TED Talk censorship

[johnson1010]

Agreed, Ant.

Human bias is unavoidable. The purpose of science is get a true understanding of reality as it is. Peer review is the way we find the human bias in scientific research and remove it.

Rupert Sheldrake has a personal interest in "morphic resonance". He proposes it exists for reasons of his own. Other scientists look at his research and pinpoint what works and what doesn't work, based on empirical studies, about morphic resonance. These independant reviewers do not have the same desire that Rupert does for morphic resonance to be correct. They can find the errors which Rupert does not see, or is ignoring (perhaps even without realizing he's stuck in confirmation bias).

Science has a corrective mechanism for trying to weed out the human biases. The better you are at removing your own biases, the better scientific work you do.

Morality is a subject that deals with real things, in the real world. It is subjective, but not imaginary. Being subjective does not make it immaterial, or beyond study, it just means that there is an element of variation.

You say that science should stay out of the study of morality, meaning and value and that we should instead let philosophy handle these topics. If the problem you percieve is human bias and that's your argument against using the scientific method, then how does that square with using philosophy to study meaning, value and morality?

Philosophy has no checks whatsoever on human bias. No mechanism to relate what is confirmable to what we suppose is happening. So how do you propose to remove human bias in studying morality from a discipline that is crafted entirely in the human mind without being answerable to reality in any way?

This is what the scientific method was designed for! You don't have to take my word for it that lead melts at a certain temperature. It isn't a question of he said, she said, and who has more prestige and so should therefor be believed above others. Reality, and objective demonstrations are the referee and the final word on who was right and who can be proven to be wrong.