It came up in comments that disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser shares a name with a famous skydiver! The primatologist does not seem to have ever delivered a Ted talk, but a quick search turned up this from his namesake:
It’s hard to know where to start, but I think my personal favorite here is the bit quoted above. Fake it till you make it, indeed.
P.S. I don’t begrudge this guy some self-promotion. I promote myself too! If this guy’s motivational speeches are motivating, and if his brand naming is effective, more power to him. His mini-bio is funny, so I’m laughing. I’m not criticizing. When people lie or misrepresent research results, that annoys me. Telling true inspiring stories, or telling fiction and labeling it as such, I’ve got no problem with that.
Also, if someone wants to pay a lot of money for something painted by someone who doesn’t know how to paint . . . again, nothing wrong with that! There are things in art other than technique. So, yeah, please do not interpret my laughter at that mini-bio as a criticism. It’s just funny, that’s all.
You can sort of see why a conceptual artist would be proud that they could sell a picture without being able to paint. Because that implies that the conceptual content itself is doing the work, rather than the superficial painterly virtues (“retinal qualities” is the phrase, I believe). If your painting looked great, someone might buy it even if the underlying concepts sucked. That’s the fatal flaw of all that gorgeous Renaissance art.
“Andrew Gelman is such a good statistician that he was able to get a paper accepted even though he submitted it in Papyrus font …” That would be kind of impressive, right?
Zapf Dingbats or it doesn’t count.
I’m a conceptual artisan. I founded a company which names bespoke equations. I sold my 4th most expensive equation at a TED talk without really being able to … uh … ‘equate’.
I, for one, am mystified by the function of “an international naming agency”. Are they responsible for supplying the annual quota of baby names?
Bewilderingly, you are not that far off! https://erfolgswelle.ch/naming-agentur-namensagentur/new-first-names
At first I was shocked that the price he charges for a baby name is $34,000 , but then I remembered that these are *international* baby names, bargain bin national names whose umlauts and tildes fall off at the first border crossing.
*not* bargain bin
I checked Mr Hauser’s corporate website. It appears to be an umbrella company for all the services he offers. While it primarily focuses on motivational speaking (book a talk, visit an event, spend time with the speaker), the naming agency stands out quite a bit. It combines marketing with legal services — they help you choose a name for your company or product and then ensure it becomes your official name by registering it as a trademark (if I understand correctly). The website states that they were once even hired to find suitable street names.
Now I am left wondering whether they conduct any kind of market research. Or are they making changes in the style of Cracker Barrel, without researching their customer base? Full disclosure: I didn’t follow the Cracker Barrel redesign controversy much beyond the headlines. Perhaps they actually did conduct market research for their redesign. If so, either the research was insufficient or they failed to pay attention to the results.
For those thinking about giving a TED-talk or TEdx-talk or TED-whatever-talk, here’s some information and/or advice.
“How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o
-Checked out the website of erfolgswelle and/or Hauser.
-Saw a link to a TedxTalk titled “The power of naming your dreams”
-Made it to around 1.37 minutes
-Was just enough to note that this talk up to that point seems to be almost a copy of the parody one, including the timestamp of the anacdotal, endearing, personal story around 1.23 minutes
I am pondering whether to pre-register a study that tracks down social scientists who did a TED-whatever-talk and measure some personality features. My pre-registered hypothesis will be that these people will score relatively high on characteristics like narcissism.
I wrote something about “the natural selection of bad psychological scientists”, and I mention a few “types” of “bad” psychological scientists, one of which is “the narcissist type”. Here’s what I wrote concerning that:
“Additionally, there could be a “Narcissist Type” psychological scientist, who could have just as well ended up in the entertainment industry, working in finance, or becoming a CEO at some company. This type of psychological scientist might feel right at home in modern universities where “Nowadays, the principal is sort of a CEO who is supposed to implement new strategies for achieving more and more excellence.” (Binswanger, 2014, p. 53). Personality traits like narcissism might even offer some kind of “survival benefit” in academia (cf. Tijdink et al., 2016, p. 9). These might be the scientists who after having been found guilty of encouraging a subordinate to
inflate the sample size by three might say that “If we had done it three times, we would have gotten the same result anyway.” (Kornfeld, 2012, p. 879), and might view the subsequent criticism regarding the artificial inflation as “nitpicking” (Kornfeld, 2012, p. 879). This type of scientist might also be like a certain fraudulent psychological scientist who writes (for what it’s worth) in his book: “My multimedia classes went down pretty well. My teaching evaluations got better and better, which was nice. I was successful, and I got applause. That made me want more. After all, I loved the theater.” (Stapel, 2014, p. 90). This might be the type of scientist that gladly accepts an individual award for their scientific contributions, although it can be argued concerning prizes and their role in
science that “They also reinforce competitiveness, encourage “sharp elbows”, heighten disappointment and envy, encourage excessive claims to individual credit for essentially collaborative work and, on occasion, claims to credit for work done entirely by others.” (Zuckerman, 1992, p. 228). This might be the type of psychological scientist that writes “pop psychology” and “self-help” books (possibly based on findings and papers partly made possible by tax-paying members of the public), and goes on a book tour and signs books sold to members of the public. And they might also be the ones who are first in line to talk to the media, and share their (apparently valid and/or useful) insights concerning some currently “hot” topic with the world.”
This is the kind of [unprintable] which gives psychology a bad name*, but sadly proves to be wi[l]d[e]ly popular.
(For the fun of it: I came across this blog whilst looking for a social psychologist – I could only recall her surname – and thunk to meself that this guy looks really interesting (I just wish I could type as fast as he does). Now there’s serendipity for ya.
*next to that notorious editorial in the Journal of Experimental Psychology from 1960 or thereabouts which basically said ‘ANOVA of bust’. I still have Woodworth (1938) on my shelf, and never had any replication problems there. (Hint: in experimental psychology, if you can’t spot an effect by eyeballing your data, you probably haven’t got one.)
He’s the human that beats the AI as opposed to the other way round. I’m reading words, not sure what they mean. “The second most expensive picture at his first exhibition”: most expensive by what measure? the world’s second most expensive picture? his second most expensive among all the pictures he sold? if so, isn’t this evidence that he’s a two-hits wonder? “Flying over entire cities in freefall”: is this another way of saying he has parachuted in various cities? As someone who name things, his use of language seems imprecise!