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by ggchappell
4219 days ago
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Interesting article. Worth reading all the way through. FTA: > The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk. On the contrary, I think this idea would be an excellent topic for a TED talk. |
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I'm guessing TED has had 50+ presentations on "solutions" for Africa over the last 5 years. We'd expect that some of the ideas have failed to deliver. However, we can't expect TED organizers to give stage time to followup presentations explaining why they failed (or why the ideas at smaller scope didn't scale up to large one like they hoped.)
So yes, we would get more value out of hard-hitting TED talks explaining warts and difficulties but we can't expect TED themselves to highlight it. A similar concept is "publication bias" against negative or non-repeatable research results:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition