I have been doing quite a bit of design work on my computer in last couple of days, and it really helps me to concentrate my eyes if my ears are busy. So, I usually listed to a podcast or something as I work. Today, I listened to a few TED talks.

I have always had issues with the TED talks, ever since they described themselves as being ‘a group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value’. This sentence was so vomit-inducing, that I decided it was not for me. Then I saw Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, and reconsidered.

Even so, I never quite made my peace with the whole thing. Something about super-rich people getting together to talk about how super they are made me uncomfortable, and reached a nadir with this description of the most ghastly place I can imagine: a monument to its makers ego.

But I keep coming back for more. Some of the people deal with such interesting ideas. What is seductive is the length. Twenty minutes. How bad can twenty minutes be? If it’s boring, not too much time to waste; if its interesting, then I get something out of it.

But what do I get out of it, really? Today I realised. I get a nice conversation nugget I can deploy to look awfully clever. I get a cheap insight, one I half-understand if I am lucky, but one that gives me a sketchy overview of someone’s life’s work.

My understanding of what they said is so shallow, that basic questioning from someone who has not heard the talk reveals total ignorance. My ‘insight’ is so superficial, that far from making me see the world in a new way, it is forgotten within a couple of days.

I have had real insights in my life. Mostly, they were hard won. When experienced, they were not forgotten.

So: the people at the TED talks are no doubt very, very clever people, with deep, original ideas, which they are keen to share. This is great, and it is fantastic that TED share their talks so freely. But Richard Feynman wrote about how hard it was to truly know something. He said he was always amazed at how people he met claimed to know lots of things. He had spent his life trying to know a few, very basic, things. But really know them, not just superficially know them.

As a self-taught kind of person (I only went to University briefly: I have no qualifications) it is easy to be satisfied with superficial knowledge. But TED talks can have a negative effect on me: when one has just heard a talk about neuroscience, or something, it all seems so simple and interesting that I feels like some kind of genius.

But I am not. Instead, I am being a dilettante, and being guilty of worse crimes than I accused TED of committing.

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