It may have been the TEDx talk in Valencia, Spain, by the Great Soul of Hugs that rang the alarm bell at headquarters for big-think conference TED. Or perhaps the free-energy, buzzword-crammed stylings of TEDx speaker Randy Powell in Charlotte, North Carolina, about “vortex-based mathematics.”
Whatever the final straw, the big brains at TED schooled their rabid audience Friday on the perils of pseudo-science. The ultimate warning: “Presenting bad science on the TEDx stage is grounds for revoking your license.”
TED posted a letter to the TEDx communityon its blog warning of the pitfalls of bad science. TEDx conferences happen in cities and towns across the world. To date there have been 5,000 events and 21,000 TEDx talks put up online.
While they are based on the well-known TED conference, and would-be TEDx event planners need to apply for a free TEDx license to use the brand, the satellite events aren’t organized nor are speakers vetted by TED staffers. That’s left up to the individual TEDx organizers. And it is where the process has failed in some cases, says TEDx Director Lara Stein.
"This isn’t the first time it’s happened, but the community does a pretty good job of policing itself, and most of the time there are amazing events,” says Stein. “But we thought it was an important enough issue to respond directly and help the community respond to this better.”
By way of helping, the TED staffers offered this:
“It is not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science or not. It is your job,” Stein Writes on the TEDx blog with TED.com editor Emily McManus. “The consequence of bad science and health hoaxes are not trivial. As an example, Andrew Wakefield’s attempt to link autism and vaccines was exposed as a hoax last year. But while his work was being investigated, millions of children went without vaccines, and many contracted deadly illnesses as a result.”
OK, so great harm can come from pseudo-science, but in this case the greatest harm may have been to the TED brand itself.
Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist by training now working at car-sharing service Uber, posted this question on Quora after viewing a video of Powell’s TEDx Charlotte talk (since pulled from the TED.com site): "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk or is it just total nonsense?"
The top-rated response came from Stanford Theoretical Physics Professor Jay Wacker.
Don’t worry if physics isn’t your strong suit, you’ll understand this just fine.
“Wow. Such fucking bullshit,” Wacker writes in unscientific prose. “Well, I am a theoretical physicist who uses (and teaches) the technical meaning of many of the jargon terms that he's throwing out. And he is simply doing a random word association with the terms.”
Random word associations have long been a part of the TED approach, but it’s called poetry, not science. And while no licenses have been revoked for presenting bad science yet (the Charlotte TEDx license was renewed even after the Powell incident), TEDx is giving its community fair warning that it's an option they will exercise if necessary.
"I think it’s all in the context," Stein says. "If something is being presented as art or an entertaining interlude that is fine, but if it is being presented as some sort of science that is not fine.”
