Apr 9 2013: The so-called factual errors were trumped up because Sheldrake disagreed with the materialist dogma and favored a scientific approach instead.
A double standard was applied. Because Sheldrake disagreed with materialism, they went looking for "factual errors." But we could find the same sort of things and probably a lot worse in other TED videos. The "factual errors" were never the point.
The point was always that Sheldrake had disagreed with materialism. The TED science board couldn't debate him on that issue because they knew he would expose them as dogmatists, so they trumped up these "factual errors."
That is how dogmas are defended -- by distracting people from the real issues, ad-hominen remarks, and straw-man arguments, all of which we saw on display here.
It's okay that TED and its science board have different views; that's their right. But I think they could have treated Sheldrake and Hancock a lot more fairly.
Apr 8 2013: Regarding telepathy and similar issues, I'll settle for a "Let's wait and see" approach, that it would be dogmatic at this point to assert that it definitely is or isn't possible. I think it probably is, but I understand there may not be evidence to prove it yet. This is not an assertion, but rather openness and curiosity.
Sheldrake is not making assertions in his talk. Rather, he is inquiring, in the spirit of C. S. Peirce, whom he mentions. The idea with inquiry is to apply the scientific method everywhere, even on dearly held assumptions that don’t have hard evidence to back them up, and not privilege any interpretation without reason or evidence.
Notice that he asks, “What if . . . ?” five times in his discussion about Big G. He uses the language of inquiry in Science Set Free as well (emphasis mine):
“MAYBE the constants fluctuate, too, and PERHAPS one day scientific periodicals will carry regular news reports on their latest values. The implications of varying constants WOULD BE enormous." (p. 93).
This is a scientific attitude -- open, curious, non-dogmatic.
Apr 8 2013: Thank you for your responses, Crystal. You make some valid points. However, I don't think Sheldrake's talk should be interpreted as describing "all scientists," but rather just the dogmatic ones who stand in the way of scientific inquiry. Interpreted like this, he didn't make factual errors.
Apr 4 2013: TED has made its position clear: videos like Richard Dawkin's "Militant Atheism" contain "ideas worth spreading," while the videos of people engaged in scientific inquiry like Larry Dossey and Rupert Sheldrake do not.
It's become clear also that TED doesn't have a good sense of fair play or interest in discussion. Anonymous members of its science board get to veto any video that comes along without listing specific criticisms or coming forward to identify themselves and debate.
So this is a platform for dogmatic materialism, mechanistic medicine, and militant atheism, but not scientific inquiry.
That is fine with me. It is a free country, and there is plenty of room for militant atheists, dogmatic materialists, and others who like to blur the line between myth and science.
What we’ve seen play out here is the conflict within science that Sheldrake mentions early on in his talk “between science as a method of inquiry . . . and science as a belief system or a worldview.”
I’d like to try to suss out the difference between these two views using “Big G” as an example. Here is Sheldrake describing how they arrive at the value for Big G:
“What happens is they measure it in different labs; they get different values on different days; and then they average them. And then other labs around the world do the same, and they come out usually with a rather different average. And then the international committee on metrology meets every ten years or so and averages the ones from labs around the world to come up with the value of Big G.”
So the final value is an average of averages. There thus isn’t hard evidence that G has a precise, constant value.
It may be that G is a constant only we can’t measure it very precisely, or it may fluctuate within a narrow range. To assert G is a constant at this point would be dogmatic, a claim without strong evidence to back it up.
Sheldrake, on the other hand, isn’t making assertions without evidence. Rather, he speaks the language of inquiry and suggests further investigation to see what we can learn:
“But what if G were actually fluctuating?” he asks. “What if it changed? . . . For more than ten years I have been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data. In fact, I am now trying to persuade them to put it online on the internet, with the dates and the actual measurements, and see if they’re correlated, to see if they are all up at one time, all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together, and that would tell us something very, very interesting. But no one has done this. They haven’t done it because ‘G is a constant; there’s no point looking for changes.’ You see, here is a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry.”
Unlike dogmatic materialists, Sheldrake is not asserting theories or making claims without evidence, despite TED’s claims to the contrary in the introduction to this debate. Rather, he is inquiring, in the spirit of C. S. Peirce, whom he mentions in his talk. The idea with inquiry is to apply the scientific method everywhere, even on dearly held assumptions that don’t have hard evidence to back them up, and not privilege any interpretation without reason or evidence.
Notice that he asks, “What if . . . ?” five times in his discussion about Big G. He uses the language of inquiry in Science Set Free as well (emphasis mine):
“MAYBE the constants fluctuate, too, and PERHAPS one day scientific periodicals will carry regular news reports on their latest values. The implications of varying constants WOULD BE enormous." (p. 93).
But he runs into enormous resistance because so many scientists dogmatically assert that G is a constant, including those who hold the raw data. In Sheldrake’s words, “So here science has become a belief system rather than a method of inquiry and actually inhibits the scientific process.”
The same basic dynamic occurs with the other dogmas as well. In each case, dogmatic assertions frequently make it difficult for scientists and philosophers to hold further investigation or inquiry. Indeed, this dogmatism makes it difficult even to speculate about doing such things in a TEDx talk.
At the same time, the TED science board tries to claim that the ideas Sheldrake lists aren’t dogmas at all, but rather are “active areas of scientific inquiry.”
However, I don’t buy this. The fact that Sheldrake hasn’t been able to persuade metrologists to consider these inquiries and the fact that the talk has been removed from TED’s YouTube channel prove it remains an enormous problem.
It seems to me a rather Orwellian attempt to muddy the waters: They’re not the dogmas of mainstream science at all. Rather, they’re active areas of inquiry. But no one can talk about them at TED because they’re pseudoscience.
Some of the mischief can probably be traced back to the ideas found in “A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science,” which is about as good a recipe for supporting old dogma as you will find.
The letter contains several items that are antithetical to scientific inquiry. For example, a couple of the problematic “Marks of good science”:
“It is based on theories that are discussed and argued for by many experts in the field”
“It does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge”
And a few of the problematic “Marks of bad science”:
“Has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth”
“Speaks dismissively of mainstream science”
And, my favorite:
“Comes from overconfident fringe experts”
All these should be red flags that the TED science board is not particularly interested in open scientific inquiry, but rather has dedicated itself to supporting prevalent attitudes and beliefs.
The only way that TED can resolve this without enduring harm to its brand is by re-uploading the video to its YouTube channel.
From there it might consider replacing some of the members of its science board with people who are less dogmatic and more sensitive to the issues of open scientific inquiry.
Mar 20 2013: Yes, Rupert got the facts better than myself, TED, and everyone else here, didn't he? I read his response last night and was going to add his figures here tonight.
Maybe we should all be more careful in our fact checking before we go accusing or correcting people on alleged factual errors.
But the important thing is that we, together, as a group --TED, materialist dogmatists, Sheldrake, and everyone else-- get the facts right in the end. As Hilary Clinton once wrote, it takes a village.
As any mature editor understands, no one editor will catch every mistake or clarify every point him- or herself, let alone every author or speaker on their own. Why be so quick to elevate oneself and put others down over minor factual errors?
We need to take more of a process-oriented view where we are all in this together, all working on this together, as one group, rather than looking to go one-up on each other over minor details.
Sandy, Edward, Pandelis, Bill, and Murray, thank you for your comments.
Murray, I think you make a really important point when you say, "I am shocked to find that . . . the debate is about the minutiae of what he [Sheldrake] said, rather than the broad thrust of his argument."
This is how the dogmatists of all stripes tend to go about their business, I have noticed -- ad-hominem remarks, one-upmanship, and nitpicking, as if showing that Sheldrake or someone didn't cross their t's or dot their i's somewhere means we are all justified -- nay, obligated! -- to dismiss all their work.
But as I said in my previous post, the Ted science board actually makes a number of factual and/or interpretive errors of its own and doesn't show that Sheldrake made any.
The board, for example, says that Sheldrake claims "scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants" and that this constitutes a factual error.
But what Sheldrake actually said, at about 9:50, was this:
“I want to focus on the constants of nature. Because these are again use [sic] assumed to be constant.”
He is saying they are "usually" assumed to be constant, which is true.
More to the point, those that hold the raw data on big G, for example, and refuse to publish it think G is constant -- they are dogmatic on the issue, and it is their voice that counts most here since they hold the data.
The board also says Sheldrake made an error in saying that scientists believe animals don't have consciousness when there is a consensus they have some form of consciousness. But Sheldrake's point is that materialists reduce consciousness to matter, which is an assumption he wants to question, so this is a semantic/scientific difference rather than a factual error.
Finally, the board says that "Sheldrake claims to have 'evidence' of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior" when the studies have "never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal." But immediately following that remark, at 9:45, Sheldrake says, "Anyway that’s my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance.”
"Hypothesis" -- so the context makes it clear he's not claiming it as a proven fact, but rather as something to suggest further study.
Sheldrake does cite replications of these experiment in his book The Presence of the Past, beginning on page 199, so why not simply open a discussion about it and let Sheldrake respond?
Mar 15 2013: Thank you Katie and Edward for your comments.
Katie I think you make a very important point about pharmaceutical "science" -- when they exclude all non-patentable agents for research money a priori it begins to look more like profiteering than research into the very best medicine.
I also think you make an important point when you say:
"One also needs to know whether the researcher applying for money to test an alternative claim was in favour or opposed to the alternative claim being tested. The fact of the matter is that many conventionally trained doctors wish to see alternative claims banned."
It may be that every bit of the $441 million that the NIH spent, or most of it, was dedicated to finding fault with alternative therapies or at least applying them in a mechanistic fashion. We would have to really get into the details to know.
Edward, I think you make a reasonable argument that spending $441 million on research doesn't amount to "ignoring," even if it is merely 1.425% of the budget. But that is assuming that it was sincere research into the efficacy of alternative treatments, as Katie points out.
In any case, it has been shown that in Denmark they do truly ignore alternative medicine, and the same appears to be true for the UK, Sheldrake's home country, and Sheldrake's remark was about governments in general, not merely the U.S.
We're still waiting for data from other countries. But while you can argue it both ways, I don't think anyone can strongly claim Sheldrake made a factual error here. In fact, he is largely correct, even in the U.S.
But the bigger news is that Ted has removed the video from YouTube, citing factual errors:
TEDCred score: +4.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
A double standard was applied. Because Sheldrake disagreed with materialism, they went looking for "factual errors." But we could find the same sort of things and probably a lot worse in other TED videos. The "factual errors" were never the point.
The point was always that Sheldrake had disagreed with materialism. The TED science board couldn't debate him on that issue because they knew he would expose them as dogmatists, so they trumped up these "factual errors."
That is how dogmas are defended -- by distracting people from the real issues, ad-hominen remarks, and straw-man arguments, all of which we saw on display here.
It's okay that TED and its science board have different views; that's their right. But I think they could have treated Sheldrake and Hancock a lot more fairly.
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
Sheldrake is not making assertions in his talk. Rather, he is inquiring, in the spirit of C. S. Peirce, whom he mentions. The idea with inquiry is to apply the scientific method everywhere, even on dearly held assumptions that don’t have hard evidence to back them up, and not privilege any interpretation without reason or evidence.
Notice that he asks, “What if . . . ?” five times in his discussion about Big G. He uses the language of inquiry in Science Set Free as well (emphasis mine):
“MAYBE the constants fluctuate, too, and PERHAPS one day scientific periodicals will carry regular news reports on their latest values. The implications of varying constants WOULD BE enormous." (p. 93).
This is a scientific attitude -- open, curious, non-dogmatic.
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
A comment on Conversation: Discuss the note to the TED community on the withdrawal of the TEDxWestHollywood license.
It's become clear also that TED doesn't have a good sense of fair play or interest in discussion. Anonymous members of its science board get to veto any video that comes along without listing specific criticisms or coming forward to identify themselves and debate.
So this is a platform for dogmatic materialism, mechanistic medicine, and militant atheism, but not scientific inquiry.
That is fine with me. It is a free country, and there is plenty of room for militant atheists, dogmatic materialists, and others who like to blur the line between myth and science.
A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk
What we’ve seen play out here is the conflict within science that Sheldrake mentions early on in his talk “between science as a method of inquiry . . . and science as a belief system or a worldview.”
I’d like to try to suss out the difference between these two views using “Big G” as an example. Here is Sheldrake describing how they arrive at the value for Big G:
“What happens is they measure it in different labs; they get different values on different days; and then they average them. And then other labs around the world do the same, and they come out usually with a rather different average. And then the international committee on metrology meets every ten years or so and averages the ones from labs around the world to come up with the value of Big G.”
So the final value is an average of averages. There thus isn’t hard evidence that G has a precise, constant value.
It may be that G is a constant only we can’t measure it very precisely, or it may fluctuate within a narrow range. To assert G is a constant at this point would be dogmatic, a claim without strong evidence to back it up.
Sheldrake, on the other hand, isn’t making assertions without evidence. Rather, he speaks the language of inquiry and suggests further investigation to see what we can learn:
“But what if G were actually fluctuating?” he asks. “What if it changed? . . . For more than ten years I have been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data. In fact, I am now trying to persuade them to put it online on the internet, with the dates and the actual measurements, and see if they’re correlated, to see if they are all up at one time, all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together, and that would tell us something very, very interesting. But no one has done this. They haven’t done it because ‘G is a constant; there’s no point looking for changes.’ You see, here is a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry.”
A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk
Unlike dogmatic materialists, Sheldrake is not asserting theories or making claims without evidence, despite TED’s claims to the contrary in the introduction to this debate. Rather, he is inquiring, in the spirit of C. S. Peirce, whom he mentions in his talk. The idea with inquiry is to apply the scientific method everywhere, even on dearly held assumptions that don’t have hard evidence to back them up, and not privilege any interpretation without reason or evidence.
Notice that he asks, “What if . . . ?” five times in his discussion about Big G. He uses the language of inquiry in Science Set Free as well (emphasis mine):
“MAYBE the constants fluctuate, too, and PERHAPS one day scientific periodicals will carry regular news reports on their latest values. The implications of varying constants WOULD BE enormous." (p. 93).
But he runs into enormous resistance because so many scientists dogmatically assert that G is a constant, including those who hold the raw data. In Sheldrake’s words, “So here science has become a belief system rather than a method of inquiry and actually inhibits the scientific process.”
The same basic dynamic occurs with the other dogmas as well. In each case, dogmatic assertions frequently make it difficult for scientists and philosophers to hold further investigation or inquiry. Indeed, this dogmatism makes it difficult even to speculate about doing such things in a TEDx talk.
A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk
At the same time, the TED science board tries to claim that the ideas Sheldrake lists aren’t dogmas at all, but rather are “active areas of scientific inquiry.”
However, I don’t buy this. The fact that Sheldrake hasn’t been able to persuade metrologists to consider these inquiries and the fact that the talk has been removed from TED’s YouTube channel prove it remains an enormous problem.
It seems to me a rather Orwellian attempt to muddy the waters: They’re not the dogmas of mainstream science at all. Rather, they’re active areas of inquiry. But no one can talk about them at TED because they’re pseudoscience.
Some of the mischief can probably be traced back to the ideas found in “A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science,” which is about as good a recipe for supporting old dogma as you will find.
http://blog.tedx.com/post/37405280671/a-letter-to-the-tedx-community-on-tedx-and-bad-science
The letter contains several items that are antithetical to scientific inquiry. For example, a couple of the problematic “Marks of good science”:
“It is based on theories that are discussed and argued for by many experts in the field”
“It does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge”
And a few of the problematic “Marks of bad science”:
“Has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth”
“Speaks dismissively of mainstream science”
And, my favorite:
“Comes from overconfident fringe experts”
All these should be red flags that the TED science board is not particularly interested in open scientific inquiry, but rather has dedicated itself to supporting prevalent attitudes and beliefs.
The only way that TED can resolve this without enduring harm to its brand is by re-uploading the video to its YouTube channel.
From there it might consider replacing some of the members of its science board with people who are less dogmatic and more sensitive to the issues of open scientific inquiry.
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
Maybe we should all be more careful in our fact checking before we go accusing or correcting people on alleged factual errors.
But the important thing is that we, together, as a group --TED, materialist dogmatists, Sheldrake, and everyone else-- get the facts right in the end. As Hilary Clinton once wrote, it takes a village.
As any mature editor understands, no one editor will catch every mistake or clarify every point him- or herself, let alone every author or speaker on their own. Why be so quick to elevate oneself and put others down over minor factual errors?
We need to take more of a process-oriented view where we are all in this together, all working on this together, as one group, rather than looking to go one-up on each other over minor details.
Sandy, Edward, Pandelis, Bill, and Murray, thank you for your comments.
Murray, I think you make a really important point when you say, "I am shocked to find that . . . the debate is about the minutiae of what he [Sheldrake] said, rather than the broad thrust of his argument."
This is how the dogmatists of all stripes tend to go about their business, I have noticed -- ad-hominem remarks, one-upmanship, and nitpicking, as if showing that Sheldrake or someone didn't cross their t's or dot their i's somewhere means we are all justified -- nay, obligated! -- to dismiss all their work.
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/comment-page-6/#comment-33178
But as I said in my previous post, the Ted science board actually makes a number of factual and/or interpretive errors of its own and doesn't show that Sheldrake made any.
The board, for example, says that Sheldrake claims "scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants" and that this constitutes a factual error.
But what Sheldrake actually said, at about 9:50, was this:
“I want to focus on the constants of nature. Because these are again use [sic] assumed to be constant.”
He is saying they are "usually" assumed to be constant, which is true.
More to the point, those that hold the raw data on big G, for example, and refuse to publish it think G is constant -- they are dogmatic on the issue, and it is their voice that counts most here since they hold the data.
The board also says Sheldrake made an error in saying that scientists believe animals don't have consciousness when there is a consensus they have some form of consciousness. But Sheldrake's point is that materialists reduce consciousness to matter, which is an assumption he wants to question, so this is a semantic/scientific difference rather than a factual error.
Finally, the board says that "Sheldrake claims to have 'evidence' of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior" when the studies have "never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal." But immediately following that remark, at 9:45, Sheldrake says, "Anyway that’s my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance.”
"Hypothesis" -- so the context makes it clear he's not claiming it as a proven fact, but rather as something to suggest further study.
Sheldrake does cite replications of these experiment in his book The Presence of the Past, beginning on page 199, so why not simply open a discussion about it and let Sheldrake respond?
A comment on Conversation: Did Rupert Sheldrake make a factual error?
Katie I think you make a very important point about pharmaceutical "science" -- when they exclude all non-patentable agents for research money a priori it begins to look more like profiteering than research into the very best medicine.
I also think you make an important point when you say:
"One also needs to know whether the researcher applying for money to test an alternative claim was in favour or opposed to the alternative claim being tested. The fact of the matter is that many conventionally trained doctors wish to see alternative claims banned."
It may be that every bit of the $441 million that the NIH spent, or most of it, was dedicated to finding fault with alternative therapies or at least applying them in a mechanistic fashion. We would have to really get into the details to know.
Edward, I think you make a reasonable argument that spending $441 million on research doesn't amount to "ignoring," even if it is merely 1.425% of the budget. But that is assuming that it was sincere research into the efficacy of alternative treatments, as Katie points out.
In any case, it has been shown that in Denmark they do truly ignore alternative medicine, and the same appears to be true for the UK, Sheldrake's home country, and Sheldrake's remark was about governments in general, not merely the U.S.
We're still waiting for data from other countries. But while you can argue it both ways, I don't think anyone can strongly claim Sheldrake made a factual error here. In fact, he is largely correct, even in the U.S.
But the bigger news is that Ted has removed the video from YouTube, citing factual errors:
http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/comment-page-6/#comment-33178
However, it turns out that Ted's board of scientists actually makes several errors of their own. More on that in my next post.