Yes and a lot of finance jobs fall into this category including investment banking, hedge funds and VC firms. The more selective ones will typically only consider people from a few schools. It's just a way filter.
The article is full of bold assertions with no (or inadquate) evidence:
"TED is not simply “engaging” and “entertaining” but a specific type of entertainment that is increasingly out of touch and exclusionary."
How do you measure "out of touch and exclusionary"?
"At first, I thought I was laughing alone; however, it turns out that lots of other people are equally unimpressed by the current state of TED. From the feedback I’ve received, I’m not the only one who does not take TED very seriously or worse, views the whole project as suspect."
Wow so people who follow you agree with you. Shocker.
"So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery."
Really? Which ones?
"TED attempts to present itself as fresh, cutting edge, and outside the box but often fails to deliver. It’s become the Urban Outfitters of the ideas world, finding “cool” concepts suitable for being packaged and sold to the masses, thereby extinguishing the “cool” in the process. Cutting-edge ideas not carrying the Apple-esque branding are difficult to find."
As measured by ???
"At TED, “everyone is Steve Jobs” and every idea is treated like an iPad."
I've learned over time that when people start making universal assertions like this, they're usually lacking in data but full of shit.
The article is clearly not substantiated. Personnally, I avoid treating TED as a whole, because the quality can vary from one speaker to another, from one topic to the next. It's not always consistent, it's not always cutting-edge, it's not always new. TED's promise is to deliver "ideas worth sharing", but not all of them can fit that description. This being said, they still do a pretty good job to keep the quality high.
The ironic thing was most of the people he cited as agreeing with him basically didn't, or agreed that TEDx was crap (which is a separate argument from TED).
I for one agree that articles like this need a lot more support to be influential. I wish that Hacker News would focus more on technical things, but who am I to judge? I read the post and now I'm even commenting on it. :)
I like to say that "the biggest barrier to success is failure." In other words, the longer you let a goal go unrealized, the harder it becomes to start because your repeated failures build up into a mental obstacle.
Turning something into a habit takes a lot of repetition so it's better to just get started with a modest objective so you can create a pattern of success.
Exactly. Those of you who think the world is fair or based on merit need to read "Power: Why Some People Have It - And Others Don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer.
The world isn't fair. This is true whether you're in academia or industry, and accepting this fact isn't a bad thing, nor does it mean you've given in to the dark side. As retube points out, if you don't play the game you're conceding before you even start.
It's not like he did an n=1 study. He just assumed it wasn't going to work for him. My impression of the article, given that it doesn't really bring up data beyond the total number of acetaminophen-related cases of liver toxicity, is that the author believes he should be able to buy the drugs separately, and is denied this opportunity by the government. After that, he says everything he can to support his beliefs, and pooh-poohs arguments against it.
Oxycodone is a very good opioid and, if you aren't abusing it, it is affordable for most people, even if you don't have insurance (http://www.rxassist.org/Search/Prog_Details.cfm?program_Id=1...). But if you need it every day to support your habit, it's too expensive, so vicodin and its friends are the drugs of choice.
