Banned TED Talk: The Science Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake

[polymath257]

Hey retard, answer the OP's video. Or are you saying that guy is scientifically illiterate as well? Or are you saying anyone who disagrees with you is scientifically illiterate??

The consensus seems to be that 'that guy' is scientifically illiterate.

Even more, it is the consensus of those who are scientifically literate that this guy is scientifically illiterate. He's a kook.

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I had hoped for other things for this thread.  Perhaps a discussion of the role of dogma in science ala Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions.  I take it from some quarters, Kuhn's central thesis is regarded as at best an inaccurate simplification, but I think the question of whether there is such a thing as scientific dogma and what that means may be an interesting one, even if Sheldrake himself is out to lunch.

Well, I found Kuhn's treatment of the Copernican Revolution to be incredibly simplistic. he seemed to think that the new ideas should be adopted immediately, even though it was the supporting evidence of Kepler, Galileo, and Tycho that were instrumental in showing the new ideas are correct. That wasn't so much because of a paradigm shift in the research paradigms as it was the discovery of new methods of obtaining data (the telescope, for example).

Yes, Popper is also not accurate when it comes to how science is done in practice. The *ideal* is to have testability (falsifiability) at each stage, but in practice it is often not possible to do the tests until the technology catches up. To deny the speculations to be 'scientific' in the interim seems, well, strange. On the flip side, there is a strong dislike of having so many parameters in a model that it can be made to agree with *any* observations. SOMETHING, somewhere has to be an actual prediction of new observations.