Feynman's Cargo Cult Science

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

by rw_rrr • 16 years ago

55 25 16 years ago

jbooth7• 16 years ago

"I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen"

He's right, of course, and that's why science is routinely beaten to a pulp in the media by those with an agenda who don't care about the truth.

jbert• 16 years ago

The honest suffer when everyone lies, true.

That can be fixed by raising the cost of lying, rather than accepting it as the norm with consequences.

Humans have a tool for this, it's called reputation.

The more we accept, say, that all politicians are liars, the more both the honest and the listener suffer.

We should be outraged when someone has been shown to lie. It should be a resigning matter.

jbooth7• 16 years ago

Or at least when it's lying repeatedly and deliberately. Fox News shouldn't have an audience (this is not a statement about conservatism, it's a statement about Fox News).

But if you're confirming people's biases, particularly regarding some "other" being the enemy (this week it's muslims in NYC), then the truth is going to take a back seat to that warm feeling of self-righteousness.

moultano• 16 years ago

What I've realized is that people hate being bored more than they hate anything else, even being lied to.

istari• 16 years ago

You know how most people decide when someone is telling the truth?

I agree with him = he's honest.

I disagree with him = he's lying.

Very few people care about object evidence that goes against what they believe in.

zeteo3• 16 years ago

It's the nature of science to reject arguments from authority. It's a sure-footed, but tedious way to progress.

The nature of mass-media is almost the exact opposite. Its incentives are to present a large volume of "fresh" information, even though 99.9% of it will be considered false or irrelevant in five years. From the reporter to the talk show guests, this information springs from a myriad of "authorities", and its veracity is wholly estimated by the reputation and rhetorical abilities of its sources.

Thus, the media understands and interacts much better with other systems based on authority. Even when scientists appear on talk shows, they are brought over as "experts" - and promptly fail in this capacity with the first self-doubt they express.

The good news is that, in the long run, all the authority-driven drivel evaporates as the "authorities" and their intellectual fashions change (even theology, with its scriptural basis, often differs significantly from one generation to the next). The hard scientific truths remain.

jbooth7• 16 years ago

The mass-media recipe is either "whatever we think will help republicans" (Fox) or "He said, she said" (everyone else). There's almost nobody who's actually willing to call BS on a lie for it's own sake.

andreyf• 16 years ago

If you like this line of reasoning, Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" [1] is a great academic approach to the same epistemological questions, applied to the academic community, and with some very bold conclusions about knowledge as a whole.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

colonelxc• 16 years ago

I went through that book in a Philosophy of Science class, and I too recommend it. I also recommend the class, if you get a chance.

I think it is important for all scientists to understand the history of science and even spend some time thinking about the cultural/societal problems that hamper scientific progress currently.

briandoll• 16 years ago

On a similar note, Robert Krulwich, one of the hosts of RadioLab on NPR gave a commencement speech at California Institute of Technology called “Tell Me a Story.”

It's a great reminder that we all learn through stories, and that stories are really the only way to convey complex ideas to the general public. Not telling these stories, because we think they won't get it, harms everyone and creates a vacuum of truth where more appealing unscientific stories then dominate.

Audio of the talk: http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/07/29/tell-me-a-story/

undefined_user• 16 years ago

For those who dont know

This is an excerpt from the awesome book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman" The whole book is full of short anecdotes like this and is an amazing read.

http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

Edit: spelling

nollidge2• 16 years ago

I think you mean anecdotes :)

Paddy3118• 16 years ago

Integrity in conducting scientific experiments? Now there's an idea!

ataggart• 16 years ago

The field of economics has, for quite a while, been suffering from this sort of scientistic behavior, aping the practices of the physical sciences, while dismissing aprioristic economics simply because it doesn't.

The following is a rather long, but quite decent discussion of the topic with a physicist that actually worked with Feynman.

http://commentlog.org/bid/4408/Feynman-Rothbard-and-the-Scie...

Feynman's Cargo Cult Science

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