If TED isn't successful, how then would success look like for a conference of this kind? I don't think any conference at all is by itself a serious engine of innovation, and the more academic ones are much worse than TED talks, in my experience during academic conferences everyone pretty much expects up front to not understand anything at all from 90% of the talks, at least a half of the people will actively do something else than listening to the speaker, playing with their laptops and stuff, and pretty much the core motivation for everyone is A) the points for getting published in the conference proceedings and B) the party in the evening where one can finally get drunk and have some fun. The only chance of really learning something is if you know some work a bit upfront, or you know the people involved, and then researching it afterwards, so at best you get a little spark and you have to put in a ton of work to make something out of it. If you aren't consistently interested in some small range of topics you get nothing at all from it.
In other words, it seems we don't really know how to make innovation happen at wish. It works better in the universities in the undergraduate studies, where over months people genuinely interested in same intellectual pursuits have a chance to meet and get to know each other thanks to the wide range of classes and activities and people involved. They also get to share a common background, so they can understand each others work and their potential relations, a lot of important scientific work happened in "schools" which started with some figure great either at science and/or at organizing science, and which spanned several generations. So it's a slow process, it happens over years and takes sustained dedication of a large group of people, how would someone expect to contribute to this significantly via a one day event? Conferences are mainly social events in my view, and there is nothing wrong with that.
And then there is the general question how much influence do so-called "intellectuals" have in the world, as compared to the Napoleons and Alexanders.
In other words, it seems we don't really know how to make innovation happen at wish. It works better in the universities in the undergraduate studies, where over months people genuinely interested in same intellectual pursuits have a chance to meet and get to know each other thanks to the wide range of classes and activities and people involved. They also get to share a common background, so they can understand each others work and their potential relations, a lot of important scientific work happened in "schools" which started with some figure great either at science and/or at organizing science, and which spanned several generations. So it's a slow process, it happens over years and takes sustained dedication of a large group of people, how would someone expect to contribute to this significantly via a one day event? Conferences are mainly social events in my view, and there is nothing wrong with that.
And then there is the general question how much influence do so-called "intellectuals" have in the world, as compared to the Napoleons and Alexanders.