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 1,000 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: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" were the best novel he had ever written.

I also encountered a project called Six Word Memoirs, where people were even asked to take their 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, you would get from 2.3 million words down to six thousand. So, I thought this was quite worthwhile. 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 on motivation was pretty good. If you haven't seen it, "Drop carrot, drop stick, bring meaning" is what he's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes. Some even included references to the speakers, such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style or the one 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—preferably involving total strangers. 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."

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. I thought of a different way, thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. So, what if I don't let people summarize individual TED Talks in 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. 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 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 never understood this. You know, some people really, they came up with their own wording of the truth.

I mean, 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 TED 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 summaries, 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 far, 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 99.9997 percent reduction in content.

And I would only pay ninety-nine dollars and fifty, so stay even below a hundred dollars for it. So, I had 50 overall summaries done. This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder. 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, but to me that kind of 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.