Apparently science is not science unless it is approved by TED’s board:
After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel.
We’re not censoring the talks. Instead we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. See both talks after the jump.
All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.
It is very difficult to try to consider the idea that most of the TED Talks are not pseudoscience with a straight face. The entire purpose of the TED Talks is to make that which is not science look and feel like science for the benefit of the self-consciously mid-witted. There is a reason the Ted Talks are eight-minute videos; it is a product targeted at people with short attention spans who are more inclined to watch television than read.
In the image on the left, Manolo the Shoe Blogger illustrates for whom these short, lightweight Talks are intended. TED Talks are really nothing more than video Cliff’s Notes. That is why the sort of people who specialize in dumbing things down for the wealthy, half-educated have to be very careful about what ideas they permit to be presented to their target audience. They know perfectly well that their audience are the exact opposite of critical thinkers and therefore have a tendency to swallow everything presented to them as the pure truth of the sciencistic gospel.
The banned talk is below. The fascinating thing is one of the reasons for the ban which is that Sheldrake “suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness.” So, are we to understand that the scientific materialists now not only accept that consciousness exists, but regard it as the orthodox and enforceable scientific consensus?