[HN Gopher] Cargo cult science (1974)
___________________________________________________________________
Cargo cult science (1974)
Author : sherilm
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-03-06 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calteches.library.caltech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (calteches.library.caltech.edu)
| college_physics wrote:
| Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking
| behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the
| planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your
| little corner of the planet
|
| If only they did.
|
| Entrepreneurship, Great Universities, celebration of failures
| (having 2 failed startups is seen as a badge of honor to VCs)
| and privately administered capital (low tax rate!) willing to
| take risk. These are the elements vital to any potential
| foreign Silicon Valley competitors and they only exist here in
| America.
|
| All of the "Silicon Valley of X" initiatives I've seen were
| either led by bureaucrats with no ties to the valley or by who
| had little to no understanding of these fundamental traits. It
| was beanbag chairs and people writing JS on MacBooks (for 1/3
| of what people who actually came to the valley made).
| seydor wrote:
| It seems like VCs are doing a lot of cargo cult tech.
|
| Cargo cults work if you have enough money. Throw it to the wall
| with adequate speed for large enough amount of time and some
| very few will stick. Then you can rest on the laurels that
| Fortuna gave you. This is why Silicon Valley cannot be
| replicated elsewhere, except perhaps Switzerland or some
| filthy-rich Petrocountry.
| narag wrote:
| Oh, the classic we're going to create Europe's SV in ___ you
| know.
| bjornsing wrote:
| But those only copy the cultural aspects that favor those
| doing the copying, and since it's conventional-minded people
| that copy and the "secret" SV ingredient is putting
| independent-minded people in charge the whole process is
| forever doomed to failure...
|
| But it keeps a lot of bureaucrats busy, and (very) gainfully
| employed.
| narag wrote:
| I enjoyed very much this blog series and the video:
|
| https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
|
| Unfortunately some people tends to cherry pick their
| favourite details. In my country there's a politician that
| says that the iPhone development was paid by US government.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - Richard
| Feynman
| poszlem wrote:
| A related quote that I always loved: "Without education, we are
| in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people
| seriously."
| learnedSloth wrote:
| Learning would work at least as well IMO. One can be educated
| to taking educated people seriously.
| analog31 wrote:
| I've been in roomfuls of people who believed in the ignorance
| of experts, and they were not scientists.
| lisper wrote:
| You do realize that was intended to be humorous, yes? It's true
| that one should not defer blindly to authority, but experts
| nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't. That's
| what makes them experts.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts
| don't
|
| Oh, yeah, engineering and all the other practices are rooted
| on this.
|
| Science is not.
| lisper wrote:
| Science may not be "rooted" in this, but it is nonetheless
| still a pretty good bet that a scientific expert knows
| things that non-experts don't.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, if he works assuming he knows those things, he will
| fail in doing science.
|
| (Unless by those things you mean the scientific method,
| because scientists usually practice that one.)
| jhbadger wrote:
| Exactly. And it was about experts questioning the beliefs of
| other experts, particularly experts in the past. Galileo
| questioning Aristotle. Einstein questioning Newton. Not about
| random quacks thinking they have opinions equal to the
| experts.
| hinkley wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle
| physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science
| wrong.
|
| Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based
| upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been
| doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and
| imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results
| in the currently explored energy levels, just in the unexplored
| ones. Then when people get funding to look into these
| frontiers/gaps, and find that everything looks the same, they
| adjust their theories to push them out into the gaps.
|
| That's not Science, she emphatically states.
|
| For myself it sounds like saying, "well you don't know Unicorns
| don't exist because we haven't looked everywhere, what if they're
| in <unexplored forests in the Congo>?" Then the Congo gets
| explored and they say, "well maybe they're in Antarctica".
| sorokod wrote:
| This one? If so I would not call it a rant, she pulls no
| punches which is a positive thing.
|
| "What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics?"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o
| lynx23 wrote:
| Just unsub her. She picked up a lot of people by her bold way
| of presenting. Most discover after a while that she isnt worth
| watching.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| You seem to imply, most people were smart. But statistically,
| most people are not.
|
| Hossenfelder critzises physics. That is a good thing to do,
| regardless of whether she is always right about it.
|
| Being smart, you can learn from her even if she is not. At
| the very least about how to present better.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm not even subbed. The things I am subbed to just don't
| generate new content at the rate that I hit youtube so I end
| up with suggestions.
| imranq wrote:
| I don't see what the problem with Sabine's analysis is? I
| thought it was great.
|
| Shouldn't particle physicists have more expectations of what
| they expect to find rather than we want to find X and we are
| going to search the entire energy frontier to find it. The
| problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the ROI
| could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what we
| expect
| bjornsing wrote:
| > The problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the
| ROI could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what
| we expect
|
| AKA the full employment theorem of particle physics...
| HPsquared wrote:
| If thousands of people have careers in unicorn-hunting, that's
| what will happen.
| hinkley wrote:
| While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or
| die".
| js8 wrote:
| Publish (in a scientific journal) or publish (on Youtube).
| No hiding from the invisible freedom of the market.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I don't get that complaint. It's like hearing a software
| engineer complaining "write code or get fired", yeah, well,
| that's your literal job?
| hinkley wrote:
| Have you been reading the threads about the
| reproducibility crisis that pop up here regularly?
| Essentially some people worry we have more people who
| need to write papers than we can sustain with our current
| research horizon, and people are making shit up or at
| least being overly optimistic.
|
| As Feynman used to say, "The most important thing is not
| to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| To all reproducibility problems I say "publish _more_ ".
| Do you plan to do a study? Register it and publish your
| methodology before data collection. Have you collected
| data? Publish it. Have you finished the study? Believe it
| or not, publish it.
|
| Do you want to do a 20 year long study on a particle
| collider built specifically for you right after finishing
| your PhD? Well, sorry, you have to build your reputation
| so that society sees that you are not one of those people
| who "are making shit up or at least being overly
| optimistic".
| lanza wrote:
| Eh, your analogy isn't apt. The problem in physics is that the
| space of possible theories has been searched so exhaustively
| that what these physicists are doing is just about the only
| choice.
|
| To make your analogy close to physics -- imagine you found a
| unicorn horn and can tell from the biological makeup that it is
| indeed a horn grown from some sort of horse-like mammal. If you
| searched 99.9999% of the earth for animals that might have
| grown that horn and found nothing then the best thing to do
| would be to continue looking within that 0.00001%.
|
| We can't figure out what comes after the standard model of
| particle physics. But we know it's wrong. e.g. we know black
| holes exist and something has to happen within them. But we
| don't have a theory that can predict what that is. e.g. we
| found a unicorn horn. So we have to desperately search for it.
|
| Hossenfelder is right that it's shitty to have to keep pushing
| the energy boundaries in which we hope we'll see some
| interesting behavior. But there's literally nothing else to do.
| We've searched 99.99999% of earth and there's no unicorn. Do we
| start denying the existence of the unicorn horn that we're
| holding?
| ikrenji wrote:
| idk the amount of experiments / work vying for funding is far
| bigger than what can be funded. and if a big chunk of the
| funds is allocated to building bigger accelerators then a lot
| of experiments or other work might not get funded. im not
| saying its better to fund other projects over the next big
| accelerator or dark matter detector, but i dont think its
| right to say there is nothing else to do besides that...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Things are more complicated than that.
|
| Something is there causing those phenomena. People have a
| theory that it may be unicorns, so they are out looking for
| unicorns. Those are supposed to be hard to find, and people are
| still searching on the hardest possible places that can hold
| them. It may also not be unicorns, on what case nobody has any
| idea what it may be. Some people are trying to make such
| theories, but none got a good one yet.
|
| On this level of detail, there is nothing wrong at all with any
| party of the above. All of the problems are with finer details.
| Tostino wrote:
| It matters when the limited resources are spent chasing
| unicorns that are vanishing unlikely to actually be there.
|
| That is part of the argument. Those dollars could go other
| places than these giant particle accelerators that haven't
| shown anything much since the Higgs Boson, and no theories
| are more than guessing that we will.
| willis936 wrote:
| Serial contrarian jumps on table and shouts. More at 11.
|
| A telltale sign of a crank is attacking career scientists,
| which is her brand. What insight is she offering? Destroying is
| easy, creating is hard. Lies spread faster than truth. In
| general she is a force of confusion rather than enlightenment.
| It's too bad because she seems capable, if only she'd follow
| through rather than chase headlines.
| precompute wrote:
| A "Career Scientist" is very, very bad news!
| vkou wrote:
| A career contrarian can be even worse. A career scientist
| actually needs to justify their output, to their peers and
| the people signing the cheques.
|
| And if not career scientists, who exactly do you think
| should be making a living... Doing research?
|
| Undergrads? The admins? The timecube guy? Nobody?
|
| There's a lot of problems with science as it's done today,
| but that snipe is a banal, tribalistic take that is all-
| too-common.
| precompute wrote:
| That would've been a great reply had the title of the
| main post not been "Cargo Cult Science".
|
| For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes
| papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute /
| uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table...
| not the point here. One can still have integrity). The
| career scientist couldn't care less about being right,
| only about how many citations he's gonna get and whether
| anyone's going to discover any flaws in his paper.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > A telltale sign of a crank is attacking career scientists
|
| yeah, she should've known better than to attack a protected
| class
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Any reason to frame this argument as contrarian? Apart from
| your decision to label the author so - presumably for the
| sake of legitimizing your argument?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What insight is she offering?
|
| For a while she was offering an honest look at a field going
| nowhere, and suggestions as to how they might better spend
| time and money.
|
| Now I think she's just profiting from her new popularity by
| doing a not so good science/tech show.
| college_physics wrote:
| the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy
| levels _did_ work before. Unicorns _were_ found in the
| unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns
| of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement
| that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel
| has managed to internalize about the universe. You can 't blame
| modern day particle physicists for being born late for the
| Unicorn chasing party...
|
| so the argurment now is, for how much longer is it reasonable
| to be roaming difficult terrains in the hope that we might have
| a repeat miracle? Its practically impossible to answer. "All
| Unicorns have been discovered" has been a scientist's cry as
| far back as Laplace.
| hinkley wrote:
| The last time we found something that was predicted by the
| Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years.
|
| edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that
| 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research
| grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at
| least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to
| the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me.
| Unfortunately she's also shining a spotlight on the thing
| she's worried about other people noticing.
| Tostino wrote:
| > The last time we found something that was predicted by
| the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it?
|
| The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was
| predicted by the standard model.
| hinkley wrote:
| Higgs et al didn't just predict the boson though, right?
| His team explained other properties of particle physics
| and their model also predicted a particle.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> The last time we found something that was predicted by
| the Standard Model was 1983, wasn 't it? That's 40 years._
|
| IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time
| we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was
| the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau
| neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark
| in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring
| to) the W and Z bosons in 1983
|
| [1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
| hinkley wrote:
| Also not a physicist, but I think the distinction being
| made here is that Higgs et al explained existing
| phenomenon that did not make sense within the existing
| theory, and oh by the way if we're correct we've also
| created a hole in the standard model where a particle
| exists with certain properties that were a bit nebulous.
|
| For instance special relativity explains gravitational
| lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be
| discovered, but also explained other problems. The
| theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past
| to the present and the present to the future:
|
| This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that
| explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can
| test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my
| theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory
| that require <future tech> to be sure that this is 'true'
| instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or
| giant particle accelerators.
| staunton wrote:
| > special relativity explains gravitational lensing
|
| You mean general relativity
| college_physics wrote:
| > That's 40 years.
|
| Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not
| saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective
| call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries
| and extrapolates a judgement.
|
| (1) it took more than that from the first gravitational
| wave detector to an actual discovery
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm going to start repeating myself in separate replies
| here.
|
| Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a
| standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction
| of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be
| plausible based on data already at hand and data they
| could collect.
|
| Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm
| what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and
| bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence
| for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of
| opportunity for some other theory to explain the same
| phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences
| that let us do new things like build Foundation power
| supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL
| travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.
| learnedSloth wrote:
| > For myself it sounds like saying, "well you don't know
| Unicorns don't exist because we haven't looked everywhere, what
| if they're in <unexplored forests in the Congo>?" Then the
| Congo gets explored and they say, "well maybe they're in
| Antarctica".
|
| In India:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_One_Horned_Rhino.j...
| theurerjohn3 wrote:
| Things like this make me want to read Against Method [1]. Like,
| yeah that seems 'not science' in one serious sense, but also
| not really? It falls into what I understand of Kuhn's 'normal
| science'. Slightly adjusting their theories to explain existing
| data is exactly what you should expect scientists to do, until
| the gaps get so big no adjustments are sufficiently concise.
|
| For a defense of the 'unicorns in unexplored forests', that was
| pretty much the approach that led to the discovery of most of
| the standard model.
|
| Plus, given dark matter and dark energy, we know something must
| be out there, even if its not unicorns, there's something.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
| User23 wrote:
| Feynman mentions a similar point in _QED_ when he talks about
| the "science" of proton decay. The proton hasn't had the
| courtesy to actually decay in an experiment, so all they do is
| keep publishing increasingly high lower bounds on the proton's
| half-life.
|
| It's fascinating that someone can make a career out of a
| phenomenon not being observed.
| analog31 wrote:
| Folks talk about the lack of support for things like
| replication studies and the publication of negative results
| in the life sciences, as contributing to the widely
| proclaimed replication crisis.
|
| Establishing a solid negative result that rules out
| hypotheses is worthwhile if unglamorous.
|
| Citing an upper bound on the half-life is all that can be
| credibly reported. It's how you put an error bar on something
| that's non-negative but consistent with zero.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been
| feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily
| like when I abandoned the belief in god many years ago. There is
| that nagging feeling I can't shake that, no matter how I look at
| it, I can't negate the null hypothesis that _organized education
| is basically useless_.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't think educational institutions
| shouldn't exist; surely smart people need a place to go and do
| things and get together and work. The point to me is that,
| whatever it is that smart people are doing, they'd mostly do that
| anyway no matter what kind of _education_ they're getting.
|
| Whenever I bring it up with colleagues, I usually get into heated
| arguments where I become the 1 in an invariably N-to-1 aggressive
| debate. Plus, my wife is a primary school teacher with a Master
| degree in Education who loves teaching, so obviously that is a
| very delicate subject to bring up at home. I have noticed that
| people like her, who love teaching, usually have a very emotional
| attachment to it from their own personal experiences and how they
| see education as transformative, and that makes any kind of
| objective research on teaching become very hard to do. It's
| almost like teaching is such a holy subject that any teaching
| _has_ to be good, and criticizing it is like defending
| imperialism or capitalism or rich people or something like that
| (it doesn't help that my wife came from a very poor background
| and got out of that through education practice, and has teached
| most of her career in poor neighborhoods; that makes a delicate
| subject even more touchy).
|
| My personal opinion is that I am only human and seeing myself as
| some kind of "savior through teaching" is unfair, to me and to
| others (yes, I do some teaching too). Most of the time I focus on
| trying to give smart students a platform to grow, and while I
| also try to motivate the other students as much as I can (I do
| believe you can "fish" some of them out of the pool), I don't
| usually pull my hair or lose sleep over them. One, because I
| don't feel like I have the right to keep patronizing people as if
| I know what's objectively better for them; lots of people out
| there are doing much better than me without formal education.
| Second, because I do not have the illusion that I (or most other
| teachers) know a really good teaching method that can make a
| significant difference. It would be like losing sleep because a
| glass of holy water that I blessed did not save a cancer patient.
| [deleted]
| smogcutter wrote:
| This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to
| a pretty banal HN greatest hit: "intelligent" people don't
| really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Yeah, he seems to be making it a matter of "well the smart
| people, the ones who really matter don't need education, so
| all the sub 99th percentile students don't really matter
| because the smart ones aren't benefitting"
|
| So teaching kids to read, understand logical inference,
| showing them different parts of the world and how to look at
| it, doesn't matter because the wonderful gifted kids would
| have happened upon those insights anyway? It seems pretty
| reductive to assume the point of education is just to foster
| a small cadre of geniuses.
| sebstefan wrote:
| If you stumble upon a website that makes the stylistic choice
| that text should take the whole width of your whole screen, you
| can toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back
| into a more usual format (F9 on Windows).
|
| If you use Chrome-based browsers, there's bookmarklets (bookmarks
| with a `javascript:` URI)
| javascript:(function(){var bod =
| document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; bod.style.margin =
| "40px auto"; bod.style.maxWidth = "40vw"; bod.style.lineHeight =
| "1.6"; bod.style.fontSize = "18px"; bod.style.color = "#444";
| bod.style.padding = "0 10px"; })();
| teddyh wrote:
| > _toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back
| into a more usual format (F9 on Windows)._
|
| Ctrl-Alt-R on Linux.
| kken wrote:
| Stylistic choice? Isn't that literally basic html the way it
| was meant to be used? I think you were supposed to display it
| in an actual browser window.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Those websites use the full width of your browser _window_ ,
| not your whole _screen_ (on desktop at least; on mobile the
| story is different). That means that you, who has control over
| your window, have full control over how wide you want the text
| to be.
| debacle wrote:
| Humans are innately imaginative outside of the bounds of reality.
| Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it
| be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about
| random things.
|
| Most interestingly, these are generally weak beliefs strongly
| held. You'll never convince these people that they've divorced
| themselves from reality, and you have nearly nothing to gain from
| trying.
|
| Psychologists, doctors, lawyers, sitting congresspeople, etc.
| This isn't something that Facebook moms have a monopoly on.
|
| We are really bad at recognizing our own flights of fancy (and,
| of course, recognizing what we're really bad at).
| derwiki wrote:
| I thought essential oils were just concentrated versions of the
| original? Eg I use orange essential oil to make my own air
| freshener spray.
| TOMDM wrote:
| When people talk about essential oils in contexts like these,
| they're most likely referring to some people having the
| belief that they have medicinal properties; can cure autism
| etc.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Lots of people believe essential oils can cure cancer. Any
| big oncology center has stories about people who show up
| presenting horrible symptoms well beyond what's normally
| seen. They spent 2 years just doing essential oils or
| whatever (often encouraged by some a quack) on some readily
| treatable thing and when they do finally give in and come
| to the ER it's basically too late.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Tragedies like these make me very hesitant about
| "harmless" falsehoods.
|
| I also wonder what cancer survival rates look like if you
| filter people who self select out of conventional
| healthcare for a period of time like your example above.
| Jensson wrote:
| I wonder if belief in alternate medicine correlates with
| unaffordable healthcare. It is much easier to believe
| that there is a better way if the correct procedure would
| ruin you financially.
| amelius wrote:
| Uh, placebos work, and different placebos may work better for
| different people!
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Yep. And given a significant problem and a placebo, would you
| rather:
|
| 1) Not use the placebo, because even though it seems to work
| for you, it's been scientifically shown in trials to do
| nothing
|
| 2) Use the placebo, because it seems to work; somehow get
| good results
|
| A huge number of people will choose #1. They are extremely
| close to cargo cult without even realizing it.
|
| I'd say that if there's a pos/neg polarization to cargo cult,
| they are on the negative side, looking for things to reject
| in culty ways. But whether you're consuming product or
| rejecting it, the same shaky mindsets apply.
| Jensson wrote:
| So we hook up ChatGPT to procedurally generate medicine
| sounding names to sugar pills, and then figure out which name
| gives the best placebo effect in patients? Then we just
| rotate some of the better ones in patients to maximize the
| placebo effect, when they say the effect wears off they get a
| new name on the pill they take.
| narag wrote:
| _Most people I know believe in things that aren 't real,
| whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random
| mythologies about random things._
|
| You're using known pseudo-science, magic examples.
|
| Do you want to have real fun? Try using computer science fads
| or political ideologies. For every new age belief, there's an
| even more ridiculous one, based on the same evidence (none) and
| hurting people and businesses. Compared to those, crystals are
| harmless.
| shagmin wrote:
| In the book Sapiens it builds on this idea for myths lots of
| people believe in, or "shared fictions" or artificial truths or
| whatever you want to call it. Like money for example, it's only
| worth anything as long as people believe it has purchasing
| power, even if really it's just collections of 0s and 1s or
| symbols printed on textiles. Extrapolate that idea to many
| other things people collectively believe in, and that let's us
| build stable societies.
| orgels_revenge wrote:
| Well said. For me, a person who admittedly has some pretty far-
| out beliefs/theories, it's because there is generally no
| penalty for having these beliefs. Sure, at work where things
| count, I make sure my theories adhere to reality. But when I'm
| out chilling in nature? My goal then is to have fun, and
| entertaining crazy ideas is my idea of a good time. People who
| have to be correct all the time are kind of missing out and
| expending a lot of useless energy.
|
| Plus, the universe is so wild that even modern science probably
| doesn't cut as deep as we think it does.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I noticed that generally, people who describe themselves like
| you don't use the "believe/not believe" phrasing, at least
| not with so much intensity.
|
| At the same time, a lot of cargo cultists are looking to
| relax and turn on the "just believe in something whole-hog"
| autopilot.
|
| They don't even like exploring details that are interesting,
| because it muddies the waters around the big Belief question.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| But surely there's a difference between entertaining crazy
| ideas, which can be fun and an exercise in creativity, and
| elevating them to beliefs?
|
| I wonder if it stems from discomfort at the admitting, even
| to ourselves, that there are things we don't know.
|
| For me, it's not so much about being correct all the time, as
| just avoiding being wrong.
| weberer wrote:
| >I say that's also important in giving certain types of
| government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about
| whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you
| decide it would he better in some other state. If you don't
| publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving
| scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to
| come out in the direction the government or the politicians like,
| they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out
| the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving
| scientific advice.
|
| We saw this just recently when the EU tried to hide a study that
| showed piracy actually increased game sales. I wonder what other
| studies are being suppressed because they don't fit the
| narrative.
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/inconvenient-eu-piracy-stu...
| [deleted]
| superkuh wrote:
| You see this constantly in information technology contexts as
| well. People who at work, when required to work with many other
| people on the same project which itself is of a larger scale,
| then bring kubernetes style containers and ideas about
| "deployment" home to their personal webserver. And this would be
| fine, silly, recreation if only they didn't write up articles on
| "How to host from home" that described their k8/etc/etc setup
| like it was required in this new context.
|
| Basically any time you see the word "deployal" outside of a
| business or institutional IT context you're looking at cargo cult
| behavior.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 - March 2021 (69
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 - Sept 2019 (33
| comments)
|
| _Cargo cult data science_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 - Aug 2017 (40
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 - Dec 2016 (37
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 - May 2016 (38
| comments)
|
| _Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 - Oct 2013 (62
| comments)
|
| _Feynman 's Cargo Cult Science_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571 - Aug 2010 (25
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (.PDF)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150 - Dec 2009 (4
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140 - July 2009 (17
| comments)
| bjornsing wrote:
| I find myself thinking of this speech more and more often. It
| seems to apply to more and more of society, as I see it. The
| scariest versions I've personally come across is Cargo Cult
| Medicine and Cargo Cult Courts...
| Loquebantur wrote:
| The central problem is the methodology of science not being
| taught explicitly anywhere.
|
| It should be part of the school curriculum, instead a
| scientism-version is part of folklore.
| staunton wrote:
| There isn't even such a thing as "the methodology of
| science". People disagree about it and it is constantly
| evolving. Who should write that curriculum?
|
| Sure, there's a lot of common ground that could be taught
| (and it is taught in some places, we read some Popper in high
| school). But it's also very abstract, difficult to teach
| without extensive examples and of very limited use in most
| jobs. Hardly "the central problem".
| [deleted]
| poszlem wrote:
| In my opinion, we have deviated from the true essence of
| "Science" by using it to determine "what ought to be" instead of
| focusing on answering the fundamental question of "what is."
|
| I know that this is not particularly in vogue now to say, but
| social sciences especially did a whole lot to discredit the idea
| of science being something that is objective. They pretend to "do
| science" but instead use it to either "Launder Ideas"
| (https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-115...)
| or pure activism (for example, a paper published in Hipatia
| suggested that male students should be trained to propagate the
| feminist message, much like the way viruses spread
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315583936_Women's_S....
|
| Not even going to mention the Grievance studies affair.
|
| I have embraced accelerationism and hope that "science" (and
| academia specifically) fails quickly so that it can rise again
| with greater resilience and the ability to withstand pressure
| from activist organizations. Let's hope the hard sciences
| renaissance is nigh.
| kilgnad wrote:
| [flagged]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Claiming that new drugs with exclusive patents are always more
| effective than out-of-patent drugs is another cargo cult theme
| promoted in many highly corporatized biomedical research centers.
|
| Demonstrating that the drug discovered by your colleagues down
| the hall (who are pushing for their little startup biotech outfit
| to be acquired by Pfizer or Merck or Gilead, in an effort backed
| by the institution's IP office and administration) is less
| effective for a given condition than a drug discovered 50 years
| ago would be considered impolite, and would lessen your chances
| of getting tenure and having a successful career.
|
| For example, molnupiravir and nirmatrelvir (aka Paxlovid),
| heavily promoted for COVID treatment, may be no more effective
| than older out-of-patent anti-histamine drugs:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903129/
|
| > "Since antihistamines seems to hold a crucial prognostic role
| in the management of Covid-19, there is a need to identify and
| repurpose some potential antihistamine drugs. One study suggested
| diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, and azelastine to be considered in
| repositioning, then further research in them. 17 Due to its
| potent, less side effects, rapid onset of action, specificity,
| antiallergic, and anti-inflammatory properties, 24 Cetirizine
| might be an important drug of consideration in managing Covid-19
| patients at the moment compared to other antihistamines or
| histamine receptors (H2, H3, and H4)."
|
| Corporatization and the profit motive have an undeniably
| corrupting effect on scientific integrity, that's clear enough.
| youainti wrote:
| One of the issues here is how intellectual property works for
| pharmaceuticals. A new drug is patentable. An old drug already
| has generic competitors. We allow doctors to prescribe a drug
| for just about any reason (off-label use is legal), but only
| the new ones get investigated for effectiveness (because they
| are the most profitable as there is less competition).
|
| No idea what the best approach would be.
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