Looking for the 80:20 Rule in TED Talk

Will it be there 80% of the time?

Most of you are familiar with the 80:20 rule more formally called the Pareto Principle which says that you get 80% of the results for 20% of the effort. It is suggested more broadly that 80% of the value will be found looking at 20% of the examples.

I was recently watching Josh Kaufman’s Ted talk The first 20 hours — how to learn anything where he is describing how we can get competency in many scales in 20 hours rather than the 10,000 hours commonly thought necessary for expert performance.

That is probably much better than an 20:80 ratio.

I then had an odd thought. If I watched ten Ted & Tedx talks would I feel like I got 80% of the value from two of them. Clearly an experiment waiting to happen.

With advanced apologies that I am rating talks despite them each being given by someone who is light years ahead of me ….

… and of course with encouragement that you run your own experiment and share the results with us all here.

A future interesting set of experiments might be whether you can predict in advance which ted talks you will find valuable. Ten years ago, I had found that “Ted” talks had a much greater chance of being valuable to me than “Tedx” talks. I don’t know whether that is currently true. I could imagine seeing whether recency, overall popularity, topic area or other factors would good predictors.

1. I will count Kaufman’s talk (above) as valuable in general and to me in specific even though it had no new information, it put it together in an insightful manner that I hadn’t internalized.
2. And count The Math Behind Basketball’s Wildest Moves | Rajiv Maheswaran talk as probably not very valuable in general, but very general to me in specific.
3. And count The math behind Michael Jordan’s legendary hang time — Andy Peterson and Zack Patterson as not especially useful to a general audience; but cute and of interest to some particular sub audience.
4. Thinking about categorizing The new positions of basketball: Muthu Alagappan at TEDxSpokane as was an interesting exercise. Alagappan speaks well and has good now information about a set of topics I deeply care about; but somehow I didn’t find it valuable and expect a general audience would to find it even less so. This strikes me as an odd combination.
5. Kenn Dickinson in Secrets of elite athletes | Kenn Dickinson |TEDxSnoIsleLibraries is an amazing speaker. Despite his great speaking, great organization and all that, I didn’t find it valuable.
6. I love the title of After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver. It had 20 millionish views. I could only find one sentence of content in it and I didn’t find it valuable.
7. I also loved the title of Why you should speak English like you’re playing a video game | Marianna Pascal | TEDxPenangRoad and unsurprisingly Pascal speak extraordinarily well. Only 20,000ish views. Important ideas well and cleverly delivered and I think it would be good for the world to understand and apply the ideas but still I didn’t find it valuable.
8. I was excited by the title Time and the brain: the illusion of now | Hinze Hogendoorn | TEDxUtrechtUniversity as I have an oddly long sense of now and short sense of forever. 100,000ish views. Topic was unrelated to what I was expecting and still an an important topic for a general audience. I found most of it dull but very near the end there is a very interesting result. Still I didn’t find it overly valuable.
9. Definitely a clever title in Why the world does not exist | Markus Gabriel | TEDxMünchen and equally clever rhetorical technique. Again about 100,00 views. Despite all the cleverness and wonderful technique, it didn’t hold my attention well, I didn’t find it convincing and I didn’t find it valuable.
10. I was surprised by the content of What if the universe was created just for you? | Assiye Süer | TEDxGöteborg given its title. About 170,000 views. Interesting subject matter, but I didn’t find it valuable.

So two out of ten. Maybe Pareto does work here.

There are some problems with my experimental design, threeof which occured to me before I even finished these ten videos.

1. Selection of talks
2. Evaluation of value
3. Tiny sample size

I would be interested to hear about ways to run a better experiment here.

And perhaps I will figure out whether Pareto works about 80% of the time which doesn’t seem like it is itself an application of Pareto, but it would be cute.