9 Comments

I watched some more of your TED talks and found your delivery pleasantly much more at ease (breath, voice).

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Any big area of life has many motives mixed in, so I'm talking about the main motive.

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Question about your argument that medicine isn't about health (this generalizes) there appear to be notable rare exceptions to that argument. Namely vaccinations are about health and have very little in the way of showing that you care. Evidence in favor of that is that there is next to no followup you rarely know why they are treating you. Getting jabbed with a needle hurts and then they leave you. It's extremely effective at preventing the diseases that killed our grandparents . So when you say X isn't about Y instead it's about Z, some parts of X may be almost exclusively about Y and not about Z. Or that some part of X is more about Y than Z. There exist other examples but Vaccination is the strongest one. Given that vaccines save more lives than perhaps the rest of the medical system combined.

Of course stuff like acupuncture is literally the inverse; it's all about showing that you care. There are no actual health related benefits. So Acupuncture is truly about showing that you care.

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This was an amazing talk! The editing, sound quality, slides, and organization were all spot on. I'm curious whether your book sales see a significant rise after this talk.

By the way, you should write a TED book about this. Those are short and accessible presentations of the main ideas. While I like your current book, I fear it's much too technical for the average person, or even for a scientifically literate person who doesn't have much time on their hands.

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I think the content of your whirlwind introductory tour of an em era was great. It’s hard to boil so many ideas into so little time and I thought you did well. I also thought you did a good job of mentioning (three times, well-paced throughout) how you are presenting analysis/predictions, not that you were hoping for all of these things to happen.

You mention how all “humans must retire at once, for good”. I was hoping you’d spend at least one more sentence about how ems would put people like coal miners, prostitutes, and bodyguards out of a job and not just dramatically reduce wages.

The comment about the president and the safe was not well connected to the rest of the speech and I was left confused what greater point you were trying to make or general pattern/trend you wanted to give an example of. You might need to add a sentence or two before the safe/president example. Everything else was smooth and well integrated.

More towards the beginning and less towards the end, you were short of breath and your voice showed signs of nervousness. This is understandable but still distracting. This is my biggest criticism, which is to say you did a great job overall.

One shortcoming of my feedback on the speech content is I’m already somewhat familiar with your work on ems via your blog, so I can’t give the feedback of a person who’s never heard of any of this before.

I look forward to more of your speeches and other work.

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Too late to change this one, but not too late to learn lessons for future talks.

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Ah, thanks. Are you interested in feedback/criticism on your speech at this time?

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Follow the link to the TED website.

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Very nice! The embedded TED video on Age of Em won't load for me, and there's an audio-only video on youtube. Do you know of any alternative video? I'd like to watch/listen again with visuals.

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