TEDx talks discredited: Sheldrake speaks, argues that speed of light is dropping
whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com
whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com
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":
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.
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.
Using the terms "dumb" or "quackery" really lowers your persuasion.
Using your own vocabulary: I guess your "shit" didn't stick to the wall. :)
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.
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.
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?
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
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?
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.
Well done TEDx.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Draw your own conclusions.
No he doesn't. You're just hearing what you want to hear.
"[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.
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.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-direct-brain-to-brain-interf...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-brain-computer-interface-goes-...
Of course, it would be a bad idea to call these technologies "telepathy", as they're "simply" wireless brain-to-brain interfaces.
If biology hasn't gotten there yet, use tech.
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.
> 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.
I'm curious - does anyone know if TED charges any sort of fee to the local TEDx licensees?
(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!")
But TED itself has hosted a talk with a similar level of pseudo-science woo-woo: Elaine Morgan pushing the "Aquatic Ape" theory.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_...
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis#Footnote...
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.
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
I think, you can't blame TED for not checking every speaker at every local venue.
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.
Food science isn't quite the same as physics.
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.
Every major idea?
Perhaps many hypotheses were considered inconceivable. But certainly not quackery.
Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
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.
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?
No, but it does mean that it's not science.
In theory, yes. What happens inside your brain isn't untestable or sacred, we're just not there yet technologically (but we'll get there).
Whether of not you can test for love is immaterial to explaining the experience.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
B. I was responding to the parent comment about empirically verified dog's-sixth-sense phenomena, and what I think about those.
But, you know, selling books and doing TED talks. Ok. Fine. Whatever.
He is doing research. I can't say if he's doing enough but he's done quite a lot.
So have all of the dumb ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Touché
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.
http://nymag.com/news/features/ted-conferences-2012-3/
It's a decent history of how TED has evolved.
Eddie Huang talks about his experiences speaking at TED
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.
Yes, I wish if there was a way to vet speakers before-hand.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/1...
http://blog.tedx.com/post/37405280671/a-letter-to-the-tedx-c...