this very short video, it's important to recall what Zimbardo has done. His most famous accomplishment was the so-called Stanford prison experiment, in which he had college students play the roles of prisoners and guards. In a shockingly short period of time, the volunteers had become absorbed into their roles, with the guards sadistically relishing their power. Zimbardo has served as the president of the American Psychological Association and has written a number of bestsellers and textbooks.
And then this distinguished psychologist came to TED and delivered a rapid-fire bombardment of disconnected statistics and sweeping generalizations without any serious evidence backing them up. In this talk, he ends with a warning that our species will descend to the level of banana slugs. It's like the punchline of a joke.
It pains me to think that hundreds of thousands of people have spent five minutes of their lives watching this stuff. Even one minute is too much. But if I got so enraged that I began to rant that watching TED talks is a dangerous addiction that is rewiring brains, you would–I hope–demolish my attempt to biologize my own bugaboos.
Yet that's exactly what Zimbardo is trying to do with guys. Guys aren't doing well in school. Guys aren't being good fathers. There must be an underlying cause. Well, guys are on the Internet a lot these days. And they watch a lot of pornography online. Bingo! The Internet, and online porn in particular, are addictions rewiring the brains of guys, and making them incapable of being true men.
The more charitable among you may think that there's a coherent argument here, one that is hard to present in just five minutes. Well, there's an ebook to go along with this talk, entitled The Demise of Guys. While it's far tinier than a tome, it does have a few chapters, and even some footnotes. Alas, if you drop three bucks for some insight, you will find a jumble that's just as incoherent and unconvincing as the talk. You'll spend half an hour instead of five minutes lost in its chaos.
The Demise of Guys is a mish mash of quotes and numbers. Zimbardo and his co-author Nikita Duncan give a column in the Daily Mail about bad boyfriends just as much credibility as a peer-reviewed paper. They cite press releases. They insert an unscientific survey of TED viewers about what they think about pornography. They leap from video games to ADHD to fatherless families, giving just a few hundred words of attention before leaping off to the next hot-button topic.
There's no question that there are some major shifts these days in the social role of men, and the psychological causes and effects of that shift are worth exploring. But The Demise of Guys charts a path to be avoided, not explored.
The most vexing part of the ebook is its claim that the brains of guys are being "digitally rewired" (their words) through an addiction to online video games and pornography. Zimbardo joins the growing swarm of doomsayers who complain that technology today is altering our brains. Of course, juggling and chess alter our brains, as does just about anything we do very much. If our brains couldn't be rewired, we would live our entire lives in a sub-toddler state. Zimbardo has a long way to go before he reaches the absurd heights of Susan "I point to autism, I point to the Internet, that is all" Greenfield. But he's off to a great start.
Zimbardo's treatment of addiction is even more flawed. He takes it as a given that the intensity of video games and online porn allow them to take over the addiction areas of the brain, and are thereby destroying men. He simply ignores any scientific literature about addiction that doesn't support his idea. There's lots of research, for example, that indicates that even the most intense drugs, like heroin, turn only a small fraction of people who try them into addicts. To understand why some people become addicts, it's necessary to consider the other factors in people's lives. Addiction is strongly associated with psychiatric disorders, for example, as well as unemployment.
Internet addiction–or, as it's usually called, pathological Internet use–also affects a small fraction of users. In a new study on nearly 12,000 adolescents, Swedish researchers found that only 4.4% suffered from pathological Internet use. That rate breaks down to 5.2% of boys versus 3.8% of girls. Why is the percentage so low, when so many people use computers? Perhaps because only some people are uniquely vulnerable to addiction, Internet or otherwise. In one study in Germany, 27 out of 30 people with pathological Internet use also have a psychiatric disorder. Their use of the Internet may have more to do with an underlying problem than with some mythical lure of the Internet itself.
For the parents of kids–boys and girls–who are consumed by their computer, this pathological Internet use can be heartbreaking. And in some cases it may indeed have a terrible effect on the lives of those children. But is this the demise of guys? Guys with a capital G? Hardly.
Zimbardo never seriously grapples with this kind of research in his book, even to mount an argument against it. Instead, he races off to his next anecdote, his next bullet-point list of statistics. And that's the most TED-like quality of The Demise of Guys. When a TED talk ends, the lights go out. There's no time for questions.
Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses
Lisaschamess says:
i point to chopper/grater/slicer, i point to Ginzu knives. BUT WAIT. THAT’S NOT ALL.
sorry. I’ve been watching a lot of Home Shopping Network. Or TED. I forget which.
and that is all.
Lisaschamess says:
also, is it just me, or have we never seen Zimbardo and Ian McShane
in the same room.
SWENJEN!
http://tinyurl.com/c5so6ob
Reuniting says:
I’m a great fan of Zimmer, but this time his sleight-of-hand is as unseemly as anything he’s criticizing in others. The study he cites as the “crowning blow” of his argument was of ninth-graders in Europe. This study is unlikely to capture the full extent of the problem of Internet addiction, as some parental control is still in the picture and many youngsters that age do not have unlimited private access to the Internet. It’s also worth noting that the test the researchers used measures addiction in terms of such things as time spent, but doesn’t ask about all the symptoms Zimbardo mentioned: impaired ability to concentrate, increased social anxiety, sexual performance problems, etc. (A 2010 German study found that time spent doesn’t correlate with problems from use. Pursuit of novel stimulation does, i.e., number of applications opened.) In any case, if 1/20 boys are already engaged in pathological use by some measure (the study also measured “maladaptive use” but doesn’t give the stats on that), how many will be addicted by the time they are 18? Or by age 22 after they have had unlimited access for years? Perhaps Zimmer would like to consider this study instead, which showed that 15% of university students in Iran met the researchers’ criteria for Internet addiction. (“Impact of Addiction to Internet on a Number of Psychiatric Symptoms in Students of Isfahan Universities, Iran, 2010” An earlier report about the study, which broke results down by gender, found rates as high as 25% of university males.) In fact, there are many studies coming out now on Internet addiction, and, overall, they provide strong support for Zimbardo’s hypothesis that Internet addiction can alter brains. (So do the thousands of self-reports on numerous threads on various websites where men gather.) Moreover, the Internet addiction studies are consistent with decades of research on gambling addiction and more recent studies on videogame addiction. How could Internet porn use be the exception? It’s tough to get a handle on the effects of a fast-moving phenomenon like highspeed Internet use because symptoms take time to develop. Few people instantly become addicts. Addiction is a disease of plastic brain changes, and most behavioral addicts need years to cross into actual addiction. I hope Zimmer will give this subject some more thought and careful research before his next piece on it.
The Weyfarere says:
Thank you so much for this informed criticism! So many people watch TED talks and just mindlessly accept every trite idea that’s fed to them. Sure, some of them are actually tremendous, but I had huge problems with Zimbardo’s ideas – widely gobbled up credulously – and you articulated it all so well.
Carl Zimmer says:
Reuniting: When I use quotation marks, I do so to quote someone. Yet no where in my own post do I refer to the German study on pathological Internet use and psychiatric diseases as a “crowning jewel.” I offered it as one explanation for the low prevalence of PIU in the Swedish study on 12,000 students–a study which you notably avoided mentioning. If indeed PIU is an addiction, then we should look to better studied addictions–such as to heroin and cocaine–to understand how addictions occur. And there, again, there is lots of evidence that factors such as psychiatric diseases and unemployment factor into whether people become addicts or not. You declare that “there are many studies coming out now on Internet addiction, and, overall, they provide strong support for Zimbardo’s hypothesis that Internet addiction can alter brains.” Really? Alter brains? Do they create the kinds of alterations to the reward pathway seen in cocaine addicts? Where are those studies? Why didn’t you cite them? And–much more importantly–why didn’t Zimbardo?
Reuniting says:
Thanks for your reply. I think I’ve confused you by shoehorning too many details into my comment. I wasn’t suggesting you referred to the German study. I mentioned it as evidence that unless researchers ask the right questions, they won’t reveal the aspects of Internet use that are most closely related to pathological use. The German study showed that in the case of porn, pursuit of novelty, not time spent, was most closely associated with Internet addiction problems. It’s not clear whether the standard test (Young Internet Addiction Study) does as good a job as it might in the case of Internet porn. For the human brain, novelty is its own reward (i.e., releases dopamine), which is what makes ever novel Internet pornography vastly different from static porn of the past, in terms of its power to captivate.
Most of my post was taking on the study you cited in support of your argument: (“Prevalence of pathological Internet use among adolescents in Europe: demographic and social factors”). Various other studies are finding higher percentages of addicts in subjects only a few years older.
The new adolescent study is interesting as far as it goes, but ‘unlimited access’ appears to be a major factor in addictions to natural rewards–the rewards we evolved to pursue. For example, give rats unlimited access to cafeteria food, and almost all will binge to obesity (Dopamine D2 receptors in addiction-like reward dysfunction and compulsive eating in obese rats (2010)). Sexual arousal is an even more powerful natural reinforcer than food. The heroin research is not as relevant because it’s not a natural reward (or a superstimulating version of one, such as junk food or Internet porn). Only some 15% of substance users become addicts. In contrast, 79% of adult Americans are overweight, and half of those are obese. Most of the latter are addicted to food, according to David Linden, author of “The Compass of Pleasure.” Psychiatric diseases and unemployment may not explain as much in the case of addiction to natural rewards.
My main point was that most youngsters don’t yet have unlimited access to Internet porn, so the new European study of ninth graders is of limited value. I’d also like to see the study’s numbers for “maladaptive use,” not just pathological use, as those kids might also be at risk for the kinds of troubles Zimbardo pointed to.
In case you’re not aware of what’s going on in Internet addiction research, there’s a list of recent studies below. But first, I want to point out that neurobiological research has revealed that addiction is fundamentally one disease, not many different diseases. Last year the 3000 addiction specialists of the American Society of Addiction Medicine issued a public statement to this effect (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-08/asoa-arn072111.php).
Addiction-related brain changes are triggered by the same molecular switch in both chemical and behavioral addicts (http://dept.wofford.edu/Neuroscience/NeuroSeminar/pdfSpring2006/a7.pdf). Those changes, already measured in human brains using techniques such as neuroimaging, include desensitization, sensitization and hypofrontality (changes in white and gray matter). They’ve been seen in gambling addicts, videogamer addicts, and now Internet addicts (some of the latter studies include porn use as well). These brain changes also correlate with cognitive and other measurable impairments, much as Zimbardo warns.
N.B.: All the fundamental brain changes seen in substance addicts have now been seen in Internet addicts. Notice how recent this research is.
1. Abnormal White Matter Integrity in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder: A Tract-Based Spatial Statistics Study (2012)
2. Reduced Striatal Dopamine Transporters in People with Internet Addiction Disorder (2012)
3. Effects of electroacupuncture combined psycho-intervention on cognitive function and event related potentials P300 and mismatch negativity in patients with internet addiction (2012)
4. Reduced Striatal Dopamine D2 Receptors in People With Internet Addiction (2011)
5. Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder. (2011)
6. Male Internet addicts show impaired executive control ability evidence from a color-word: Stroop task (2011)
7. Enhanced Reward Sensitivity and Decreased Loss Sensitivity in Internet Addicts: An fMRI Study During a Guessing Task (2011)
8. The neural basis of video gaming (2011)
9. Preliminary study of Internet addiction and cognitive function in adolescents based on IQ tests (2011)
10. Brain correlates of craving for online gaming under cue exposure in subjects with Internet gaming addiction and in remitted subjects. (2011)
11. Changes in Cue Induced Prefrontal Cortex Activity with Video Game Play. (2010)
12. Altered regional cerebral glucose metabolism in internet game overusers: a 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography study (2010)
13. Impulse inhibition in people with Internet addiction disorder: electrophysiological evidence from a Go/NoGo study (2010)
14. Gray Matter Abnormalities In Internet Addiction: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study (2009)
15. Increased regional homogeneity in internet addiction disorder a resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging study (2009)
16. Cue induced positive motivational implicit response in young adults with internet gaming addiction (2011)
17. Brain activity and desire for Internet video game play (2011)
18. Excessive Internet gaming and decision making: Do excessive World of Warcraft players have problems in decision making under risky conditions? (2011)
19. Specific cue reactivity on computer game related cues in excessive gamers (2007)
Two studies from the above group found a reversal of Internet addiction markers:
1. Effects of electroacupuncture combined psycho-intervention on cognitive function and event related potentials P300 and mismatch negativity in patients with internet addiction (2012)
2. Brain correlates of craving for online gaming under cue exposure in subjects with Internet gaming addiction and in remitted subjects. (2011)
This study found IAD appears to cause multiple symptoms
Precursor or Sequela: Pathological Disorders in People with Internet Addiction Disorder (2011)
Todd Stark says:
Thanks for this critique, Carl. I’m an admirer of Phil’s work from way back, and I think there are some reasonable or at least intrguing points here, but I agree this talk is a largely incoherent mashup of ideas in search of a real argument. I’m not convinced he doesn,t have a worthy perspective, but he hasn’t made his case here. On the other hand, I think the fashionable trend now among science writers is to deny culture critiques reflexively and take a somewhat panglossian view of culture change, waving away the relics of our past like face to face interaction and books. As if our remarkable adaptability always works to our advantage eventually. There are tradeoffs every time we adapt ti something new. I don’t accuse you of ignoring that, Carl, your writings are particularly thoughtful. I do think you’ve adopted a little of that tone though when you seem to sneer at Zimbardo’s conceptual material along with his admittedly poorly sewn rug here. How much is Phil’s doing, how much the promotional format of TED is hard to say. I would suggest though that “pitching out corrupts within.”
Carl Zimmer says:
Reuniting–Sorry about the the weird formatting. I’m not sure how to fix it.
I appreciate all the references. There are certainly some intriguing findings among them, but nothing that supports Zimbardo’s blanket declaration that the Internet, video games, and online pornography are causing addictions that are transforming our entire society. Some *might* be consistent with his argument, but it’s an absurd leap to his sweeping claims. As I said in the review, the spread of Internet use around the world is an important subject to investigate, as are the large-scale shifts in marriage, parenting, etc. But to concoct a simple A causes B argument like Zimbardo does, larded with anecdotes and press clippings, is not the way to go about it.
Reuniting says:
Thanks for considering the material. I share your view that Zimbardo and Duncan might have done a better job of documenting and tempering their views. Nevertheless, the problems they raise do indeed seem to be affecting a lot of young, male Internet porn users/gamers.
In the case of porn, it’s very difficult to investigate the effects formally given that (1) control groups of “porn virgins” can no longer be found and (2) no one can ask test subjects to give up masturbation as it “might cause undue distress.” This is relevant because, at first, many who stop using porn discover they cannot climax without porn due to desensitization from overconsumption. So, to give up porn they have to, in effect, give up masturbation temporarily too.
The result is that volunteers who willingly give porn up are in the best position to compare Internet porn use versus no porn use. If you’re interested in intriguing phenomena, read the posts of the tens of thousands of guys giving up Internet porn across the Web – mostly due to sexual performance problems. (Links available upon request.) Most are reporting surprising benefits in terms of improved concentration, increased attraction to real potential mates, increased sexual magnetism, deeper voices, increased confidence and optimism, restored sexual performance and so forth. This suggests Zimbardo and Duncan are onto something.
Still, no one knows what percentage of young guys have been adversely affected. However, as I said, other studies have found much higher rates of addiction in older guys than the Europeans found in their study of 14.9-year olds. One thing is certain: Never have so many pubescents/adolescents started out their “sex lives” on highspeed, ever novel Internet porn. Our ancestors had nothing remotely like it as the human brain evolved – except, perhaps, the odd harem.
Moreover, teen brains are far more reactive to stimulation (novelty, weirdness, forbidden), and more plastic and therefore susceptible to addiction than are adult brains. It would be surprising if they *weren’t* showing effects from the introduction of constant 2-D sexual novelty via highspeed Internet. This is why I think it is hasty to assume that Zimbardo and Duncan are completely off-base.
Eric Pepke says:
Thanks for this critique. It’s appropriately mocking but scientific. It follows on the heels of an unscientific critique I just posted on Quora, where I got the link to here. (O the internet addiction!) I also respected Zimbardo a lot, mostly due to his book on shyness, which was a serious problem for me that I overcame. (Shyness, not the book.)
First, just watch the video without sound, if you cannot afford some of the trendier brain disorders, and watch his body language. It’s all tight and pinched. This should say something apropos to a guy who is criticizing people’s skill at body language.
Second, Guys™ are doing just fine these days. They are certainly doing better than they were in any decade since I was born in 1961. It’s true that they don’t know the Rules, but there’s a good reason for that: the Rules sucked. They are coming up with rules of their own, which are better.
Zimbardo needs to get out more. That black-clad look might work for him, if he spends a bit more time grooming and learns something, anything, about body language. After experiencing a few hot young pansexuals, he might get some sense back.
David Ley Phd says:
Great article – The use of (pseudo)brain science, by Zimbardo, Reuniting, etc., is all part of a moral panic, that tries to make us scared of the world we live in, technology, sex, masculinity and male sexuality. The various citations of brain changes offered by these zealots rarely show what they are claimed to show, and never do so on the basis of sound science. Instead, they take little nuggets of information and science fact, and expand it greatly into extrapolated science fiction – and somehow, the results always support their arguments that sex, the Internet, internet porn, and internet games are dangerous and destructive.
Frankly – I think that their limited, moralizing and paternalistic view of masculinity is offensive and more damning to men than the Internet ever will be. They are arguing that men (and society) should be protected from the irresistible dangers and temptations of the Internet, which men are supposedly just not strong enough to resist. A few hundred years ago, similar arguments were made as to why women shouldn’t be allowed to read, work, or view erotica. There are always people out there who try to use fear and panic to manipulate others, to try to restrain society from moving forward, and who fear that the world will end as a result of whatever change is happening latest. But, unbelievably, the world, humanity, men and women, keep on keeping on, and we constantly find new things to strive towards. That’s not addiction- that’s the nature of humanity’s quest for excellence. It brought us fire, the written word, space travel, and now the Internet. But I bet there were cavemen who feared the effects of fire on the teenagers, just like there are people now who fear the Internet.
For the interested reader, my new book The Myth of Sex Addiction explores the history of this current moral panic, and the way in which these folks try to control us, and make a profit at the same time, by making us fear sex, porn and technology.
Ruth says:
I am intrigued by the article and appreciate the points, but I confess that I got caught up by a few typos. Zimmer demonstrates the graces of good writing, but there were sentences with too many words (see below), and I started to get distracted from the excellent topic. I look for serious proofreading when I read articles online in order to take the author seriously.
EXAMPLES:
“The problem, I think, is lies in TED’s basic format.”
“There’s lots of research, for example, that shows that indicates that even the most intense drugs, like heroin turn only a small fraction of people who try them into addicts.”
And at the end, when I wanted the punchline, a striking typo:
“When a TED talk end, the lights go out.”
I sort of hate to be so picky. But I think each of us in our various fields should keep our standards up. Believe me, I am not being snarky here! I admire the article.
Signed,
an English major who wants to learn more serious science
C Van Youngman says:
My biggest complaint about this blog is the sloppy writing.
The author might want to find better words for “that”.
Here’s one example, “There’s lots of research, for example, that shows that indicates that even the ……….”
Carl Zimmer says:
Download the Universe does not have a copy editor on staff. (We don’t even have a staff, period!) So we always appreciate it when readers point out typos. I’m fixing the post now. Thanks.
Neurobonkers says:
I couldn’t agree more with this post, this same TED talk really hit a nerve with me. I wanted to attack it but the complete lack of citations makes TED talks a nightmare to deconstruct.
Have you seen Zimbardo’s film “I am Fish Head”? It is a full one hour and 18 minutes of almost entirely unsubstantiated psychobabble. The argument is not necessarily wrong and the evidence does not necessarily not exist but the authors simply fail to provide it. See my review of the film here http://neurobonkers.com/2012/03/22/corporate-psychopathy-or-witch-hunt/ It made me want to pull my hair out reviewing the film. When I wrote that review I put in a request from my lending library to get a book written by the producers of the film called “Snakes in Suits” in the hope that I could find the evidence for Zimbardos claims, it still hasn’t arrived so I’m no closer to learning whether Zimbardo actually has any citations or if he’s just making it up of the top of his head. Based on other reviews I’ve read of “Snakes in Suits”, I’m expecting the latter.
Ruth says:
I appreciate that, Mr. Zimmer! I actually wondered if you were interested in hiring a copy editor. 😉
Thanks for the openness.
Paul Danon says:
Is there evidence that people “fixate on the high-end video quality of TED talks … but … overlook the speakers themselves”?
Wilhem says:
But Zimbardo is by no means the only academician speaking about how modern technology is rewiring the minds of men: http://www.psmag.com/health/manic-nation-dr-peter-whybrow-says-were-addicted-stress-42695/
Job Satisfaction Survey says:
Sad to see a scientist like Zimbardo, and a format like TED, collide into ridiculousness
Klaus says:
Several other academics make statements like those of Zimbardo. A few examples: Peter Whybrow, Marnia Robinson, Gary Wilson an others.
Check this link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201206/porn-pseudoscience-and-fosb