[HN Gopher] Cargo Cult Science (1974) [pdf]
___________________________________________________________________
Cargo Cult Science (1974) [pdf]
Author : ed_westin
Score : 222 points
Date : 2023-08-13 08:26 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calteches.library.caltech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (calteches.library.caltech.edu)
| nextmove wrote:
| Agreed with everything Feynman wrote. Monkey see, monkey do.
|
| Even if someone questions what everyone else believes is true
| because "scientists said it", they will only be downvoted and
| censored.
| throw18376 wrote:
| I have heard that some anthropologists now have a more
| complicated view of the cargo cults. They argue that, even if
| there was some notion of making cargo appear, their main purpose
| was more political and social. It was an opportunity for the
| locals to move around in organized groups, even march around
| doing military drills, without causing the colonial leadership to
| panic and retaliate. It would bind people together socially and
| get them used to coordinating under a leader, whose legitimacy
| would be enhanced.
|
| Sometimes people now claim that "cargo cult science" is not
| really a good analogy and should be abandoned.
|
| However, I think this newer understanding of cargo cults may
| actually make it an even better analogy.
|
| Even if a line of scientific ideas is mostly fake and its
| research practices can't possibly lead to truth, participating in
| this ritual of fake research, giving talks about it, and other
| science-shaped activities, still does bind the participants
| together. It lends prestige to the leaders of the field. It gives
| everyone a way to coordinate politically around securing funding
| and legitimacy from higher powers for their fake research area.
| And we've seen you really can keep a field going this way for a
| very long time even if the planes never land.
| archepyx wrote:
| Wikipedia seems to be a good first stop here,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult and contains several
| other useful references for entering the rabbit hole of what
| these cults are and why they appeared.
| fosk wrote:
| > participating in this ritual of fake research, giving talks
| about it, and other science-shaped activities, still does bind
| the participants together. It lends prestige to the leaders of
| the field. It gives everyone a way to coordinate politically
| around securing funding and legitimacy from higher powers for
| their fake research area.
|
| You just described modern US politics.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| Yup there's even a very fascinating documentary about this
| called Waiting For John Frum. It traces the history of
| background from the insane colonial administration to what led
| to the development of the John Frum cult.
|
| Basically the gist as I understood it is that when Christian
| colonial missionaries arrived on Tanna Island, they banned all
| the local religious practices and quickly established
| themselves as the sole administrator and authority on the
| island (giving out harsh discipline and torture basically to
| maintain this power).
|
| Once WWII comes around, all the missionaries fled, and soon the
| Americans arrived bringing with them cargo and gear and
| importantly, employment and autonomy. Locals were used as
| couriers and carried supplies in support of the Americans, and
| in return were given "goods" that were to them simply unheard
| of before.
|
| When the Americans left, the colonial missionaries returned,
| but because so many people gained this autonomy and ability to
| practice their former religious ideas, this "cargo cult" formed
| which essentially was formed by anyone who refused to partake
| in the Christian authoritarianism that was running the island.
| People joined simply because it allowed them to have freedom
| and autonomy and the movement basically fused previous
| religious practices with these rituals that the Americans
| brought.
|
| The "dream" for John Frum (i.e. the Americans) to return really
| meant a dream for independence and the Christian missionaries
| to leave.
| verisimi wrote:
| Great last paragraph!
|
| As with any and all human institutions, even those started with
| the best of intentions, it is surely just a matter of time
| before money and power corrupt and bend whatever-it-is to
| server money and power.
| ycombinete wrote:
| This view of cargo cults appears to be reversing the proximate
| and ultimate causes.
|
| That said, I thoroughly agree with your last paragraph.
| hliyan wrote:
| Then this seems to be true of cargo cult programming too:
| blockchain, NFT, machine learning, agile, cloud-native, big
| data (or take your pick) enthusiasts creating a great deal of
| online chatter, organising conventions etc., not merely out of
| innocent fanaticism, but as a deliberate means to a) draw in VC
| money b) create consulting opportunities c) build personal
| branding and finally, d) pad CVs.
| teawrecks wrote:
| It sounds like you're just describing a religion/cult. All
| talk, all faith in each other, no substance to back it up, no
| one dare doubting what is established as true. It's almost like
| that's where the name came from.
| lqet wrote:
| A group of people integrated by a lie can achieve things
| orders of magnitude greater than the same number of mavericks
| living their lives fully grounded on evident truths. This is
| the evolutionary explanation of religion/cults in a nutshell.
| katzgrau wrote:
| Integrated by a belief? Whether it's true or not is
| irrelevant and subjective.
| lqet wrote:
| I agree, belief is the better word here.
| wellanyway wrote:
| Religion is society worshipping itself
| 0x445442 wrote:
| A better analogy and even more negative. The Cargo Cult label
| that harkens to Pop Fashion is much less damnable than than
| which harkens to political dynamics.
| csomar wrote:
| > And we've seen you really can keep a field going this way for
| a very long time even if the planes never land.
|
| And it's in many places, if not everywhere. People mock the
| Polynesians for engaging in a Cargo Cult but they don't realize
| that most countries do that in more "sophisticated" ways.
|
| Think about the big infrastructure projects that some
| "dictators" do in some countries. It would make more sense for
| the dictator to just pocket the money, or distribute it equally
| if he wants to give it up. But these projects and their
| prevalence suggests another dynamic at play here.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Think about the big infrastructure projects that some
| "dictators" do in some countries. It would make more sense
| for the dictator to just pocket the money, or distribute it
| equally if he wants to give it up. But these projects and
| their prevalence suggests another dynamic at play here.
|
| I mean, ultimately infrastructure is an investment. Now, it
| might be a _bad_ investment; some infra projects don't make
| sense. But there's a fairly obvious reason to do them, and
| even in totalitarian countries many are good investments.
| prepend wrote:
| > It was an opportunity for the locals to move around in
| organized groups, even march around doing military drills,
| without causing the colonial leadership to panic and retaliate.
|
| It seems like we have entered the explanation phase where
| reasons are discovered where the stupid and pointless thing
| actually had some minimal benefit that in no way was worth the
| effort expended.
|
| I think this is generally a good sign as it means the pain from
| the event is fading and so people can reflect on it in sort of
| silly and absurd ways.
| momirlan wrote:
| doomsday cults also bind participants together...
| mannykannot wrote:
| This more extensive understanding of cargo cults does not seem
| to contradict the key element which both distinguishes them
| from other responses to contact with technologically-developed
| cultures, and which makes them a useful analogy for Feynman's
| point: they are activities organized around a profound
| misunderstanding of the causes behind the phenomena of
| interest.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| This is a real problem. Realistically, a well researched flat
| earth scientist could destroy the average nasa scientist in a
| debate. You only need to lie about or misrepresent a few facts
| to undermine a whole field, and to an outside observer it looks
| like science got conclusively btfo. Of course, given enough
| time the nasa scientist will be able to piece things together,
| but they might never be able to recover some people.
|
| While there are legitimate concerns about the scientific method
| being too strict, I think it's necessary to help us keep faith
| in a field. That's why I dislike fields that lean into
| methodological anarchy, like critical theory. They really have
| no business claiming any sort of authority.
| mistermann wrote:
| Realistically, a well researched flat earth scientist could
| destroy the average nasa scientist in a debate. You only need
| to lie about or misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole
| field, and to an outside observer it looks like science got
| conclusively btfo. Of course, given enough time the nasa
| scientist will be able to piece things together, but they
| might never be able to recover some people.
|
| > While there are legitimate concerns about the scientific
| method being too strict, I think it's necessary to help us
| keep faith in a field.
|
| Important phrase: " _keep faith in_ " - faith is always in
| play (it is fundamental to culture & consciousness), and it
| is healthy for the institution of science to acknowledge it
| imho.
|
| > That's why I dislike fields that lean into methodological
| anarchy, like critical theory. _They really have no business
| claiming any sort of authority_.
|
| Might this be an instance of "You only need to lie about or
| misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole field, and to
| an outside observer it looks like {the field} got
| conclusively btfo"?
|
| You are discussing your opinion/interpretation of critical
| theory, _necessarily_ , but it would be very easy for readers
| (or even yourself) to form a belief (which is typically
| _perceived as_ knowledge) that your subjective evaluation is
| objective and accurate.
|
| Science and its methodologies are excellent for figuring out
| the physical realm, but watch out if you apply these methods
| to the metaphysical realm.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
| zeroCalories wrote:
| > Important phrase: "keep faith in" - faith is always in
| play (it is fundamental to culture & consciousness), and it
| is healthy for the institution of science to acknowledge it
| imho.
|
| Science does rest on unfalsifiable foundations, but this
| isn't productive to discuss. I'm talking about the faith
| that scientists aren't making stuff up given the reasonable
| foundations we all already agree on.
|
| > Might this be an instance of "You only need to lie about
| or misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole field, and
| to an outside observer it looks like {the field} got
| conclusively btfo"?
|
| I don't think so. If you accept my premise that
| authoritative fields should be held to strict and
| conservative scientific standards, then critical theory is
| categorically ruled out by it's own definition. Yet people
| dress it up as if it were strict and conservative field,
| like a cargo cult.
|
| > You are discussing your opinion/interpretation of
| critical theory, necessarily, but it would be very easy for
| readers (or even yourself) to form a belief (which is
| typically perceived as knowledge) that your subjective
| evaluation is objective and accurate.
|
| I think I made my premises clear, but I dislike the
| suggestion that they are merely my opinions. Most people
| actually share my views, but are willing to pick and choose
| when they apply them.
|
| > Science and its methodologies are excellent for figuring
| out the physical realm, but watch out if you apply these
| methods to the metaphysical realm.
|
| I'm not applying science to critical theory. My issue with
| critical theory is it's methods.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Like the Bill Nye/Ken Ham "debate" some years ago [0]. A bit
| painful for me to watch. A creationist would come away
| feeling quite vindicated after that one.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nye%E2%80%93Ken_Ham_de
| bat...
| msla wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order
| of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
|
| The logical conclusion of that is the Gish Gallop:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
|
| > The Gish gallop /'gIS 'gael@p/ is a rhetorical technique in
| which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their
| opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with
| no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
| Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's
| arguments at the expense of their quality. The term was
| coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it
| after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish
| used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific
| fact of evolution.[1][2]
|
| Even if it's a moderated debate where an outright gallop
| isn't allowed, it's still easier for the dishonest party to
| erect a strawman claim than it is for the honest one to
| carefully rebut it, especially if the dishonest claim is so
| far into wackyland it's Not Even Wrong and requires a lot of
| its assumed premises to be demolished first.
| Loughla wrote:
| And with how modern media is structured, for short drive-by
| statements and social media engagement, this (I would argue
| natural) human argument style is made a thousand times
| worse.
| lisper wrote:
| A perfect example of this is the young-earth creationism
| movement, which is a fully fledged cargo cult in this sense. It
| publishes legitimate-looking books and papers, has intellectual
| leaders who are highly regarded within the group, and an army
| of well-trained foot soldiers on YouTube and other social media
| sites. Cargo cults are by no means limited to Polynesia, or
| even less developed countries. They are everywhere.
| rcme wrote:
| I mean pretty much all religion is a cargo cult. How is a
| cargo cult fundamentally different than Catholicism, which
| has a series of rituals in preparation of the return of
| Jesus?
| lisper wrote:
| I guess I wasn't entirely clear on this, but I meant that
| YEC is an example of cargo cult _science_ in the sense
| described by the GP.
| rjsw wrote:
| I suspect that the leaders of the cargo cults were leaders in
| that society before the "Outside Context Problem" happened, and
| that the ideas followed by the cult will come from what kind of
| leader they were. If they were previously a religious leader
| then the cult would look like a religion.
|
| I think a better example of a cargo cult than bad science is
| climate change denial. The followers see the potential loss of
| "cargo" in the form of their current way of life as a problem
| and the leaders apply the skills that brought them success in
| politics to that problem. Someone good at reading legal
| documents is going to think that there is something wrong with
| scientific papers.
|
| A climate change denial group in the UK [1] rented office space
| from one of the scientific institutions that used to meet in
| Carlton House Terrace. The GWPF held meetings where they could
| talk in a sciency way even though they were not reporting any
| real science that they had done themselves.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...
| Drakim wrote:
| That is a very interesting view, thank you for sharing it.
|
| I've often used "cargo cults" as a way to categorize stupid
| ritualistic things about the world I didn't like, but it's good
| to be reminded that the world isn't so two dimensional.
| tuyiown wrote:
| This is a problem with the cargo cult analogy, the observer
| assumes to be an outsider, while it would be more useful to
| the observer to assume of being part of it.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is very difficult to be a part of a different group.
| Even if you move there it would often take years to become
| a member, if you ever can get that much trust.
|
| The idea is sound, but don't assume you understand the
| members enough to do a good job.
| vitiral wrote:
| I think they meant you should assume that YOU are part of
| a cargo cult. You should look for ways your own
| viewpoints/society/etc are cargo-cultish
| prox wrote:
| Like Feynman says "The first principle is not to fool
| yourself, and you are the easiest to fool."
| mistermann wrote:
| Case in point:
|
| >> I think a better example of a cargo cult than bad
| science is climate change denial. The followers see the
| potential loss of "cargo" in the form of their current
| way of life as a problem and the leaders apply the skills
| that brought them success in politics to that problem.
| Someone good at reading legal documents is going to think
| that there is something wrong with scientific papers.
|
| Specifically: "The followers see..." - it is not known
| what climate change "deniers" believe - rather, people
| _tell each other stories_ about what they believe, and
| believe these stories to be true. Some humans are
| currently smart enough to realize that this behavior is
| flawed in certain scenarios (race /gender/etc
| stereotypes), but when it comes to ~political
| stereotyping the mind (and mainstream "right thinking"
| culture/media/etc) will defend the delusional practice to
| the death.
|
| Typically these topic are argued primarily using memes
| (Gish Gallop, Whataboutism, Brandolini's Law, etc) and
| rhetoric (rendering it not possible for a strict logical
| perspective to "win"), with some stats and studies
| included _to give the appearance of_ objectivity,
| permanently locking humans into this ~conceptual Overton
| Window.
|
| If humans could analyze and evaluate the system _we are
| embedded in_ with the same emotional /psychological
| detachment we analyze computer systems with it would be a
| big improvement, but I do not see it happening anytime
| soon.
| swayvil wrote:
| Isn't "cargo-cult-science" simply "engineering"?
|
| You use the models handed down by the researchers because they
| work. They help you make machines and navigate reality and such.
| There's nothing shameful in that. You don't have the time for
| research. Time is money after all.
|
| You are not a scientist. You are not interested in Truth. You
| just want to get from A to B.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Yes, Stack Overflow is also cargo cult programming.
|
| Of course sometimes you have to use tools handed to you by
| others and sometimes you won't understand how they work (I
| don't know how CPUs work but it hasn't stopped me from
| programming).
|
| This speech is largely about how you shouldn't _willfully_
| delude yourself. I think we 've all had that situation where
| we're hunting down a bug and rearranging the code _just so_
| seems to resolve it, but we don 't understand why. At a certain
| point the temptation is high to shrug your shoulders and move
| on even without fully understanding the mechanics of the fix.
| But if you do that, it will likely come back to bite
| you/someone one day. In the case of science it's even worse
| than engineering because the entire point of the endeavor
| _should be_ to advance understanding, rather than to get
| certain results.
| Sharlin wrote:
| No. A cargo cult is about doing _X_ , or more commonly some
| flawed facsimile of _X_ , in order to attain some desirable _Y_
| , because you've seen someone else do _X_ and indeed attaining
| _Y_. What you don 't know, however, that _Y_ is not directly
| caused by _X_ but there exists some _W_ that 's the cause of
| both _X_ and _Y_.
|
| Now, " _Y_ after _X_ thus _Y_ caused by _X_ " (see: _post hoc
| ergo propter hoc_ ) is a perfectly fine hypothesis worth
| testing, but to _keep doing that_ even if it doesn 't work?
| That's the "cult" part.
|
| What Feynman criticized were certain fields of study, which in
| his opinion claimed to apply the scientific method to get
| scientific results (and importantly the associated prestige of
| Doing Science), but which in his view only practiced a
| facsimile of the scientific method and got merely facsimiles of
| scientific results!
|
| Now, cargo cult _engineering_ definitely also exists. If you do
| _X_ - even without entirely understanding why - and reliably
| get the wanted result _Y_ , that's engineering. If you don't
| get exactly Y but are able to adjust X to compensate, that's
| also engineering. But if you keep doing X without understanding
| why and keep not getting the wanted result Y (even though you
| might get some different result Z and misinterpret it as Y),
| _that 's_ cargo cult engineering!
| lloeki wrote:
| I was looking for any kind of recording of Feynman's address, all
| I could find is a third party narrated version, which probably
| lacks Feynman's unique delivery:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg
| bagacrap wrote:
| Can't AI fix this problem yet
| sturza wrote:
| > It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of
| it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle
| of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty
| --a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing
| an experiment, you should report everything that you think might
| make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other
| causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you
| thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and
| how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have
| been eliminated.
|
| Feels appropriate to the current LK99 discussions
| fsh wrote:
| My current favorite cargo cult is the quantum computing scene. No
| practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a realistic
| concept for building one. Yet, there are dozens of startups and
| research groups developing quantum algorithms, quantum cloud
| computing solutions, etc. They seem to believe that blindly
| copying what silicon valley did must surely lead to success. What
| they are missing (or are refusing to accept) is that silicon
| valley was only successful because they had useful computers
| _from the very beginning_. In Germany, the cargo cult was even
| enshrined in the names of two research clusters ( "Munich Quantum
| Valley" and "Quantum Valley Lower Saxony").
| fastneutron wrote:
| I work adjacent to this field, and I largely agree when it
| comes to the software side of things. With some notable
| exceptions, a lot of pure-play "quantum software" companies are
| premature optimizations to a field who's hardware can best be
| described as physics experiments with a Python API. Many of
| these places are pivoting to "AI" applications, which is simply
| them putting their mouths where the money is. If a "quantum
| winter" happens, many of these places will be the first to go.
|
| I think this is partially a symptom of cargo culting the SV
| model, like you suggested, along with the much more fundamental
| reason that software has a very low barrier to entry. Hardware
| is hard, but it's really the most impactful investment to make
| in quantum tech at this early stage because of the spin-off
| applications in sensing, timing and networking.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Could you also be describing George Boole's wasted efforts in
| algebra?
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| I think this post, like yours is simply forgetting that start-
| up culture isn't some immutable meritocracy of free market
| behaviour with these odd abberations of irrational behaviour.
| The whole thing is built off irrational behaviour, because
| becoming a "successful" startup is all about hunting VC
| funding.
|
| Look at Uber for instance. Aside from one blip in 2018, it has
| never had a single year of profitability. Yet it receives year
| after year of VC funding and investments because surely any day
| now they have to turn a profit, right? All these people
| couldn't be wrong...right? I mean this is the revolutionary
| business that was a mArKeT DiSruPtOr and deregulated entire
| vast swaths of industries to do it, so surely their success
| will materialize "any day now" into profit. Afterall, its the
| most free-market principles-based business right?? It overthrew
| the tyrannical state-regulated taxi industry! It HAS to be more
| efficient and better! Except it isn't.
|
| Quantum computing isn't a "cargo cult" of VC startup business
| models, its simply another VC startup business models like all
| others hunting for sustainability through venture capital
| funding.
| ascar wrote:
| > No practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a
| realistic concept for building one.
|
| Can you expand on that? I'm not involved in the field, but
| there certainly exist many low qbit machines with varying
| technologies around the world that can already be used for
| calculations. Yes, they're nowhere near big enough to be useful
| yet, but qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying
| every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a
| matter of time.
| sampo wrote:
| > qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every
| year similar to Moore's law
|
| 2001: Shor's algorithm was demonstrated by a group at IBM,
| who factored 15 into 3 x 5
|
| 2012: factorization of 21 was achieved
|
| 2019: an attempt was made to factor the number 35, but the
| algorithm failed because of accumulating errors
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
| fsh wrote:
| Increasing the number of qubits doesn't help unless the gate
| fidelities and coherence times also improve. Otherwise, the
| system quickly becomes a very expensive random number
| generator. In transmon qubit systems, I haven't seen much
| progress in these metrics over the last couple of years. IBM
| keep adding more qubits to their chips, but they don't seem
| to be able to actually use them.
|
| After almost thirty years of development, ion traps have now
| reached a few ten qubits with reasonable fidelities. However,
| this requires shuttling the ions between trapping zones which
| is enormously slow (many milliseconds per gate). And scaling
| this to hundreds of thousands of qubits is a completely open
| question (none of the current techniques will work).
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every
| year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a
| matter of time.
|
| That's pretty much my take on it too, just because it's
| pretty limited right now there appears to be healthy growth
| in qbit counts which would suggest a more usable quantum
| computer is mostly a matter of time and further research.
| upofadown wrote:
| It doesn't matter how many qubits you have if those qubits
| are too noisy to do anything with. Noise is the ultimate
| limit when trying to get a useful signal out of something.
| Noise is how the universe stops us from knowing everything
| about everything.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Can you expand on that? I'm not involved in the field, but
| there certainly exist many low qbit machines with varying
| technologies around the world that can already be used for
| calculations. Yes, they're nowhere near big enough to be
| useful yet, but qbit counts in the biggest machines are
| multiplying every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems
| to be just a matter of time.
|
| I'll believe it when I see it. Yes, machines exist, but so
| far I have not seen one single convincing application that
| makes it better than a classical computer. Not saying it
| can't be done, but for all the hype around quantum computers,
| so far the results are dismal. (And I used to work in a
| relevant field.)
| fastneutron wrote:
| The big "if" in quantum computing is in our ability to
| engineer error correction and fault tolerance. Implementing
| fault tolerance requires a physical qubit overhead of
| 10-10,000 qubits per logical qubit, depending on the
| technology, base error rate and whose analysis you look at.
|
| It's not entirely accurate to say nobody knows how to do
| this. The theory of quantum error-correction has been
| rigorously developed since the 1990s, and experimental
| implementations have shown that improved fidelity is possible
| with known error-correction schemes. I think we'll know
| definitively within the next 3-5 years how hard it will be to
| engineer fault tolerance, and workable solutions will emerge
| from those findings.
| lpolovets wrote:
| I love this speech every time that I read it. There are a ton of
| examples of cargo cult thinking in the startup ecosystem. I wrote
| a post about this a few years back:
| https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are...
|
| A few examples that come to mind:
|
| * because lots of famous VCs made contrarian bets, new VCs try to
| be contrarian (even when a consensus point of view is clearly
| correct).
|
| * almost every startup I know is looking for 10x engineers, even
| though most startups don't need 10x engineers. We've just all
| been conditioned to believe that 10x engineers are required to
| build a great company.
|
| * generalizing the 10x example, young startups copy the traits of
| FAANG companies or famously successful startups, even if those
| traits are harmful for early stage companies.
|
| Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
| --and you are the easiest person to fool."
|
| Also, here's a text version of the OP that's easier to read on
| mobile: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
| amelius wrote:
| Apple comes close to having started a cargo cult.
|
| People think that if they keep saying nice things about Apple,
| they will not one day lock them down hard.
| Drakim wrote:
| It's more complicated than that, a lot of the people who says
| that Apple keeps things secure and tight compared to
| Android's wild west will themselves have a jail-broken
| iPhone.
|
| The iPhone was hot when it came out, and was a lot of
| people's first taste of the smartphone, and it's very easy to
| fall into tribalism. You and I aren't immune to it, there are
| hundreds of things we are irrational about in our lives.
| Arguments in favor of your chosen tribe are proxy arguments
| for preserving your own value, identity, and dignity.
| logdap wrote:
| [dead]
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| People aren't saying nice things about Apple to appease Apple
| from locking things down.
|
| People who rebelliously use non-Apple products are helping to
| keep the alternatives alive. It's a tradeoff of now vs
| future. That's the real tradeoff, it's not cults.
|
| (edits: HN vs who?)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Tech hiring practices is also a fantastic example.
|
| There was a time when companies like Google were looking for
| very talented CS people because they actually needed people
| with broad skills because in the case of G they were building a
| search engine and there's almost no area of computer science
| that isn't involved in such a project. They actually needed
| people with strong CS skills.
|
| Twenty years later we have positions where hires are selected
| for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard,
| where the position will mostly be about gluing together CRUD
| apps with YAML.
| josephg wrote:
| > Twenty years later we have positions where hires are
| selected for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a
| whiteboard, where the position will mostly be about gluing
| together CRUD apps with YAML.
|
| A few years ago I worked as an interviewer for a large
| software engineering recruiting company. We did quantitative
| scoring on a lot of parts of our standardized interview. We
| had sections in our interview on CS knowledge, programming,
| debugging and whiteboard style problems. Based on the data,
| we asked: Could we eliminate any part of the assessment?
| Could we throw out the CS knowledge part without losing
| accuracy about the overall hireability of the candidate?
|
| Based on the data, the answer was no. The scores were all
| positively correlated - so CS knowledge implied you were
| better at programming and vice versa. But we still got extra
| signal by assessing candidates on their CS knowledge. Turns
| out even if you aren't amazing at programming, having
| excellent CS knowledge will still make you desirable to a lot
| of companies.
|
| (The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with
| people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how
| well they did after they were in the door, as employees. So
| we might have just been mirroring the same biases the
| companies themselves have in their hiring processes.)
| esaym wrote:
| > We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how well
| they did after they were in the door, as employees.
|
| Just lol
| dimal wrote:
| > The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with
| people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how
| well they did after they were in the door, as employees
|
| I'm sorry, but then your study doesn't show anything
| useful. Interviews are supposed to determine whether
| someone is going to be a good employee, not whether they
| are "desirable to a lot of companies." So yeah, all you
| were doing was mirroring the bias of those companies'
| processes. As a recruiting company, that can be good
| business, because you're giving the customers what they
| want. But it's not effective hiring practice for the
| customer.
|
| Furthermore, you did not follow up on the people that were
| weeded out to see if they would have been good employees.
| Current hiring practices weed out a lot of people that
| could have provided a lot of value, but they weren't able
| to perform the prescribed ritual on cue, you didn't have a
| chance to evaluate whether that was a good decision or not.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with
| people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how
| well they did after they were in the door, as employees.
|
| That's not just a weakness, that invalidates the whole
| study.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| >(The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with
| people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how
| well they did after they were in the door, as employees. So
| we might have just been mirroring the same biases the
| companies themselves have in their hiring processes.)
|
| Kudos for the self-awareness but like others have pointed
| out, cmon.
|
| This obsession with quantitative scoring for tests is a
| great example of a cargo cult science because you are doing
| all of these intricate little rituals that amount to
| nothing because you're simply measuring latent social
| phenomenon of hiring like-minded people. It's just
| statistically-laundered-bias.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > (The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with
| people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how
| well they did after they were in the door, as employees. So
| we might have just been mirroring the same biases the
| companies themselves have in their hiring processes.)
|
| This is some weakness. Surely this is the outcome that's
| interesting.
|
| I also suspect there's likely a correlation between how
| hard someone is trying to get hired and the freshness of
| their CS skills.
|
| Chances are a motivated candidate will have been brushing
| up on CS because it's such a trope to be grilled on those
| types of questions; that same candidate likely prepared for
| other interview questions as well and I would indeed expect
| that to increase the odds of getting hired.
|
| Since nobody walks around with perfect recall of the types
| of algorithms that crop up in the classic tech interview,
| it's fairly safe to assume the CS part of the interview is
| a direct measure of how much preparation the interviewee
| has done.
| josephg wrote:
| > Since nobody walks around with perfect recall of the
| types of algorithms that crop up in the classic tech
| interview, it's fairly safe to assume ...
|
| I'd love to have data on that.
|
| I know its really common for engineers to never touch
| this stuff in their day to day work. Most product teams
| don't need any of this knowledge at all. So asking about
| it in an interview is a massive waste of time.
|
| But personally, I've used a lot of these algorithms while
| working on collaborative editing for the last few years.
| For diamond-types, I ended up writing my own b-tree and
| skip list implementations, and I make heavy use of binary
| search, BFS, DFS and priority queues. I've used priority
| queues in plenty of projects - like, years ago I made a
| library to mock out timers in nodejs for our test suite
| so we didn't have to wait for real timeouts to trigger in
| our test suite.
|
| But I've got no idea what percentage of working engineers
| use any of this. 5%? 1%? 0.01%? On the surface, it seems
| nowhere near useful enough to justify how often these
| questions show up in interviews.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well part of the reason I'm skeptical of how who would
| actually be able to pass these interviews without
| cramming for them based on the fact that I too have used
| a fair number of the algorithms (because as mentioned,
| internet search is a fractal of challenging CS problems)
| and would almost definitely not pass such an interview.
|
| Just because I've implemented a binary search a few
| times, and a b-tree, and a skip list, and various sorting
| and intersection algorithms doesn't mean I can
| reconstruct them on a whiteboard from memory. What it
| amounts to is that I have an upper quartile understanding
| of the underlying idea and the general quirks (among
| practicing programmers), but not much more than that.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Wait, so the conclusion the study came to was... people
| that do well in the interview process tend to get hired?
|
| In my experience interview processes act like a series of
| stage gates, you have to pass each and every one to get
| hired. It seems trivial to say the doing well in each
| activity is predictive of success when you need to do well
| in everything to be successful.
|
| I don't mean to be mean, but that study sounds like a giant
| missed opportunity to do something useful. Knowing what
| interview activities are actually predictive of being good
| in a job is the holy grail.
| [deleted]
| bravura wrote:
| Completely missed opportunity, particularly since GP has
| been breathlessly recounting this story to others since
| it happened, and probably his old colleagues are too.
| josephg wrote:
| GP here. I completely agree. Looking back, I wish I
| pushed harder to follow up and get the last piece of that
| data. It was a massive missed opportunity.
| shaan7 wrote:
| On a lighter note, people who can write YAML are very
| skilled, in my eyes. I'm yet to encounter a situation where I
| edited YAML and it worked on the first go -_-
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sure it's a skill, but it's a different skill. It's like
| hiring a chef on their ability to sharpen a cooking knife.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Those "reverse this linked list" interviews are essentially
| disgused IQ tests, which wouldn't otherwise be allowed in the
| US, not without a lot of legal risk at least.
|
| Their point isn't to test a specific practical skill.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > In the past, I've been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news
| outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism,
|
| I'm sorry, I can't take anyone that thinks CNET and Wired is a
| bastion of digital journalism seriously.
|
| It's well known that these sites focus on 80% profit and 20%
| Journalism. It's been that way from the beginning.
| [deleted]
| obscurette wrote:
| Probably even more relevant in HN -
| https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engi...
| hliyan wrote:
| I wrote something similar in 2021: https://medium.com/the-
| engineering-manager-guide/cargo-cult-...
| inquirerGeneral wrote:
| [dead]
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I'm only really familiar with machine learning and computer
| vision papers and many of the mentioned aspects, especially Mr.
| Young's rat running experiments have their analogs here.
|
| There is a ton of accumulated "dark knowledge" locked up in
| research groups, all the tricks (like putting the rat corridor on
| sand, in that example) but they are not really publishable. To
| publish, you need a clear _story_ , literally that's the word we
| use when drafting papers. What's your story? A bunch of boring
| tricks rarely make a good story. And when people do publish such
| things, they have to also insert some other conceptual "novelty"
| contribution (typically a non intuitive tweak of the model
| architecture) to the paper that makes a +0.5% improvement on some
| benchmark, just to be able to talk about the real practical but
| ugly things that really make the whole thing work.
|
| Not to mention the replications that Feynman mentions, ie that
| before you test your tweaked new model, you have to also perform
| the baseline yourself, you can't just take it as given in another
| person's paper. This is rarely done in ML, and not just for
| resource scarcity reasons. Another reason is that it's damn hard.
| ML systems are very very complex and essentially impossible to
| exactly reproduce from a paper description. It would even be hard
| for the same team to do it, if we deleted their codebase and
| checkpoints and asked them to redo it.
|
| "But open source!" you say. Sure, except that large systems often
| evolve and the released code is often a refactored version of a
| haphazard ducktaped spaghetti monster codebase that was actually
| used, where they manually edited code files between runs, or
| hard-coded things, discovered some Bug midway and fixed it and
| compensated for it best they could etc.
|
| These projects must be done in a few months so youre ready before
| the next conference cycle happens where someone does something
| related and now you need to rework your story and contribution
| claim, or at least you now also have to compare and compete with
| them.
|
| But let's say you took your time and now redid the experiment of
| the other prior work, but it doesn't agree with your numbers
| totally. You can email them or open a github issue. They answer
| perhaps in a week, and say they don't know exactly the reason, or
| that it was a different code version they actually used but they
| can't release that one as it's not approved by corporate (from
| real experience). Of course with your questions you are also
| terrifying them and your queries may feel to them like threats of
| pending potential reputation destruction. So they will be very
| defensive, which will make you suspicious. But they are just some
| other grad student like you and probably didn't mean any ill.
|
| I've seen a PhD student on Twitter asking what he should do after
| discovering an anomaly in an Arxiv paper before the camera ready
| deadline (the finalized version of an article). Should he
| publicly "out" them if they fail to incorporate his findings. Of
| course it is absurd and the camera ready deadline cannot
| introduce significant new contributions or new discoveries, as
| that would require new peer review. But he was convinced that
| he's a noble defender of scientific integrity while doing this.
| I'm just mentioning this because some junior people may read
| these Feynman pieces and think they should go on a crusade based
| on often quite scarce information.
|
| But again, think of the sheer volume of works coming out every
| week. It's unmanageable. If you stopped to interact with every
| single prior work of your comparison table in such detail you'd
| take years to write one paper. A PhD student usually has to
| publish 3 top papers in about 4 years or so. And some will
| definitely get rejected. The reality is that high-end labs have
| become paper factories. They have a process, just like pop songs
| are formulaic. They get a smart person as an intern for example
| and pump out a paper in 5 months. Exactly how much of this "you
| are the easiest person to fool" deep self-reflection fits into
| such a thing?
|
| And yet.
|
| And yet the cumulative effect is undeniable progress. The
| thousands of low quality papers are simply ignored. They
| contribute to someone getting their PhD, and that's their true
| function. But then there is a small set of works that really are
| excellent. It's just that the publicly available papertrail in
| the literature isn't really necessarily what has driven it. The
| papers are more like a shadow projection of the real world work
| behind the scenes, filtered to please novelty-hungry impatient
| reviewers and paper-count-rewarding committees. But of course the
| sheer hardware growth is a big part of the overall success, but
| the hardware design was informed by the research, and without the
| model improvements, you couldn't just hardware-scale the state of
| the art of 1995 to modern computes and expect strong results.
|
| So for sure the spirit that Feynman espouses here still lives on,
| but it's alive despite all the incentives, and most of what
| appears as academic science is not really about contributing some
| truly usable and convincing knowledge, but a demonstration of the
| job skills of people towards various personal evaluations, like
| granting a degree, hiring or promotion.
|
| Most people who start with this starry eyed idealism quickly get
| it stamped out by the system. The important thing is to yield a
| productive synthesis instead of a resignatory pessimism. Do your
| best given the circumstances, but also read the room and don't
| run with your head into the wall.
|
| The fabulous thing is though, that things adapt. The less these
| hurried processes live up to the ideal, the more the reputation
| of the label "science" gets eroded. Many people already react
| with an eye roll when they hear what "experts" and "The Science"
| have to say. The trust is finite and can run out.
|
| A few major discoveries in physics and medicine led to a giant
| reserve of public trust over the last century, but it isn't
| infinite. Immediately after the moon landing, in the space age,
| science and scifi captivated the minds of everyone and that was
| probably the peak of it, including figures like Sagan (or indeed
| Feynman). Then computing brought a new wave of tech but it, and
| even AI is less of a natural science, and many popular claims
| turn out to be overblown.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, we have no idea what exactly made the 100 years between,
| say, 1870 and 1970 so scientifically productive. Because that's
| the period that lends the weight to the label "science" in the
| public and hence for politicians. It certainly wasn't the current
| academic system of journals and conferences and 8-page papers and
| rushed peer review, h-indexes and byzantine grant application
| forms.
|
| And whenever something has prestige, people flock to it and want
| to also bask in it. And it gets inevitably diluted. But the
| prestige will move on and there will be some other thing next.
| Something we will call something else than "science".
| gwern wrote:
| More on the rat story: https://gwern.net/maze
| rossdavidh wrote:
| One point rarely mentioned in regards to Cargo Cultism, is that
| the fundamental error of the cargo cultists wasn't that they
| didn't understand what made the planes land. The fundamental
| error was that they kept doing it, even though it wasn't working.
| We don't know how a lot of our most effective pharmaceuticals
| work, but we at least know to stop using them if (in a rigorous
| test) they don't work (although people with $$ in their eyes
| sometimes try to get us to do it anyway).
|
| Now, the magnitude of the error would depend on how long the
| cargo cultists kept doing this, even though the planes didn't
| return, and I have never heard how long that was. If they tried
| this for a month or two, it's not that bad an error, really; it
| was worth a try, based on what they knew. If they did this for
| decades, that would be a serious error.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| Except the cargo cult religions weren't trying to get cargo to
| return in any meaningful sense. It was a religious ritual like
| anyother. If we were watching Christian practices from the
| outside and not knowing any of the nuances of their beliefs we
| would probably interpret that "they're trying to get this guy
| named Jesus to return by eating crackers and wine".
|
| Feynman's speech is interesting and all but like so many
| similar gifted scientists who then go on to explore into other
| domains, they stumble into a field and ignore whole bodies of
| research into the philosophy and sociology of how science is
| produced.
|
| Thomas Kuhn had already established some solid insight into the
| social and organizational aspects of "scientific revolution",
| and showed that despite most people's ardent belief that
| science is somehow immune to it, there is a significant amount
| of social hierarchies and ritualistic beliefs that dictate what
| is considered "acceptable" science.
|
| Believing in science as this perfect immutable meritocracy is
| pretty much its own ritualistic cult, as if you can just
| pretend away human bias and insular beliefs by thinking really-
| really hard.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > If they did this for decades, that would be a serious error.
|
| Assuming they didn't get other benefits from the rituals,
| namely the same ones people get from more mainstream religions
| like social cohesion and a sense of purpose and a belief in
| some greater power.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > kept doing it, even though it wasn't working
|
| It was working though. It was maintaining a new state of social
| order, which is a mandate for sustainable power transfer in
| society.
| uwagar wrote:
| it could be the tribals were critiquing how american military
| conducts itself in tropical lands.
| gadders wrote:
| I saw some archive footage of him speaking recently and I loved
| that he kept his blue collar (to my British ears) Brooklyn
| accent.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It is kind of funny to me. I'm not sure he could help it
| though, ha ha.
| fnord77 wrote:
| crypto seems like a massive cargo cult
| bagacrap wrote:
| I would have just called it a regular cult ("give me all your
| money and you'll receive great riches in return").
|
| It's true that adherents to crypto have a faulty understanding
| of traditional finance just as the islanders have a faulty
| understanding of airplanes and canned food. But rather than
| painstakingly recreating the minute details of traditional
| finance in hopes of capturing the same success, crypto cults go
| out of their way to _avoid_ recreating those details or
| understanding why they 're necessary, if burdensome.
| sfpotter wrote:
| [flagged]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| To be fair it's also Feynman. He's always entertaining.
| tomcam wrote:
| Most people overestimate their intelligence, HNers or not.
| There's even a name for it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar
| ticles/PMC8883889/#:~:tex....
| js2 wrote:
| HTML version which I find easier to read:
|
| http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
| bschne wrote:
| I read this extension of the concept a while back that dives a
| bit more into what's actually missing in the "cargo cult"
| approach, and how to transition to actual productivity --
| https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult#upgradin...
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| James Knochel, 6/18/2022:
|
| "20th Century psychiatrists wrote manuals and procedures for the
| diagnosis of 'mental disorders'. They order lab tests and
| undertake careful study of their patients' symptoms, and they
| diagnose the conditions listed in their manuals. They seek
| regulatory approval of prescriptions to treat the diagnoses. They
| stopped doing psycho-surgery by mid-century, but still
| electrocute their patients' brains when they think the patient
| will benefit.
|
| They have their own special hospitals, where troubled patients
| are sent to be stabilized on palliative prescription drugs. The
| psych wards have little areas for staff to sit in. The staff wear
| scrubs and badges, keep medical records, and some prescribe
| prescriptions--[s]he's the doctor--and they wait for their
| patients to get better.
|
| They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks
| exactly the way it looks in the other medical specialties. But it
| doesn't work. No patient recovers as a result of the allopathic
| drugs provided. Some patients get better anyways--perhaps because
| they're fed, perhaps because they're kept sober--compounding the
| profession's confusion."
|
| It's true. People get better in psychiatric incarceration,
| because there is a predictable, regular daily schedule. There are
| meals on schedule. There are groups and stuff. You see the same
| people all the time. You're off TV and you're off the computer,
| so you need to face reality. You're relieved of burdens such as
| bill paying, cooking, cleaning, and running your household. You
| might color by the numbers or work a puzzle, but you've got
| reality, and it's stripped down and reduced to its essential
| components. You tend to get better and saner in this environment,
| if that's your baseline and that's where you tend to go. If your
| baseline is insanity, then all this regularity may not help.
| Daub wrote:
| > the form [of their science] is perfect.
|
| The reason the British Houses of Parliament feature so many
| exterior and interior chimneys was to funnel so-called 'bad
| air' of the Thames away from the people who work inside the
| building. This was based on the newly acquired knowledge that
| some diseases are passed on via microbes. They wrongly assumed
| that most malicious microbes were airborne and that bad smells
| were an indication of their presence.
|
| The history of science is littered with such examples of 'good
| science/wrong conclusion'. We would be foolish to assume that
| this is not as true today as 100 years ago.
| hliyan wrote:
| If I remember correctly, _malaria_ literally means "bad
| air".
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, cf. Latin _malus_ "unpleasant", "bad", "evil", "ill"
| and _aer_ "air".
| nemo44x wrote:
| I wonder if it had to do with tuberculosis, which is
| airborne? Tenements were designed with that in mind and in
| the USA houses built in the early 20th century often feature
| "sleeper porches". Outside areas to sleep to get fresh air.
| This too was in part to avoid TB.
| Daub wrote:
| Maybe. Certainly TB was a major killer at that time:
|
| https://nonprofitupdate.info/2010/10/21/10-leading-causes-
| of...
|
| But the idea of 'bad air' (miasmic theory)' though Informed
| by microbe theory, had its roots in Hippocratic thinking
| which was derived from the observation that swampy areas
| were generally unhealthy to live. This was attributed to
| their bad smell and not the preponderance of mosquitoes
| (malaria).
|
| Fyi... The same miasmic theory gave rise to toilets that
| were designed to flush away bad smalls with water.
| raincom wrote:
| Miasma theory ruled from 4 BC until 1800s. Miasmata (airborne
| vapors, noxious, polluted air) caused most diseases. This
| encouraged cleanliness. Germ theory of disease replaced it.
|
| "Malaria was prevalent in the Roman Empire, and the Roman
| scholars associated the disease with the marshy or swampy
| lands where the disease was particularly rampant.[13][14] It
| was from those Romans the name "malaria" originated. They
| called it malaria (literally meaning "bad air") as they
| believed that the disease was a kind of miasma that was
| spread in the air, as originally conceived by Ancient Greeks.
| Since then, it was a medical consensus for centuries that
| malaria was spread due to miasma, the bad air." [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito-malaria_theory
| tcj_phx wrote:
| Thanks for the quote. This was part of an essay, _Cargo Cult
| Psychiatry_ , posted at the _Mad in America Foundation 's_
| website: https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/06/cargo-cult-
| psychiatry/
|
| I found Robert Whitaker's books invaluable for helping me
| understanding the mental health industry's mindset. _Mad in
| America_ covered how the Quakers got much better results with
| their Asylums (safe place with 4 meals a day & activities)
| than modern techniques of lobotomy, ECT'ers and palliative
| prescriptions. _Anatomy of an Epidemic_ makes the case that
| palliative psychiatric prescriptions take an episodic condition
| and make it chronic. _Psychiatry Under the Influence_
| chronicles how psychiatry got captured by the prescription drug
| cartel. Highly recommended.
|
| The good news from the mental health world is that Chris
| Palmer, M.D. published _Brain Energy_ [0] last year. I haven 't
| read more than excerpts from google books [1]. My understanding
| is Dr. Palmer was a conventional palliative psychiatrist, then
| he had a patient whose schizophrenia improved on a ketogenic
| diet. The patient was able to discontinue antipsychotics: _Dr.
| Palmer 's mind was blown_. Then he discovered the 70+ years of
| research establishing that mental health conditions are
| metabolic problems, and wrote a book. Perhaps
| the most bold and disruptive aspect of Brain Energy is
| understanding precisely how and why medications that
| harm metabolism might reduce mental health symptoms.
| The long-term consequences are of great concern and
| require the urgent attention of the psychiatric
| community.
|
| -Chris Palmer, MD -
| https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerMD/status/1687850270602981376
|
| Dr. Palmer recommends a ketogenic diet. I think most of the
| benefit of 'keto' stems from avoiding fortified flour:
| https://twitter.com/JamesKnochel/status/1595562197412851712
|
| A lot of people are harmed by folic acid, and the iron and lack
| of fiber in fortified white flour is harmful for almost
| everyone, in that they disrupt the microbiome. Most people get
| adequate iron, and don't actually need iron filings ("reduced
| iron"); the fiber in whole wheat fiber feeds bacteria that make
| short-chain saturated fatty acids [2].
|
| [0] https://brainenergy.com/
|
| [1]
| https://books.google.com/books?id=FoxlEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT233&dq=B...
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756104/
|
| (edited to add [2] and some speculations on the mechanisms of
| harm of fortified white flour)
| tcj_phx wrote:
| Submitted _Cargo Cult Psychiatry (2022):_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37110874
| henrydark wrote:
| I hope this isn't received too badly on HN, but Feynman was way
| too smug sometimes. This speech is essentially a philosophy of
| science piece, at the intellectual stage of at least one hundred
| years prior, and probably more like three hundred.
|
| It's too bad that he so diminished philosophy of science, and at
| the same time put so much undeveloped thought and prose into it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree Feynman was often smug. It's annoying but I forgive him
| because I too am smug from time to time. Perhaps he was aware
| of it within himself as well.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I'll bite.
|
| > way too smug sometimes
|
| Immediately after:
|
| > This speech is essentially a philosophy of science piece, at
| the intellectual stage of at least one hundred years prior, and
| probably more like three hundred.
|
| Bruh.
|
| Apart from the hypocrisy there, the fact is Feynman _did_
| science. He did more science than Popper, Kuhn, and Hume put
| together. He understood it on a level deeper than >99% of
| other scientists, and >99.9% of philosophers.
|
| That he did so with a "three hundred year" out of date view
| doesn't really reflect well on PoS's utility for actual
| scientists.
|
| Let people who are that capable and accomplished have a blind
| spot once in a while. What is this trend of cutting legend's
| ankles gonna accomplish for anybody.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's a weird beef between science and philosophy. It doesn't
| really make all that much sense. Philosophers arent on one
| team versus the scientists. If you read any philosopher,
| they'll vehemently contradict other (prior or contemporary)
| philosophers, passionately arguing for their view of things.
|
| Its a sort of elitism and inferiority complex.
|
| The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive"
| positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just rubs
| it in more that a talented scientist needs philosophers about
| as much as a bird needs ornithologists to know how to build
| its nest.
|
| When talent, curiosity and integrity come together in this
| way, it doesn't need some philosophers musings and rulebooks
| to do great.
| mistermann wrote:
| > The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive"
| positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just
| rubs it in more that a talented scientist needs
| philosophers about as much as a bird needs ornithologists
| to know how to build its nest.
|
| How's that global warming thing coming along?
|
| Let me guess: it isn't relevant?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Your snark is unwarranted and your post is vague. State
| your point clearly. I don't know how Feynman (and his
| beef with the philosophy of science) is connected to
| global warming "coming along" or not.
| Animats wrote:
| > way too smug sometimes
|
| Feynman was lucky enough to be a physicist in an era when there
| was much new, experimentally testable physics. Experimentalists
| discovered new phenomena. Theorists could propose theories,
| which were then confirmed or rejected quickly. Most results
| were clear, not near the noise threshold. The field progressed
| rapidly. Physics was finding, and had found, a set of concise
| rules that the universe consistently obeyed. Plus, they won the
| war. Physicists of that era could afford to be smug.
|
| Today, physicists are still banging their head against the wall
| on dark matter and string theory. Both ideas are not directly
| testable. Trying to find the foundations is not going well.
| hellothere1337 wrote:
| Cargo culting is one of those mental models that appears
| everywhere once you learn about it. Similar to kayfabe in
| wrestling and politics. 99.9% of humanity basically is winging it
| daily (by copying the shallowest parts of whatever
| philosophy/ideology they espouse) pretending they know everything
| while the 0.01% is honest with themselves and thus are free to
| question and doubt their own ideas in order to improve them. This
| 0.1% is mostly invisible despite pushing humanity forward
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Wait, did you just wing those percentages?
| tomcam wrote:
| 76.7% of Hacker News readers believe so
| josephg wrote:
| I assume you place yourself in that 0.1%? Or was it 0.01%?
|
| Personally, I think we're all winging it almost every moment of
| our lives. Relative to domain experts, I'm bad at almost
| everything I do. (Cooking, driving, talking, writing, planning,
| etc). I'm only really good at maybe 2 or 3 things.
|
| I think we're all like this. And its fundamentally ok. Its how
| human brains are wired.
|
| Sometimes I imagine dividing all my thoughts between things
| I've personally invented and things I've heard from others.
| Whats the ratio? I think at least 95% of my thoughts come from
| other people. Maybe 99%. Maybe more.
| hellothere1337 wrote:
| Nah I'm pretty stupid and follow the herd, its the reason for
| my success too!
| bagacrap wrote:
| How could you even tell if you've personally invented
| something? You don't know what caused a thought to pop into
| your head. Heck I often forget things I've said, so I clearly
| forget things I've heard. I could be fully convinced an idea
| was my own and still be dead wrong.
|
| Luckily you can build on the ideas of others without being a
| cargo cultist. Simply verify the sturdiness of the foundation
| before you go adding an extra wing to the house.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 23?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma
| nntwozz wrote:
| In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war
| they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they
| want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make
| things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways,
| to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces
| on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like
| antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to
| land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It
| looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No
| airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science,
| because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of
| scientific investigation, but they're missing something
| essential, because the planes don't land.
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