
Six Smart Guys Sitting Around Talking (1994) - indigodaddy
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/arts/television-six-smart-guys-sitting-around-talking.html
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indigodaddy
The discussion: [https://youtu.be/YUWd5xgLXBU](https://youtu.be/YUWd5xgLXBU)

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serf
one of my favorite casual talks between people who I respect.

(in my fantasy head-cannon they replace Rupert Sheldrake with someone that
brings up less WOO. Even they seemed annoyed in that video when he says things
like "How do we know whether or not the Sun is alive?")

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blast
Sheldrake strikes me as a revival of the early modern scientist, someone who
would have been at home in the early heyday of the Royal Society—an insatiably
curious English gentleman who asks questions from fundamentals and wants to
test everything for himself. Someone who sees no conflict between science and
religion but is often attacked by dogmatists. Historically, this was an
entirely mainstream position, though it hasn't been for a while now.

I find his curiosity charming, and his ability to consider questions from
first principles remarkable. That he has been attacked so harshly ("A Book for
Burning") yet always retains his good-humoured demeanour says a lot for him.

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sandwall
Have to agree, in some ways he helped drive the discussion to greater depth --
many questions aren't easy to answer and Gould didn't want to entertain them.
I particularly liked Sacks vignette on patterns from migraines, revisited
here:

[https://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/patterns/](https://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/patterns/)

Sheldrake's discussion on magnetoreception was also of value; it wasn't
perfectly accurate (nor as well understood then as it is today) but Gould was
arbitrarily dismissive; see more on the really cool phenomena here:

[https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-
crypt...](https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-cryptochrome-
cry4-photoreceptor-2018)

Einstein said it well: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For
knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world,
stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

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mikhailfranco
Very similar format to the British Channel 4 series _After Dark_ (1987-97):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(TV_programme)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_\(TV_programme\))

itself inspired by the Austrian program _Club 2_ (1976–2012):

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487238/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487238/)

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neonate
[https://archive.is/sWWvJ](https://archive.is/sWWvJ)

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2sk21
Amazing that Dennett and Gould were in a panel together!

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indigodaddy
Gould is an incredibly eloquent speaker isn’t he?

