TEDx does more to damage the TED brand than anything. The correct alternative to TED if you can't afford it is BIL, or watching the videos online and commenting somewhere like hn or twitter. TEDx is basically universally horrible.
This won't be a popular opinion around here but I've read quite a bit of Sheldrake's works and they strike me as very lucid. He's a scientist to the bone.
However, his findings go against many current scientific theories. This should be an opportunity for intellectual debate. I don't understand why many people think it's heresy to come to different conclusions about how the world works.
The editor of "Nature" actually called for his books to be burned. It's quite disheartening to see how a bit part of current "science" (including some internet mobs) has turned into a new version of the church that condemned Galileo.
1) You have a right to have unusual, heretical, controversial or just plain dumb opinions.
2) The scientific community is required to respect, and seriously debate your conclusions, regardless of their foundations.
Point (1) is valid. Calling for book-burning is silly. Some correct ideas do, indeed, seem wacky to begin with.
Point (2) is not. "Lucid" theories are worth almost nothing until backed by scientific rigor, peer review and the weight of evidence. Cf. "intelligent design" - a theory invented out of nowhere as a backstop against evolution. You're more than welcome to believe it (1), but real scientists shouldn't be wasting their time with it (2).
-- EDIT: I felt the need to add...
It's quite one thing to have an idea that you believe passionately, that you spend your life defending, that is ultimately proved true in the fullness of time.
It's quite another to dabble in a wide range of quackery, pushing unfounded positions in everything from constants of physics to animal telepathy and the conciousness of inanimate objects.
That's not perseverance in the face of scientific obstructionism, it's throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks.
polemic, you seem frustrated in your efforts to condemn.
Why? Are his ideas dangerous? Have they touched a nerve? Maybe that's a good thing.
This talk is not aimed at the scientific community anyway. It's aimed at a TED audience, who love a bit of creative, unconventional thinking with their rigorous scientific discoveries and rock solid demonstrations. So the talk was heavy on the creative, and light on the rigorous scientific demo, but that's ok... we have the option of not buying his book, and taking his ideas with a grain of salt.
No need to cry panic, no need to worry. Eventually, ideas such as these either gather momentum or die from lack of evidence. We don't need to put this speaker, or TED on trial just because someone speaks for 18 minutes about intriguing, exotic ideas that you don't like.
Firstly, I didn't say his ideas are dumb. I said you have a right to hold dumb ideas.
Secondly, some ideas are dumb, some ideas are quackery. It's a good thing to recognise that fact. If you don't like the terminology, well, I'm just saying it like it is.
I wouldn't say "intelligent design" was invented out of nowhere. It's an old (3000+ years old) concept. The name of it is new, but it's the same old tired dogma.
Assuming that human nature and basic demographics haven't changed much since Galileo, the class of people who used to be priests must still be around in roughly the same proportions today. Since they're obviously not priests any more, it's worth asking where they went.
Nobody should stop him from talking, of course, but I don't see any good reason for anyone to listen for more than a few minutes, either. Neither the scientific community nor society as a whole will benefit from spending time and energy "debating" ideas past the point where it becomes clear that they're fundamentally flawed. New, innovative ideas are great, but it turns out that we already know an awful lot about how the world works, including lots of very precise measurements that any new theory must match to be worth considering.
And if this talk is any example, Sheldrake really doesn't know what he's talking about, at least where physics is concerned. If he understood what we mean by "we've now defined the speed of light to be constant", he'd phrase his arguments differently (regardless of whether they're actually right or wrong). I certainly wouldn't call for his books to be burned, but I suspect the world might be a little bit be better off if they'd never gotten wide attention and distracted valuable brain cells from more useful tasks.
Scientists don't dislike his work because it goes against their theories. They dislike his work because there is no experimental support for it. If anyone could prove this stuff there would be nobel prizes galore for them. They can't prove it because he has the wrong type of theories and no possibility of proof.
Here's a video of Richard Feynman explaining what it takes for something to be real science, and why the letters from amateurs he keeps getting are incorrect. Sheldrake is no different from the people who wrote to Feynman:
There is also the issue of how much of their career a scientist needs to spend examining the theories of cranks. They have, after all, got their own jobs to do.
Perhaps it could be a tithe, in which scientists are ordered to spend one half day a week debunking perpetual motion machines before they are allowed to practice actual science?
Or perhaps the onus ought to be on Sheldrake to prove his theories rigorously first?
If it can motivate intellectual debate, then that's a good thing. Unfortunately on HN, it's motivated the book-burning brigade into a frenzy of condemnation.
Why don't people discuss the ideas presented instead of crying about how the ideas should never have made it to a TEDx video?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this talk. Those who are "outraged" should relax.
His main points are about thinking less dogmatically. He is a scientist, and he states the importance of science, he is only exploring the idea of moving beyond the dogma, and he is both qualified and well-spoken enough to earn a listen.
He makes valid points such as how science can't deal with the fact we're conscious. That's true. Science is still in the dark about consciousness. He proposes that our minds extend beyond our brains, which is an exciting and interesting idea worthy of consideration.
He talks casually, not conclusively, about the sensation of being stared at, which many of us are familiar with. He draws parallels with predator-prey relationships in nature.
He says "it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate within consciousness studies right now." [the question of "where" the images in our mind actually are]. And he is dead right.
Quite frankly, we need more outside of the box thinking. Don't take tokenadult's click-bait here. This talk is not centered on the speed of light, nor does he take aim at science in general.
If you want your quantum computers and interplanetary space travel to come online, you'll need to open your mind to everything including ideas presented in this talk.
Ah yes, but in typical "men in lab coats" testing environments, what we have is "blindfolded subjects attempting to guess whether persons were staring at them."
This is far removed from "prey detecting whether a predator is staring at them", which would be a much harder test to set up.
For humans, "prey" might mean someone with genuine sexual interest in you, staring at your backside. Try setting that up as a scientific test! Observer effect in full swing, and your results will be disappointing.
Not that I believe or support ideas because they're exotic and exciting. My point here is that it's worth keeping an open mind, precisely because science is entering uncomfortable areas such as consciousness, ego, identity, dreams.
It is very different and that is exactly the point. Experiments are not supposed to mimic the natural condition in which an effect is found, they are supposed to isolate the effect being tested and eliminate all confounding variables.
It might be the case that the "sense of being stared at" is real but it could easily be a combination of ordinary senses. By isolating the confounding variables scientists can determine whether this is an independent effect.
I don't disagree. It could easily be a combination of ordinary senses. Scientists not happy with people poly-filling the knowledge gaps with fictional ideas, have no choice but to improve their equipment for even more data capture and analysis.
It may be that the very act of staring at someone actually alters or influences something in the physical world, as those flowers do we've recently learned....
>"electrical fields—may work in concert with these other cues to provide extremely nuanced details about pollination status."
Along those lines, it's plausible that there's processes at work with staring we're currently unaware of, waiting for science to discover.
Better that fictional ideas about possible nature of matter come from scientists anyway. Having a go at guessing where science may uncover new mechanisms, or where current science deserves more attention, is a good thing to have a go at.
It's the equivalent of drawing attention to a new patch of ground for a fresh archeological dig, he's not actually claiming on the TEDx stage to have dug it up and found an alien artifact.
Sheldrake's actual talk is pretty decent, and this is another example of internet skeptics being intellectually dishonest. The blogger's entire argument is that Sheldrake is saying that the speed of light isn't constant, which he explicitly never says. The ironic thing is that this blog post actually proves Sheldrake's point.
Starting around 14:48 in the video, he says, "I myself think the constants may vary, quite considerably, well, within narrow limits, but they may all be varying. And I think the day will come when the scientific journals, like Nature, have a weekly report on the constants, like the stock market reports in newspapers. 'This week big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady,' and so on."
If Sheldrake expects the journal Nature to eventually publish weekly reports on the current value of the speed of light, that's a pretty clear statement that he thinks the speed of light isn't constant. And making that claim is pretty convincing evidence that Sheldrake doesn't understand the physics that he's so upset about. If he actually understood what is meant by "we've now defined the speed of light to be a constant", he would phrase his argument in different terms. (It would still have a lot of major flaws, from the sound of it, but at least he wouldn't be immediately showing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.)
But even leaving aside that specific error, I still disagree with his premise. I work in high energy physics, and it's routine to see people discussing frameworks where our measured fundamental constants could change. Practically any mention of a "multiverse" in physics or cosmology draws on that idea, for instance. If there's a scientific dogma that's supposed to make us blindly reject those possibilities, it seems to be remarkably ineffective.
"Dogma 8: your mind is inside your head. All your consciousness is the activity of your brain and nothing more.
Dogma 9: psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible. Your thoughts and intentions cannot have any effect at a distance because your mind is inside your head. Therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory."
Sheldrake says these are science's "dogmas" (there are 10), and that they are all wrong.
"[I] take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science, and turn them into questions, seeing how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well."
So "telepathy doesn't exist" does not stand up to scientific questioning? Come on man, you're better than this.
>"[I] take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science, and turn them into questions, seeing how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well."
He's saying that the evidence for the 'ten dogmas' being true is weak, not that there is strong evidence for them being false.
>So "telepathy doesn't exist" does not stand up to scientific questioning?
He's not saying that telepathy exists, he's saying there isn't good reason to believe that it's impossible.
Here's the thing though, and this will be the last comment from me on this thread as it gets tiring; people of your sort are great when it comes to playing "he said/she said" games, finding something to "tutut" about at every sentence– but when it comes to actually producing results, actually bringing something to the table other than an ego, there is nothing. Not a single man standing.
Using (alpha, beta, delta, etc...) brainwaves & Neural Impulse Actuation (NIA/EEG) technology, it is possible to interact with other networked entities...
His talk is filled with nonsense. In the beginning, I was going along with him ("yes - let's challenge scientific assumptions") but from the point at which he said rats can learn essentially telepathically, I was out. And it just got worse and worse.
Why would you not entertain the idea that rats can learn telepathically?
As an open minded scientist, would you not want to test for evidence of such a phenomenon instead of following in the footsteps of flat-earthers, who tune out at the first sign of an idea that seems to question their beliefs?
There is so much about the universe we don't even begin to understand, from why anything exists at all to the nature and quality of consciousness. What baffles me is that all these supposedly open-minded rational people can presume to know so much to be "nonsense" about which science does not even claim to know anything at all.
There have been countless attempts at observing telepathic-like phenomena and not a single one has produced anything.
I'm not sure why you are saying science claims not to know about telepathy. Every scientist I know would claim it doesn't exist because it's theoretically impossible and empirically never been observed.
He never says this. He says the measurements fluctuate, which means the speed of light itself may (or may not) fluctuate. But we will never know because it's been defined as a constant.
Ok. In related news, I tried to measure the length of a day the other day (just to make sure we're not being had) and it was 29 hours long! My watch was broken, but still - 29 hours! Could it be that some days are 29 hours long? We'll never know, I guess. But I personally have my doubts, and plan to share them in a future TEDx talk.
The author confuses TEDx with TED near the bottom though he mentions it's TEDx earlier.
> TED, you’d better vet your speakers from now on
Obviously TED doesn't typically vet the TEDx speakers. In fact apparently 378 TEDx events took place just last month. It's starting to feel like there is one of these events just here in Vancouver every month now.
That's... huh. I think I'd actually rather it cost money. Then, at least, only rich people would be diluting the brand in this way--besides there being fewer of them, there's at least a small correlation between wealth, free time, and ability to immerse oneself in the liberal arts to the point that one can give interesting TED talks ;)
(Or, to be more cynical in a Robin Hanson-esque fashion, "get off the TED stage, low-status people we don't care to affiliate with!")
Those are not nearly in the same league. I think that talk fits the purpose of TED perfectly, which is to bring in new ideas, throw fuel into the fire and gently poke the boundaries of mainstream consciousness (props to myself for that one). Even though the aquatic ape story is unlikely to be proven as a theory, it seems to have generated a ton of valuable discussion and scientific research.
The Aquatic Ape theory is not new (proposed in the 1940s) and has never generated any scientific scholarship apart from repeated debunkings. It was proposed, and is today promoted by, people without any formal education in anthropology. It's not supported by any rigorous physical evidence--fossil or genetic. It's got nothing going for it other than an energetic former TV writer and a credulous audience.
I don't think you get my comment: the debunking itself is valuable. Just look at the many papers/critiques published on the subject[1]. The last paragraph of the Wikipedia article is also very relevant:
In a 2012 paper, anthropologist Philip Tobias noted that rejection of
the AAH led to stigmatization of a spectrum of topics related to the
evolution of humans and their interaction with water. The result of
this bias, in his and co-authors opinions, was an incomplete
reconstruction of human evolution within varied landscapes.
This is why I think these not-100%-scientific talks (but not spiritualistic crap) are perfectly valid in a TED event. They might be wrong after all, but it doesn't matter as long as they made you visualize/explore new ideas.
The debunking is not valuable. For one thing it takes up the time of professional scientists who could be studying more promising subjects. For another, as your quote points out, this crazy theory has unfairly tarred related, more promising areas of study.
In terms of TED, the primary harm is that it gives the subject lay credence that it does not deserve. The very fact that you are arguing that this theory has value proves my point. What is your educational or professional background for evaluating the merits of this theory? A Wikipedia page? My wife is a professional anthropologist and I can assure you that her field considers Elaine Morgan a crackpot. She was astounded that TED would give her a platform.
It says rejection of the AAH led to stigmatization; correct me if I'm wrong but that means it was not acceptance of the theory which has tarnished related areas; it was labeling it as "crazy" as you just did that caused damage.
You're right that I don't have a degree in the area, but I don't claim any merits to the thoery, to me it's just another conjecture (like what if life on earth came from a martian asteroid) - I don't really care if it's going to be proven or not and don't take it as a fact, it's just food for thought. Falsifying hypothesis is the basis of science after all! Quoting from the aquaticape.org debunking website:
false views, if supported by some evidence, do little
harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving
their falseness: and when this is done, one path toward
error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same
time opened
- Charles Darwin
It might sound crazy if you're immersed in the field, but it's not the kind of blatant pseudo-science we should be raging about.
Hacker News thread started 89 days ago about suggestions for vetting TEDx speakers (including advice in the original post, submitted by ColinWright, that was perhaps not followed in the incident described in today's thread):
The history of science is filled with ideas and theories that were heretical or even nonsensical at the time they were first proposed - only to be accepted later as part of mainstream science. That is how science progresses. Just a century ago, wave-particle duality was a heretical idea, as was the notion that gravity bends space-time, or black holes exist, or even that the universe is expanding, and so on. Even Einstein could not accept the "spooky action-at-a-distance" implications of quantum mechanics - a theory he helped formulate early on. In fact, every major shift in our worldview has come from such paradigm shifts that start with fringe ideas that challenge conventional wisdom or dogma - starting with Galileo challenging the Church's dogma about a geocentric universe. Every age has its own sets of dogmas and beliefs that preclude other ways of viewing the world. The current scientific dogma is that the universe consists of stuff and phenomena that are entirely explainable by a materialistic, mechanistic worldview. It is dogma because it is an unshakable belief that automatically excludes any other ways of looking at the world. And even more revealing, in every age, it is just a handful of scientists - never the majority - who challenge our most sacred assumptions, and overturn the old paradigm to usher in a new way of looking at the world. That said - does not mean or imply that every heretical idea should be embraced. But at least let us consider them first before dismissing them out of hand - just because they challenge our most cherished notions about how the world ought to work. That is all Sheldrake is asking us to do here.....
This makes me so sad, as I saw up close the organization of the first TEDx talks in the Middle East and the amazing effect they had on everyone involved. In fact, I gave my own speech at TEDx Dead Sea and was honored to do so, and this kind of stuff really makes me regret the poor image TEDx sometimes earns. That's terrible because I've seen in person and watched online many TEDx talks that were as good or even better than actual TED talks (though by far less famous individuals).
I find TED mostly marketing these days and less substance. I'm a fan of people that TED attempts to bring together, but I have no love for the organization.
Despite any potential inaccuracies or not. I still think he raises a good point with regards to questioning assumptions that we all might have. Regardless of accuracies or understanding. As scientists and intellectuals we should be the most open about accepting and exploring of new and conflicting ideas. Even if they turn out to be wrong. It's always worth investigating everything from time to time.
While it's sad to see pseudoscience in TED talks, keep in mind that this was on TEDx, a local venue of which there are hundreds, which the author mentions himself.
I think, you can't blame TED for not checking every speaker at every local venue.
Am I the only one who appreciates the non-conformist view, wrong or not, I'm sure much of what has been presented at TED turned out to be wrong in the long run. It's about ideas, and ideas have to come from the fringe.
Or how about Tim Ferris? He sells science with a test/control group of 1 (himself), his science is questionable as well (eg. don't eat sugar/fruit, drink wine...wine is fruit & sugar!).
Doesn't mean there aren't valuable nuggets or interesting ideas.
Are we throwing the baby out with the bath water?
On another note, I suspected that TED was using TEDx events as a vetting process for finding speakers to invite to the big show. For example, you'd think Born to Run author Christopher McDougall would have been a great presenter, but watch his TEDx talk from portland, and you'd barely have any interest in the book, which is surprising because it's a great read. But I also suspect some of the science he writes about is questionable.
Isn't part of the point of TEDx to provider a broader venue of speakers? Keep in mind that almost every major idea in the history of science was at one time considered unlikely quackery. Spiritual and philosophical conjecture have a place where the science of today is unable to even speculate.
Consciousness of inanimate objects and the universe itself is not as crackpot as it sounds. Of course it is not something scientifically verifiable at this time, but science has negligible understanding of the nature of consciousness, awareness, the illusion (or reality) of free-will, the reason for existence itself, and what might exist outside space-time. Many such fundamental questions are wide open, and neither can they be addressed by current science, nor can wild ideas be discounted. How do we know consciousness is not a property of the universe as a whole if we do not even know what consciousness is or how it arises?
If you suggested that a massive explosion of energy would result in a stable universe that would come to know itself through intelligent, self-aware bundles of molecules, you'd be shouted out of the cosmos, yet that seems to be why we are here discussing such things.
EDIT: After watching the video, I don't agree that all of his "scientific dogmas" are false, nor does he say they are. I do agree that some of them possibly are false and should be questioned, which is all he suggests. What is science worth if it does not allow the questioning of it's own assumptions? What is the use of science applied to realms it is unable to address?
Most emphatically, we do not understand the nature of consciousness, and we do not know that consciousness is not comprised of something more than the matter in our brains. Yet all we know enters, or perhaps exits, through that window of consciousness and perception. Science works from what Sheldrake calls a materialistic view to explain the testable laws of the universe based on our perception. Science does nothing to help us with larger questions of what this all is and why we are in it.
"Morphic resonance" is indeed a "bizarre" idea, but it is also not implausible nor is it untestable. At one time, relativity was a bizarre idea. And is string theory and quantum entanglement really not a bizarre idea? "Morphic resonance" could arise in any number of ways, from a unified dimension of consciousness, to some as yet unknown quantum interaction, to simple electromagnetic field sensitivity, to some yet undiscovered energy field that is impacted by consciousness.
The arrogance of the "scientific" folks to push out alternative ideas they can not disprove is akin to the arrogance of a religious leader. Science is amazing. So are the things science can not yet explain.
Ok, maybe not even almost every major idea (I did use the word "almost"), but pretty much by definition every major conceptual shift, from a round earth, to relativity, to microorganisms.
> Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
Scientific ideas do tend to be testable. This doesn't mean we can't have ideas that are not testable or not yet testable. Hopefully, every idea will some day be falsifiable, but we can't rely on that. We may need to speculate in untestable territory before we find a plausible and reasonable theory that is testable. And as you know, science does not tell us that anything is true, only that some things can't be proven false.
There is more to life than testable scientific understandings. I could love my mother or I could not love my mother. Can you test that? Because you can not test it, does it mean it should not be mentioned and is not important?
Human love, creativity, and consciousness are perhaps the most interesting and important parts of existence, yet they are not currently testable from an experiential viewpoint, and they may never be.
There are qualities of the consciousness, which by definition are qualities of existence - love, color, taste, beauty, suffering, pain, joy - which can only be explained scientifically in their mechanical reflections in brain matter. Science can not tell us anything about the qualitative conscious experience of these qualities are, yet those qualities may be the most important part of the universe. What would the universe be without the conscious experience of its wonder and beauty?
> There is more to life than testable scientific understandings. I could love my mother or I could not love my mother. Can you test that? Because you can not test it, does it mean it should not be mentioned and is not important?
Love is a subjective experience of consciousness. We must first have some clue about what consciousness is, then perhaps we will be able to scientifically explain what love is.
If I create a device that predicts with 99% accuracy whether a test subject loves their mother (by looking at the subject's brain), without ever answering any of your questions about consciousness, would you retract the above statement?
No, because you would not be explaining what love is, any more than explain what pain is by showing me the brain patterns the light up when I twist your nipple.
Whether of not you can test for love is immaterial to explaining the experience.
> When did I say I want to be explaining what love is?
Well, you were asking me to retract this statement based on the theoretical existence of a test:
> Love is a subjective experience of consciousness. We must first have some clue about what consciousness is, then perhaps we will be able to scientifically explain what love is.
Anyhow, I was using it as an example of something that we can't currently test for, not asserting that it will never be testable. So no, I'm not arguing that it will never be testable.
If we do test, however, it will most likely be a test for the brain activity associated with love, not for the actual qualitative feeling of love. As I've said, we know nearly nothing about what subjective experience is despite all we know being subject to it.
As far as science is concerned, there's nothing beyond being able to objectively model a phenomenon and make useful predictions about it. If I can fully model the set of brain processes that humans typically call "love", and if I can make useful and accurate predictions based on my model, that's all that I care about as a scientist.
Now, it's entirely possible that reasoning about "love" scientifically requires several layers of new language / models on top of the currently established models in neuroscience, which is why I said it's _theoretically_ possible.
Subjective experience exists objectively, as in, the subjective experience in your consciousness is an objective reality of the universe. We do not yet know how to model such things, and making useful predictions based in brain activity is great, but it will not be a remotely satisfying model of consciousness.
In fairness to Sheldrake, he writes about these ideas, and then goes off to test them. See Seven Experiments that Could Change the World, and his later books which tested the effects.
A meta-analysis has supported the sense of being stared at. I will find the link later and included it. I believe it was in the British Journal of Social Pyschology around 2005.
Of the seven experiments that Sheldrake describes in his book, the phenomena of dogs (and other pets) knowing when their owners are coming home, has been empirically verified in many instances, and anecdotally verified by thousands of pet owners the world over - and at least a couple of friends. It certainly deserves some serious scientific inquiry rather than being dismissed out-of-hand as "ergo jesus" (as per the blog post above) or woo-woo. His other proposed experiment on phantom limbs and the real pain they can cause, on the other hand (no pun intended) has been fully explained and even solved by neuroscientist V. Ramachandran in his book "Phantoms of the Mind".
My issue with this sort of unexplained phenomena is that people are willing to jump to ridiculous conclusions that invalidate or at least poke a hole through physics/chemistry/biology/all the other layers of scientific knowledge, vs trying to look for explanations within the established framework of knowledge. The amount of scientific knowledge we've accumulated so far is huge. It's been very thoroughly tested through multiple independent experiments, quantitative relationships have been verified to ridiculous precision.
It's just astronomically more likely that a dog sensing their owner's arrival is going to be explained within the framework of established science, and not invalidate every layer of our model of the world from mammal biology to quantum foam.
I'd add that if one can sense a stare, this opens the door to a huge array of psychic abilities. Perhaps we can communicate more than a stare, perhaps this really all is pseudo-science, experimental bias, and statistical anomaly. I'd like to know.
The mechanism may be as simple as the brain's high sensitivity to electromagnetic fields from other brains, or as mysterious as a cosmic consciousness.
On a side note, Jessica Utts is wonderful.
I actually did my undergraduate thesis on this, but didn't find a significant effect (there was an effect, but the study was underpowered).
If they could truly change the world he should totally follow up on them and test them beyond reasonable doubt. There's potentially seven Nobel prizes in the bag, fame, fortune. Even empirically ruling out those seven ideas would be a worthwhile endeavor.
But, you know, selling books and doing TED talks. Ok. Fine. Whatever.
Another scientist, Dean Radin in his books - "The Conscious Universe" and "Entangled Minds" has compiled a very detailed and persuasive meta-analysis of experiments and phenomena that defy conventional scientific explanations.
Have you heard anything about Sheldrake apart from this blog post? For every one of his hypothesis he provides experiments to test and falsify them.
The problem is that he's already condemned for drawing the "wrong" conclusions so every scientist who even goes near his ideas and tries to test them is ostracized.
Touchée. Although "dumb" ideas are much more easily dismissed, as they are often disproven by evidence or easily shown to be implausible - that's what makes them dumb. It's the smart ideas that we seem unable to disprove which are most likely to cause the establishment to react strongly, since they can be a formidable challenge and ultimately disrupt many careers. As far as I can tell, none of Sheldrake's hypotheses are "dumb." Some are probably wrong, some may be right.
As others have suggested, Sheldrake does have quite a bit of research behind him attempting to find evidence or disprove his hypotheses - and he does not claim them to be any more than hypotheses.
Being unable to disprove does not confer any special status to a hypothesis. Perhaps even the opposite. Things that aren't falsifiable are generally outside the realm of science. See Sagan's Dragon. Some of these "theories" seem a bit too close to invisible garage dwelling reptiles for my tastes.
> Being unable to disprove does not confer any special status to a hypothesis
It does separate it from those hypotheses we can disprove.
Certainly some conjectures are not falsifiable with current science, and some may never be. When we must make decisions based on non-falsifiable hypotheses, such as whether love is more valuable than misery, whether our life has purpose, whether we are actors or observers in the world, we must have some basis for belief or be paralyzed by believing nothing.
Given the long history of philosophical and spiritual discussion by humanity, little of which is scientifically testable, there may in fact be more to life than science.
Don't get me wrong - I love science and am a big believer that where science can be used it should be. Where science does not apply though, we must resort to reason, intuition, feeling, and whatever other basis for judgement we can have. Just as with science, no hypotheses or belief should be unassailable, but we must have a basis for belief other than science to place any value on our lives or experience.
Intuition and feeling are not good substitutes for reason and evidence when trying to explore anything that doesn't or shouldn't have subjective qualities.
If something is supposed to be there, you can test for it. Take the Higgs particle. A model of particle physics was proposed. That model predicted the Higgs particle. Many years later we were able to build a machine that proved its existence within reasonable doubt.
God conveniently eludes the scientific method by a technicality, which is exemption by design. Love, faith, even artistic merit are things that can be hypothesized on using scientific models. But we generally agree that these are subjective qualities.
Intuition and feeling are often all we have to start with, and we can often make great leaps by combining intuition with our best facts, observations, and reason. There is nothing wrong with proposing hypotheses based on intuition as long as those hypotheses don't contradict known falsehoods. This is especially true in fields such as consciousness about we which we know so little and in which great advances can be made. As much as possible, we should try to use reason and science to support or disprove these hypotheses, but we must accept that at some point we may not be able to, or we may have to wait until we understand more.
Intuition can be very misleading and can be a hindrance when trying to understand new concepts. Intuition is intellectual drag.
Think about what intuition is. It is your brain applying known patterns of how the world works to a new situation. If something works as expected, or close to what is expected, that's great for normal situations, but leads to false positives, where you get an expected result for completely different reason. Intuition teaches you nothing about the underlying processes.
If you come across a situation which doesn't behave intuitively, the human brain scrambles to find something - anything - that might come close to explaining how how it works, filling in the blanks as appropriate. The human brain is great for filling in the blanks and finding patterns where there are none. In other words, it often makes stuff up. Again, intuition and feelings are not helpful for understanding underlying processes except for formulating an initial hypotheses.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
FYI, the comment directly above is all quoted from someone who might have had more experience on the subject matter than anyone in this thread - Albert Einstein.
Appeals to authority also instinctively make sense but cloud judgement.
Einstein famously said "God does not play dice"; his instinct was that probability did not have a place inside the fundamental laws of physics. His stubbornness prevented him from fully accepting the Heisenberg model for some time, although as an exemplary scientist he was able to put aside his instincts and accept that a probabilistic quantum model did describe the known observable a very well.
The problem isn't with the concept of TEDx and having others run TED clones, it's that they're allowing almost anyone to run a TEDx event. There are awesome talks that come from TEDx events. TED should just be very stringent on who it grants TEDx licenses to, which it clearly isn't.
A friend of mine mentioned this video to me last week and I finally got to see it.
On the one hand, Eddie Huang didn't follow the rules set in place by TED. It seems like now he is just complaining that he didn't get the exposure he was expecting and he doesn't have anything to lose so he goes public about how "cult-like" TED is. He knew what he was getting into and he knew that he wasn't going to get paid for it, and then goes and complains about how much money they are supposedly making.
On the other hand, the rules set in place by TED are a bit ridiculous. Maybe they have justifications for those rules, I don't know.
There are usually two sides to a story and seeing as how Huang feels like he got screwed by TED, he may just be venting his anger at the organization. If anyone has anymore info on this event or has any idea why TED imposes those rules on it's guests, I'd love to know more.
We just had a TEDx event at IIT-Roorkee, and all the speakers, except one, was brilliant. The exception was a horrible talk on "Quantum Holism", which just degenerated into "I think God does things".
Yes, I wish if there was a way to vet speakers before-hand.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NL9i-Fu15hhYGB-d0hmS...
They may be the funniest thing The Onion has ever done.
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Edit: of particular interest to the HN crowd would be their takedown of the "Idea Guy":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
and the "Social Media Consultant":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY