Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

by _zhqs • 13 years ago

212 62 13 years ago

neurotheory.columbia.edu

Excellent read. Maintaining integrity in daily life has been a constant struggle. For many people, myself included, paying bills or taking care of people that depend on you can get in the way of integrity and it's a shame. Mr Feynman is lucky in that his skills will allow him to have his cake and eat it so to speak, not to discredit his message.

robbiep• 13 years ago

Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan project) in 1989.

This article seems to appear every couple of months. Still enjoyable and useful however.

magicalist2• 13 years ago

Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan project)

Feynman was a theoretical physicist. Direct exposure to fissile materials in a lab or factory environment is hard enough to reliably correlate with cancer rates[1][2] (we're all exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation over the course of our lives), but Feynman's exposure during the Manhattan project would have been extremely minimal, making any connection to his eventual cancer is virtually impossible.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9314220

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10098774

gwern• 13 years ago

Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan project) in 1989.

Something like a fifth of the American population will die of cancer, without ever having worked on the Manhattan population.

adharmad• 13 years ago

There is no evidence that the cancer he got was related to his work on the Manhattan project.

jnotarstefano3• 13 years ago

I love this speech so much I wrote an italian translation for my blog. Which other speeches in science do you think are worth a translation?

euoia• 13 years ago

Randy Pausch: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

jnotarstefano3• 13 years ago

I loved that. But I fear a blog post can't do justice to Pausch's excellent delivery.

ot• 13 years ago

The following two are among the most enlightening I can remember.

* Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

* Gian-Carlo Rota's "Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught" http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...

P.S. Ciao Pino! :)

jnotarstefano3• 13 years ago

Excellent suggestions! Thank you, ot.

md2242• 13 years ago

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

Sometimes I think if we could extend this principle to human communication in general, we'd end up with a lot less misinformation.

I try to communicate doubts or possible weaknesses in my arguments when I can, though it's difficult and I'm sure I've failed to do so on numerous occasions. It occurs to me that perhaps we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to include that level of information in our everyday communications. Still, I wonder if perhaps this should be an ideal to strive for. Information travels so fast now, and it seems like most people aren't very mindful of how they participate in this transmission.

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

For the general audience total confidence always beats the person who delivers a confidence interval.

Hedgehogs also beat foxes, despite the obvious difference in prediction accuracy in favor of foxes.

md2242• 13 years ago

Yeah I was actually considering that as well, in terms of how information evolves. Whatever is best at spreading will spread.

wging• 13 years ago

Perhaps the answer is a kind of confident non-confidence. "I have studied this problem and am about 70% confident that the answer is this, and I am confident there's not enough information available to be more certain than that. If anyone tells you they know the answer for certain, they are probably trying to sell you something."

TheZenPsycho2• 13 years ago

As others have pointed out, in the court of public opinion, ideas are not a meritocracy. Loudest wins, and hedging is seen as weakness.

There is an experiment here that can be applied to start ups. Can you predict the success or failure of a start up based on how confident the founder is perceived?

PLejeck• 13 years ago

I once read a post (that I can't seem to find now) talking about how startups need a "hacker, a hustler, and a hipster" to succeed.

sarreph• 13 years ago

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman is a brilliant read. My high school Physics teacher lent it to me a few years ago; it really opened my eyes and increased my love for the subject.

kops• 13 years ago

I first spotted that book in 1993, when a semi-illiterate guy passed it to my dad. The book came from a person who runs a school "Feynman public school" in a place called Bharatpur in northern India. It was the best thing that happened to me in 1993 and there was quite a lot that happened that year in my life...

The part that got me hooked was "he fixes radios by thinking" and then sure enough I learnt a bit of safe-cracking too :-)

His lectures on physics were the most beautiful books sitting on my shelf during my school years(never read them), but in India cool kids aren't supposed to be theoretical physicists... they are supposed to be Engineers..and so here I am...

projectileboy• 13 years ago

Reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics is a lot to ask of anyone, even many physicists. But if you'd like to appreciate a gem, crack open Volume I and read Chapter 22 - "Algebra". He starts with the ability to count integers, and then proceeds to derive Euler's Formula. Not rigorous mathematics to be sure, but easily my favorite piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction).

valisystem• 13 years ago

I just happened to finish it today. I already knew throughout the book that it would be a very important read, in several aspects. The very end is about the cargo cult in science, and it looks like he put this collection of anecdotes of his life in the sole point of illustrating the cargo cult problem, only exposed in the end. It's almost the sole time he talks extensively about science in this book (and it's why it's so awesome). Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in. We all know or knew at some point how to avoid the trap, but it gets another perspective when reading about someone that put it in practice his entire life.

Question everything, discover everything, take nothing for granted.

If it's seems unrealistic, just read the book, it'll just teach you how it happens. If it's intimidating, it's by its ruthless simplicity.

IanCal• 13 years ago

Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in

That's because we're over-sensitive pattern matching machines. This is good because often recognising and learning patterns quickly is extremely important, far more so than some false positives. Our amygdala, for example, responds very quickly to simple patterns ("AAAAH A SNAKE"). Slower processing can then tell us it's actually a stick. The cost of a false positive VS a false negative here are quite clear.

"Cargo Cult X" is always about us recognising a pattern and just blindly following it without understanding the causal links. Our poor (innate) understanding of probabilities means we can't really combine evidence well, but we can pattern match. Worse, because we start to feel like we understand what's happening we don't delve more into the problem. Even worse than that, we start to ignore evidence that doesn't fit the pattern since those examples look like outliers, and we quickly forget how often we've seen them.

As situations get more subtle than "Snake or stick" the costs of being wrong in different ways change massively. A poor understanding of statistics in healthcare can kill significant numbers of people, similarly with economic or political interactions.

Our brains are awful at complex statistics, but to be fair to them if our ancestors had waited for a double blind study on how likely a tiger was to eat you we would be here. Good work brains, but we need to stop listening to you now.

Information on fear responses and the role the amygdala plays:

http://labnic.unige.ch/papers/PV_cns2003_science.pdf

antimagic• 13 years ago

Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in.

Yeah, tell me about it. I fell into the trap a couple of months ago. I was tasked with porting my company's browser's 2D graphics backend onto Android OpenGL. My first attempt allowed the browser to draw into graphics buffers that I would load into a texture using glTexImage2D.

A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter hardware, without having to do a load step. I agreed - on the face of it, if we could arrange things to draw into the texture buffer directly we could save memory and processor cycles, so I started hunting on the Internet to see if anyone else had come to the same conclusion.

It turns out that the guys that were developing Firefox for Android had had exactly the same problem, and they hacked together a solution where they used some internal Android APIs for graphic buffers, that they accessed through dlopen/dlsym. They then linked the buffer to an eglImage, and created a texture from the eglImage. I figured that hey, if the Firefox guys are doing it, then it's probably not to bad an idea.

Unfortunately I should have taken the next step in my investigations, and ask myself exactly what that code that created an eglImage and linked it to a texture was actually doing. If I had investigated that more closely, I would have realised that behind the scenes there's an implicit equivalent of glTexImage2D being done - the problem being that the internal format of a texture is not a simple bitmap. The image is tiled so that OpenGL can draw a texture to the screen with any rotation and have roughly the same performance - if you use a standard bitmap layout, memory paging makes drawing tall thin rectangles much slower than drawing wide short rectangles. So, for OpenGL (or at least OpenGL ES) to be able to draw the texture to the screen, it first reads the data in from the eglImage, tiling it as it goes. This is exactly the same workload that you have in glTexImage2D, and it requires you to keep two copies of the buffer - the one you draw into, and the one that has been tiled for OpenGL.

Anyway, it took me about a month to get the eglImage solution to work (apart from everything else, you are exposed to odd behaviour by the graphics libraries of each Android tablet that your code runs on, that you have to write special code to handle, ie it's not very portable as a solution). Once I realised that I wasn't actually gaining anything from the exercise, I had to go and rip out all of that native graphic buffer code, and put back in the original standard texture code. I probably wasted 6 weeks stuffing around with all of this.

Lesson learned - if you are worrying about optimising code, you need to understand what is being done by the compiler / hardware, and it is pointless changing code until you have that understanding. Don't just accept stuff that you read on the Internet, where possible you need to go and look at source code, or official documentation. Anything else is running the risk of cargo-culting.

danielweber• 13 years ago

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that "science" is all about the customs designed to defeat the brain's imperfections. (It's pretty impressive that we can build such a reliable system on top of a such an unreliable system.)

One important conclusion is that scientists are not more believable than other people. "You should believe me because I am a scientist" is not acceptable answer. That scientist is still a meat-bag, just like you. The entire field of science is built up so we can trust the results of science despite it being done by meat-bags, not because we have created high priests that are more believable.

dlsx• 13 years ago

I didn't truly respect and understand Feynman until I read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer And it really shows how important Mr. Feynman was to not only making the first computerized filing system for the manhattan project, but also in solving some of the crucial challenges they faced. He had such a unique way of approaching physics that I think a lot of his contemporaries admired.

MikeCapone• 13 years ago

That was a great biography. Oppenheimer is fascinating in his own right.

alrs3• 13 years ago

That this story can thrive on HN every few months is a strong indicator that a nontrivial chunk of the userbase is 16.

mikeash5• 13 years ago

Why, do only 16-year-olds read interesting stories from famous physicists?

alrs3• 13 years ago

It's a great speech.

Having never seen this before is perfectly reasonable if you're new.

wglb• 13 years ago

Well, I would disagree. I do enjoy seeing some old, but very good stories crop up again after some time has passed.

cmsmith• 13 years ago

I've never seen it here, and based on a limited search [1] it appears that the story hasn't made it to the front page (i.e. gotten a non-zero amount of comments) in three years.

[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+...

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

The scientific integrity of your statement is questionable ;)

nknighthb• 13 years ago

Feynman is great, but not as well-known as you would like to think. Even people who recognize specific widely-related events (O-ring in ice water, or Trinity through the windshield) usually won't be able to tell you who he is. Even in tech, I only occasionally encounter people outside certain Internet Echo Chambers who have read anything at all by him.

leoedin• 13 years ago

I'm familiar with Richard Feynman, have read this before and voted it up anyway. Why? Because it's a really fantastic read and being reminded of the content every year or two is definitely a good thing.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I'm not so sure about the user base being 16, but this story does seem to make the rounds quite a bit. Perhaps so much so that I cringe when I hear Cargo Cult misused in the popular jargon. It's a shame because Feynman does have so much to say.

triplesec• 13 years ago

This story has been particularly sccessful on HN recently partly because of this year's Burning Man festival's theme being "cargo cult". Quite happy to see this pop up again. Feynman never goes out of style.

mhartl• 13 years ago

This year at Burning Man, I happened to notice a car with the California state license plate "TUVA". I recognized it as belonging to Ralph Leighton, Feynman's close friend and author of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. (The plate is a reference to the story recounted in [Tuva or Bust!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva_or_Bust!).) I reached out to Ralph, and it turns out he wasn't there but his son was. I thought it was a fun coincidence given the theme of the burn.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

Not to distract from the Important Scientific Discussion, but Esalen is as wonderful today as it was back then. The hot tubs and showers have been rebuilt, and the scenery is just as striking. Out of this world.

If you're there over Thanksgiving, say hi.

peterwwillis• 13 years ago

How does it compare to Harbin? I was just there and it was also lovely (a bit too much like a resort than i'd prefer, though)

Also off of the scientific tangent: If you find yourself in a hot tub with a beautiful nude and no idea what to say, compare poetry to liquid thermodynamics. "Rock Star" doesn't begin to cover it.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

Very different vibe from Harbin, plus of course the ocean. Much more of a sense of "community" at Esalen, while at Harbin you generally interact with the people you came with, if any.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

Yeah, yeah. Java - the planes don't land.

Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)

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