The Battle For the Internet

Thee resulting knee-jerk reaction from TED to remove Sheldrake and Hancock's talks resulted in a back-and-forth exchange in an online thread which included insults, accusations of strawman arguments, challenges about what constitutes science, and disgust at the attempt to censor new ideas. Weiler dedicates a full chapter to key developments in the history of parapsychology over the last hundred years, such as Ganzfeld research, effects on random number generators, and staring studies, partly in defence of parapsychology, but also as an introduction to readers new to the discipline. Weiler cites examples of their bad research into the paranormal which includes Richard Wiseman's (n.d.) critique of Sheldrake's paper Dogs that know when their owners are coming home (2000) where Weiler alleges CSI researchers attained the same results as Sheldrake, but that arbitrary criteria for judging removed the positive results. The controversy spills out into the real world when the ongoing debate about 'sciencey sounding woo', a term used by Jerry Coyne to describe parapsychological concerns, leads to TED revoking the license for