Is this simply an envy-green rent-a-rant from “theory heads”? Or do the critics have a point?:
It’s hard to argue against millions of people getting a dose of a Daniel Gilbert lecture—or hearing the MIT cognitive scientist Nancy Kanwisher talk about mapping the brain, or the behavioral ecologist Sara M. Lewis, of Tufts University, discuss firefly evolution (both also spoke in Vancouver this year). But plenty of observers have argued that some of the new channels for distributing information simplify and flatten the world of ideas, that they valorize in particular a quick-hit, name-branded, business-friendly kind of self-helpish insight—or they force truly important ideas into that kind of template. …
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TED and its cousin events create the expectation that problems like inequality and environmental degradation can be solved without rethinking any of our underlying assumptions about society, Bratton argues. History has ended; only the apps and robots will keep getting better. Over 30 years, he says, TED “has distorted the conversation we have about technology and innovation. The uncomfortable, the ambivalent, the real difficulties we have get shunted aside.”
Harvard’s Gilbert dismisses the criticisms of TED: “Who cares about a backlash against the idea of having a series of brief talks by the most interesting thinkers, researchers, and artists?” He says a TED talk is just one form of expression among many and portends the end of serious discourse no more than Psychology 101 lectures do. “This is the argument against haiku: If we write it, all other poetry will vanish.”
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Hard scientists, for their part, seem utterly unperturbed by the opportunity events like TED afford. “Especially for those of us who do research funded with federal grants, I think we have a responsibility to explain to people what our science has found out,” says Tufts’s Sara Lewis, the ecologist and self-styled “firefly junkie.” She thinks the wide distribution of such talks might even reduce scientific illiteracy: “My hope is that by the time the National Science Foundation does another survey about how many Americans believe in evolution, it won’t be 48 percent, it’ll be, oh, 60 percent.”
Rot. What we really need is a serious discussion of what it even means to “believe in” “evolution.”
Believe in Bill Nye’s skull slide (WHATEVER it means!)?
Believe in the buzz from the human evo industry, no matter that their story has been sent back to rewrite?
For that matter (because the following often turns out to be part of the package):
Believe in whatever counterintuitive claim is currently circulating around life on other planets?
Believe that odds make no difference where origin of life is concerned?
Believe that there must be an uncountable infinity of universes because otherwise ours might appear fine tuned for life?
And this above all: Believe that there is no need to wonder why indiscriminate belief in defiance of evidence has become part and parcel of science.
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It is not being counter-intuitive that is the problem (although I appreciate the Lewontin allusion).
It is the fact that it is counter to the only actual piece of evidence we have.
Science is supposed to account for the evidence, not hide it, suppress it, deny it exists, or flatly contradict it.
OT- someone takes a swipe at Dembski- see how many mistakes and misrepresentations you can spot:AN ALGORITHMIC INFORMATION THEORY CHALLENGE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN
This is just a beautifully wrong of a quote on so many levels:
Well it may completely surprise Sara Lewis but an increase from 48% to 60% of people who believed in Darwinian evolution would mark an increase in scientific illiteracy in America not a decrease.
After years of debating Darwinists, I have found that Darwinian evolution is a full fledged pseudo-science and is certainly not to be considered a science in any proper sense. My first inklings that Darwinian evolution is a pseudo-science instead of a proper science came with my realization that no matter what evidence was presented to a Darwinists, they could always ‘explain away’ the evidence with a ‘just so story’:
No matter what the evidence is against evolution the answer is always ‘evolution did it’:
A rough outline of the top problems of neo-Darwinism are found here:
Here are some of the methods Darwinists use to avoid falsification from empirical evidence. Here is how neo-Darwinian evolution avoids falsification from ‘anomalous’ genetic evidence:
Here is a article that clearly illustrate that the protein evidence, no matter how crushing against Darwinism, is always crammed into the Darwinian framework by Evolutionists:
Here is how neo-Darwinian evolution avoids falsification from the fossil record;
Evolutionists avoid falsification from the biogeographical data of finding numerous and highly similar species in widely separated locations simply by ignoring contrary evidence:
The fallacy inherent to Cladistic analysis (of assuming your conclusion) is gone over here:
Some unscrupulous Darwinists avoid falsification from the fact that nobody has every seen material processes generate functional information by the fraudulent practice of ‘literature bluffing’:
Nick Matzke seems to take literature bluffing as a form of art rather than the blatant fraud it actually is:
Many more instances of Darwinists avoiding falsification from the empirical data, by ad hoc models (just so stories), are found on this following site:
Thus after a few years of getting this run around by Darwinists no matter what evidence is presented to them, no matter how crushing to Darwinian presuppositions, I finally learned why Darwinian evolution cannot be falsified. The main reason why Darwinian evolution cannot be falsified is that it has no mathematical demarcation criteria in which to potentially falsify it:
The reason why a mathematical basis cannot be rigidly formulated for Darwinian evolution is because of the materialistic/atheistic insistence for ‘randomness/chaos’ at the base of its formulation:
Thus Darwinian evolution, as long as it insists on ‘randomness/chaos at the base of its formulation, cannot ever have a mathematical demarcation criteria so as to demarcate it as a proper science they may be falsified instead of a pseudo-science that can never be falsified!
Verse and Music:
I loved the TED things for what i watched and they are a excellent idea to propagate ideas and interest in the universe.
Inequality?? Sounds llike left wing ethnic/sex agitators want to control science talking for their evil agendas.
How cvan people be against the tED talks?? In fact creationists should apply and allowed to dio these talks. Equal time for freedom of inquiry eh?!