“identifying experts on the TED talk circuit who are doing substantially dishonest or misleading work”—easy: with TED talks, assume guilty until proven innocent. Knowing someone has given a TED talk substantially diminishes my estimate of their credibility unless they are the sort of high-profile person who would be invited to give one as a matter of course (e.g. Bill Gates). The genre positively screams out for the invention of feel-good BS, or counterintuitive “insights” that are just false.
“identifying experts on the TED talk circuit who are doing substantially dishonest or misleading work”—easy: with TED talks, assume guilty until proven innocent. Knowing someone has given a TED talk substantially diminishes my estimate of their credibility unless they are the sort of high-profile person who would be invited to give one as a matter of course (e.g. Bill Gates). The genre positively screams out for the invention of feel-good BS, or counterintuitive “insights” that are just false.